The Fourth-Place Cardinals Are MLB’s Team to Beat. No, Really.

Following a depressing start, St. Louis now looks like the best team in the NL Central.

Less than three weeks ago, the Cardinals were buried in last place after 34 games and inelegantly scapegoating their catcher. Now, they look like the best team in the NL Central, a reasonable facsimile of the 2005 Astros and ’19 Nationals, teams that seemed hopelessly under .500 almost two months into a season who then rallied to win a pennant.

What happened? Simply, St. Louis slugged its way out of the mess. Reinstalling Willson Contreras behind the plate helped, too, if only because it forced Cardinals pitchers to look in the mirror for their own culpability in a post–Yadi Molina world with a pitch clock. The Cardinals are 6–0 with Contreras behind the plate since they returned him from his awkward trip to baseball Elba.

The real key: They have outscored teams 61–24 in those six starts. Nolan Arenado is hitting, Nolan Gorman is becoming a star and Paul DeJong—after a winter of remaking his swing—is back from minor league hell. The Cardinals are mashing enough to cover their warts, real or perceived.

Since May 7, the day GM John Mozeliak and manager Oliver Marmol tripped over themselves trying to say Contreras was not to blame for the 10–24 start when their actions projected otherwise, the Cardinals are 12–4 (including 4–0 after a loss) and have slugged better than every team in baseball (.507).

“That,” Marmol says about L’affaire Contreras, “was probably the biggest difference in external noise to internal feel I’ve been a part of. What was being said compared to what was being felt and dealt with in-house was night and day.”

As it turned out, the Cardinals were right to take “a pause,” as Marmol called it, with Contreras behind the plate. The pause lasted eight games. It wasn’t just about Contreras. The Cardinals do not have a swing-and-miss pitching staff, and they were making consistently poor pitches in two-strike counts. Opponents were slugging a preposterous .357 with two strikes, the worst in the league. That’s much more about pitch execution (pitcher responsibility) than game-planning (catcher, pitcher and staff responsibility).

“Our guys are not accustomed to calling [their] own game,” Marmol says, after years of his pitchers throwing whatever pitch Molina called. “So you remove that and then you add a new catcher. ... Not a big deal, but then you add a clock, so you have less time to actually think. And this plays up way more than people are given credit to. You put all of it together; it’s a perfect storm.”

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Cardinals pitchers could always call their own pitches by using the PitchCom device, as do many others. They don’t. And their trouble putting away hitters is still a concern—it’s just not as obvious as in the first 34 games. Since then, they are 12th worst in slugging allowed with two strikes (still well above average at .298). Before July is over, St. Louis probably will need to trade from his bevy of young position players to find pitching help.

Contreras bore most of the public blame for the 10–24 start because Mozeliak and Marmol singled him out. The announcement appeared so hasty that one day they talked about Contreras getting time in the outfield, where St. Louis has such depth Jordan Walker is buried in the minors. The next day, Mozeliak had to walk back that idea.

“I think the biggest misconception was that it wasn’t collaborative,” Marmols says. “This wasn’t a ‘Hey, Willson, you're not catching.’ It was a way bigger discussion than that. I don’t have a better way of putting it, but it was just noise.”

Cardinals catcher Willson Contreras was reinstated behind home plate after an eight-game break :: Sam Greene/The Enquirer/USA TODAY NETWORK

I told Marmol I would not have been so definitive and so public about taking him out behind the plate. Why not just transition Contreras to catching one or two starters, putting less on his plate in terms of learning the staff?

“I’ve thought through your question quite a bit, what would I have done different or how could we have worded it initially?” he says. “And I don't think there’s a way around it. The reality is people were already starting to kind of poke their head at certain things.

“So, if I would’ve just not caught Willson that next day, it would’ve been two in a row. [Stuff] would’ve hit the fan.”

And give Marmol credit for this, which is not a small thing in today’s game: The man was honest about what was going on. The Cardinals knew they wanted Contreras out from behind the plate for this “pause,” and they did not know how long it would run its course. Marmol did not invent a narrative to explain it away.

“I live by two words: honesty and curiosity,” he says. “I’m going to be honest. And some people are going to like it. Some people aren’t.

“I think we’re dealing with people and emotions and relationships and conviction and trust. And at the end of the day, we took a pause. And we’re able to build upon those things extremely well. We didn’t know if it was going to be a week, two weeks, three weeks ... so for me to put a timeline initially on it was unfair to everybody.”

Contreras handled it well; his famous energy never dropped. Veteran pitchers Jack Flaherty and Adam Wainwright stepped up with accountability, showing leadership by vouching for Contreras and announcing a preference to throw to him. With his honesty, Marmol comes out of this the better for it. So do his pitchers.

“I continue to see guys with a little bit more conviction,” Marmol says.

On the day the Contreras matter began unfolding, May 7, Paul Goldschmidt smacked three home runs, the jump start to what had been an underachieving offense. Then Arenado, hitting .232, awoke. He has hit .328 since.

“I didn’t think I was locked in during the WBC,” Arenado says. “But it did sharpen my competitive edge to get at bats under those conditions. I felt like I was ready for the season, but then we struggled out of the gate, and I tried to do too much to turn it around. It’s been a lot better lately.”

Meanwhile, Gorman has become a hugely important lefthanded bat to complement Goldschmidt and Arenado, the righthanded sluggers. A high launch angle slugger, Gorman was exposed last season on high fastballs, hitting .137 on those pitches designed to run over the uphill path of his swing. This season he already has more hits on high fastballs (11) than he had all of last season (10) and he has improved to .275 on high heaters. He is still a high launch angle hitter (19.6 degrees, almost the same as last year’s 20), but he’s done a better job not swinging at fastballs at the top of the zone or fitting his swing to match pitchers he knows will work him up there.

“If you look at Gorman’s career, once he has gotten to a league he struggled a little bit, came back to the league and gotten better,” Marmol says. “He did it at every level. He had a really good offseason where he made some real changes. He didn’t have an answer for the fastball at the top of the zone.”

Likewise, DeJong made some changes to his posture and balance that have made for better contact and less loft. He spent five days a week last winter at the team’s training facility in Jupiter working with Cardinals’ coaches on the biomechanics of his swing. He junked his leg kick for a toe tap, lowered his hands with the bat on his shoulder to start and kept a consistent spine angle while driving through the baseball. The work has paid off. After a three-year decline in which he hit .196 over 235 games and was demoted to the minors, DeJong is slashing .291/.371/.616 and looking even better than he did in his 30-homer All-Star season of 2019.

The Cardinals have the most talent, and they are the healthiest team in the NL Central, especially with Milwaukee wrecked by injuries. St. Louis has just five players on the IL; the Brewers have twice as many. Only the Orioles and Guardians have fewer players out than the Cardinals. It’s difficult to announce a team still under .500 this deep into the season as the team to beat, but it is true in this case.

“Right now they’re playing with confidence and trust each other,” says Marmol. “But I can’t say that that wasn't the case, even when things weren’t going well.”