Last night, the Cardinals dropped to a season worst three games below the .500 mark. An 8-2 loss to the Pirates in front of their largest home crowd of the year sent them as far below .500 since 2017.
After the game, Second Baseman Tommy Edman had some interesting comments and takes as to why the Cardinals have been struggling so much, at least from an offensive standpoint.
“I don’t think we’ve necessarily done the greatest job of kind of making a gameplan for how guys are going to throw us day by day and working on things pregame that are specifically tailored to prepare ourselves for that,” Edman said. “I think we’re going to kind of start to implement a few more of those things into our pregame routines and hopefully that helps us out.”
This is about as blunt as you can get if you’re Tommy Edman. The Cardinals currently are averaging fewer than four runs per game and are sitting 25th in the league. It’s also worth unpacking the fact that the Cardinals have been trending down in that category since 2019.
Comments like these shouldn’t be taken lightly by the organization. If a team is unprepared offensively, then the first person the front office should put under the microscope is the hitting coach, in this case, Jeff Albert, who was hired prior to 2019.
When asked about Edman’s comments, manager Mike Shildt said that the problem was the “attention to the execution” of their gameplan.
“We just got away from being committed to, you know, all aspects of the game,” Shildt said. “And I’ll take responsibility for that. But we’re back on track.”
Shildt shouldering the blame is admirable, however, to say that his team is “back on track” is ludicrous. St. Louis managed just two runs on four hits in last night’s loss.
As the manager, Shildt does have to maintain some positivity about his club, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but Shildt has continued to seemingly brush off any urgency to fix his clubs’ problem. The more he does that, the more it seems like it’s time for a managerial change.
At least he did acknowledge that it’s time to make a change in the starting rotation after another lackluster start by Carlos Martinez, who went five innings and allowed five runs while walking seven, continuing St. Louis ominous trend of walking batters, which is something they’ve done more than any team in baseball this year.
The Cardinals will hope to snap their four game skid tonight with Kwang-Hyun Kim taking the bump. But if they’re really serious about getting “back on track,” some changes need to be made, not just within the club’s roster, but with the coaching staff as well.
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