Tag Archives: Great American Ballpark

Dear Cardinals: No More Synchronized Slumping

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For all the fuss made about the Cardinals needing a starting pitcher in order to keep up with the Pirates, a bigger issue has quickly evolved: they have got to figure out how to score runs. Five losses, three runs.

Sad baseballNot even Wacha’s spectacular return to the rotation can save a Cardinals team that seems to forget how to handle the bats. Losing 1-0 to the Reds is not about the Cardinals’ pitching.

Baseball is a tricky thing. It becomes even trickier when you’re in as tight a race for a division title as the Cardinals find themselves.

It’s a performance-driven world, and yet sometimes, even the performance isn’t enough if the results don’t match up. Individuals are held to staggering standards because they must be — successful individual performance is the only way to create successful team results.

The pressure, the length of the season, the challenge to be better than the guys in the other dugout … sometimes, it leads to slumps. Maybe it’s mechanical. Maybe it’s a guy trying too hard. Maybe it’s just the sort of battle baseball is made of. The trouble is, the Cardinals seem to be in a synchronized slumping pattern. Continue reading →

Westbrook: “I’m going to be better.”

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It wasn’t Westie’s night. Boo

Five runs on four hits and five walks in five innings.

It wasn’t the rest of the lineup’s night, either. At least not like it had been the previous two evenings.

Just four hits. Three runs. Six runners stranded. One-for-nine with runners in scoring position, and three left with two outs. No magic two-out RBI this time.

And the Pirates won, to boot.

No, it wasn’t the Cardinals’ night. But, they’re going to be better. Winning teams make adjustments. They take nights like last night and figure out how to avoid the same mistakes again. That’s the idea, anyway.

“I’m going to be better,” Westbrook said. “It’s just a matter of figuring it out and getting back into the swing of things and getting back to where I was earlier in the year, getting a lot of ground balls and limiting my walks and getting a lot deeper in the ballgame than I have been.”

You know the best part about this road trip? It’s almost over. One game left today, and it’s over. You know what else? There’s absolutely nothing the Cardinals can do about the last 10 games. The wins were big. They were loud. Yet, the losses were louder. Even so, just like a good pitcher has to have a short memory, so does an entire team. Continue reading →