The St. Louis Cardinals are not where they want to be yet, but some members of the team have proven they have turned things around individually.
At 27-37 and in the basement of the NL Central, I completely understand St. Louis Cardinals fans that are uninterested in apologizing to anyone in the organization.
This team has been one of the worst at delivering on expectations this season and, though they're just seven games out of the lead in a tightly-contested division, it has not looked pretty. The Cardinals have blown 21 leads and are currently in the midst of a 3-7 slide after a 14-6 run directly before.
There is time to pull up before this whole thing nosedives into an explosion, but there also haven't been hints that massive moves will be incoming near the trade deadline.
But let's pause and forget about the team's success as a whole for a moment. That has been simply bad. Two players have restored their reputations after taking tumbles at various points this year, and that deserves at least some recognition. One player might be on the upswing but isn't deserving of an apology just yet.
Let's take a look.
Cardinals who earned apology from doubters: Jordan Hicks
Jordan Hicks was one of the main characters of the early season struggles for the Cardinals in all the worst ways. Before the Cardinals had made history with their worst April ever, Hicks had already been demoted and had his role moved from high leverage to low leverage.
Hicks came in to an average leverage index of 0.91 up until the announcement of the change. He hovered around 1.2 entered leverage index over the next month.
Leverage index can vary wildly and isn't always a perfect indicator of how a pitcher is being used by the manager, but looking at how Hicks has utilized opportunities, clutch rating does a nice job of showing us how he's performing. For the month after his demotion, Hicks had a clutch rating of -0.2 (a slight improvment of -0.23 the season so far to that point).
Since May 16th, Hicks has a clutch rating of 0.23. In the nine games he's appeared in since then, he's earned just two runs and put up an FIP below 2.0. Both earned runs were in the most recent appearance, he did have a 10-game run going of appearances without earning a run from May 8 to June 7, and he added a sum of 0.956 in win probability added across those 10 games, a stat that he sits at -0.69 at for the entire season.
Hicks is coming around, and I'm ready to say he has earned his apology.
Cardinals who earned apology from doubters: Nolan Arenado
Boy oh boy, what was going on with Nolan Arenado to start the year? At one point from mid-April to early May, he was 5-for-52 with an OPS of .235.
When your OPS looks like a batting average, you're in something worse than a slump. Fans were left wondering whether or not Arenado's performance was, in fact, just a slump he would swing his way out of or if there was something deeper to be concerned about. Remember, Turner Ward was promoted over the winter as the team's batting coach, so was this a sign of his new imprint on the team being something to be concerned about?
Valid questions to ask given that Arenado has historically had no problem raking at the plate.
Well, since, Arenado has been mostly smooth sailing. He had a five-game stint without a hit, but ultimately has a .974 OPS since May 3, and has hit 10 out of the park since the start of May. We're early in June but he's well above 1.0 in OPS this month.
Since May 1, he has a .326 average with two outs, the best on the team among the eight Cardinals who have had 30 such plate appearances in that frame.
Arenado is back.
Cardinal who hasn't quite earned his apology yet: Willson Contreras
Willson Contreras has been through a tough year in his first with the Cardinals. After being signed to a lucrative deal and making the trek from the Cubs to a team he considered a longtime rival, Contreras was demoted and brought back to his role all in the span of a few weeks.
That seems to have had a lot more to do with Oli Marmol not knowing what he wanted to do with Contreras, but there was reason for the demotion. Contreras wasn't doing well offensively at the plate and he was also struggling to frame pitches while also committing a heap of errors as the backstop.
Pitching was struggling, too, and with mostly the same staff, Contreras was the one thing that had changed from 2022 to 2023 to point fingers at.
After rattling off three errors in April, Contreras hasn't had one in May or June. So there are some positives.
But while he's performing OK behind the plate, he hasn't earned his apology because coming up to bat, he's been continuously unreliable. His OPS is .656 and his on base percentage is over 50 points down from last year. The last time Contreras had a consecutive game with hits was May 18, and he's gone on a five-game slump without a hit, too. His chase rate is in the 18th percentile, down from 30th last year. His whiff rate was in the 30th, its down to 12th this year.
He's never been stellar in those metrics, but he's even worse now than he used to be.
It's easy for Cards fans to turn on Contreras. They hated him for years in Chicago! Now, they might hate him even if he's wearing the jersey they prefer if he can't turn things around.
