The St. Louis Cardinals completed a sweep of the first-place Chicago Cubs at Busch Stadium on Sunday no thanks to manager Mike Shildt.
Let’s start by recognizing that Adam Wainwright used to be an excellent pitcher. Before age and injuries caught up to the veteran, Wainwright competed for Cy Young awards. He was the quintessential workhorse ace, tallying high innings-pitched totals while holding down opponents.
The Wainwright of yore no longer exists. You know it. I know it. The Cardinals front office knows it. That’s why they signed him to a one-year, incentive-laden contract with a base salary so low that no one has been able to report it with specificity.
At the time the contract was announced, it almost felt cruel the way that the Cards were continuing to enable Wainwright’s quixotic belief in his ability to get major-leaguers out. For years, we’ve heard the Georgia proclaim proudly that he was a minor mechanical tweak or surgical cleanup away from once again being great. By the end of 2018, it felt like only Wainwright believed such pronouncements when he made them. No pitcher can outrun Father Time, especially when his sinew is made of glass.
Wainwright looked like he was done with pitching as recently as this year. The aged righty looks out of his depth on the road, but has turned in a handful of good performances. With an overall line that smooths the Jekyll and Hyde starts in one cumulative whole, Wainwright has emerged as a perfectly acceptable No. 5 starter for a rotation that doesn’t already have two other pitchers throwing like No. 5 starters or worse. Thankfully the Cardinals removed Waino’s fellow former hero in decline Michael Wacha and his 13.5 BB% from the rotation last week and rookie Dakota Hudson has settled in, using his sinker to turn in the types of starter prospect hounds expected when they projected him as an eventual middle-of-the-rotation arm.
Even though it’s looking more and more like the Cardinals might be able to afford keeping Waino in the rotation despite his decline, it’s clear that nowadays it’s unfair to expect Wainwright to give the Cardinals a quality start. Six innings feels like an accomplishment, even if he allows four runs. Seven seems like a fantasy. I hadn’t even thought about Wainwright throwing eight or more innings in 2019 until yesterday because doing so would have felt cruel.
On Sunday, Wainwright held the Cubs to no runs in eight innings — a really great result. However, Wainwright’s pitching was not as great as the runs-allowed total might suggest. It wasn’t even very good. While Wainwright notched eight strikeouts and allowed just the glaring number from his line in Sunday’s box score is the seven walks, a total so bad that it would make even Wacha blush.
The high walk total is more and more looking like the new normal for a righty whose stuff doesn’t allow him to challenge many hitters and especially not left-handed batsmen. Wainwright now freely places ducks on the pond at a rate higher than league average, which is somewhat astounding for a starter who loudly proclaimed that he was able to take his game to the next level post-Tommy John surgery because he recognized how badly walks hurt starters and swore to avoid them once he returned from injury. Sunday’s performance is more an indictment of Waino’s decline than evidence of Wainossance.
Enter manager Mike Shildt, who by all accounts is a smart man.
After a brutal month of May that saw his Cardinals sink in the standings, Shildt and his team were in a position to sweep the first-place Cubs with a win on Sunday. Shildt watched the once-great Waino pull multiple Houdini acts out of his hat on Sunday. In the sixth inning, Wainwright and the Cards were fortunate enough to have Anthony Rizzo line into a double play to end the inning. Wainwright was at 91 pitches after the Rizzo lineout and set to lead off the bottom of the inning for the hometown nine.
There was no reason for Wainwright to hit instead of a pinch-hitter. Wainwright is a bad hitter — certainly worse than all position player options on the bench. The Cardinals were nursing a 1-0 lead that they needed to grow by playing more runs. Wainwright batting hurt the team’s ability to do that, so it hurt their chances of winning. But the analysis doesn’t end there.
Run suppression is important to winning. The one sure way to win is to hold the other side scoreless. And that’s what Wainwright had done through six innings. A manager could reasonably conclude that a starter who is pitching well would do more to help the team win with one or two more innings of work — if that manager were Mike Matheny, a known idiot who believes more in veteran proveyness than objective observation and math, or Shildt, a known non-idiot who more and more appears to believe more in veteran proveyness than objective observation and math.
Consider that Wainwright has thrown more than six innings once this year. He did so against the Pirates a couple weeks back, when he totaled 92 pitches in seven innings. That’s just one more pitch than he threw against Chicago on Sunday through six innings. Waino also issued zero walks that game. None. That’s five fewer than he gifted the Cubs on Sunday through six innings. Put otherwise, Wainwright pitched much better in his seven-inning start against the Pirates than he did on Sunday against the Cubs.
Before that start against Pittsburgh, Waino last totaled seven innings pitched on April 11, 2018. With Waino’s injury history and performance level this year (and before), there was no reason to believe that Wainwright is capable of grinding out and old-school, over-100-pitch shutout. All Shild had to go on was the adherence to veteran proveyness that was a bedrock philosophy of Mathenaging. The decision made Shildt look much more like a disciple of Matheny than George Kissel. What followed only reinforces this impression.
Wainwright predictably made an out to lead off the home half of the sixth. He got through the seventh despite walking left-handed batter Jason Heyward, growing his pitch count to 108. The last time Waino tallied as many as 108 pitches was May 2017, when he threw 109 each in his starts against the Giants and Rockies. Shildt allowed Wainwright to return to the mound for the eighth.
It was in the eighth inning that Shildt truly cemented his belief in veteran proveyness. One of Matheny’s greatest weaknesses as a manager — one that hurt the team’s chances of winning most when he showed it in October — was his belief in letting starting pitchers lose games. Matheny learned nothing from Tony La Russa’s masterful postseason managing in 2011, when he had the shortest of hooks, a style of fall pitcher usage that has spread across baseball of late. In the regular season, sticking with the starter is more understandable, but not when you have a mediocre at best veteran issuing lots of walks. Yet Shildt stuck with Wainwright, allowing him to face left-handed batters Daniel Descalso and Kyle Schwarber even though left-handed batters have slashed .308/.397/.579 (.398 wOBA) against Waino this season. Unsurprisingly, Descalso walked and Schwarber singled. Yet Shildt stuck with Wainwright. Only by the grace of Kolten Wong’s defensive excellence were the Cards saved from Shildt’s blind devotion to Wainwright’s veteran proveyness.
When asked about sticking with Wainwright after the game, Shild had this to say:
Mike Shildt on letting Adam Wainwright go deeper into the game: "He said, 'I've got plenty of gas left.' I said, 'Alright, keep the pedal down.'" #TimeToFly pic.twitter.com/KnApaXDNQA— FOX Sports Midwest (@FSMidwest) June 2, 2019
On Sunday, Shildt showed that he has a strong belief in veteran proveyness. It’s safe to say that Mathenaging is not dead in St. Louis. It lives on despite Matheny’s firing in Shildt’s irrational belief in veteran proveyness. Most worrisome of all is that Shildt might look at the result of Sunday’s game and feel that his Mathenaging was justified. There may very well be more to come.
