The Redbirds are coming off a nice stretch where they have won 7 out of their last 8 games. In that stretch, they won a game against the Cubbies in Chicago. This normally feels amazing, but it felt even better this time since it was the first time the team had won a series since April 12th when the Birds took 2 out of 3 from the Rockies. All of the Cardinals fans around the world were riding the high but crossing their fingers that the winning ways would shrivel up and die. It didn’t! They followed up their series win against the Cubs with a series sweep against the Boston Red Sox. When people thought it couldn’t get any better, the Cardinals put up 18 smackeroos on their division rival Milwaukee Brewers! What I enjoy most about this recent run is not just that we’re winning game after game, but that the Cardinals are winning the way we expected. This gives me hope for the rest of the season turning around and us seeing some Cardinal baseball deep in October.
Redbird bats go BOOM
In that stretch where the Cardinals won 7 out of 8 games, they averaged an astounding eight runs per game. Unless the Cardinals are secretly the 1927 Yankees with Ruth and Gehrig, I don’t expect them to keep that pace up. However, we did expect the lineup to be the team’s strength. The Cardinals are top ten in runs, batting average, OPS, and home runs. They have 3 players on the team with over a .900 OPS. As we hoped, young guys like Lars Nootbaar and Nolan freaking Gorman are huge parts of the charge. Not to mention that the Cardinals’ MVP candidates, Goldy and Arenado, are finally both firing on all cylinders.
On Sunday Night Baseball the Red Sox first-baseman Triston Casas asked Arenado for a jersey swap and he said, “You can have it, I can’t hit in this thing.” Boy has that changed! Nolan hit a homerun in four consecutive games while wearing the birds on the bat. It seems like everyone wearing the birds on the bat is hitting. Especially after putting up a cool 18 runs on the Brewers. I’m convinced that if I put on a Cards jersey that I could hit a home run at this point! Things will ebb and flow but the team’s bats should be here to stay.
The starters are at least meh, and not that bad
Over the same stretch of games where the Cardinals averaged eight runs per game, they were also giving up four runs per game. If they kept that performance up they would nearly be a top 5 pitching staff in the league. That won’t keep up unless the Cardinals make some big moves, but they are certainly showing signs that they can at least have an average rotation and bullpen!
One of the stars in the sky that the Cardinals are looking to follow to find their promised land is Jack Flaherty turning things around. He just pitched an absolute gem going 7 innings and striking out 10 with no runs surrendered in front of his mother on Monday, who dropped in for a surprise visit. The day prior, Miles Mikolas delivered 6 innings of 1 run ball against a good Red Sox offense in his last start to lower his ERA below 5.00. Uncle Charlie has returned, and he’s not setting the world on fire in his age 84 season, but he’s eating innings. It hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows, though. Monty is seemingly regressing towards his average self, and Matz hasn’t been totally able to avoid his signature Matz inning of disaster.
All-in-all the staff looks good enough to likely win the central. Luckily, you can click here to check out Grant Peters’ article on our website and see that there are some arms the Cardinals can add to bolster up the rotation.
There was a squirrel on the field guys…A SQUIRREL
I’m not convinced that Mozeliak wasn’t desperate enough to spark something and released a squirrel onto the field at Busch. During the game against the Tigers on May 6, an allegedly stray squirrel darted onto the field and stole the show. After that magical appearance, the Cardinals immediately started this incredible turn around.
I was just dm-ing with another baseball page on Instagram and we couldn’t help but make connections to magical World Series runs of the recent past. We all know the legendary story of the 2011 Cardinals making a last-second run at the postseason and winning it all (with a squirrel helping out). The 2006 championship Cardinals won just 83 games when they won the 10th title in team history.
I know it’s a stretch, but can’t you see the Cardinals’ devil magic starting to come alive again!?! They won a game on an error against Kenley Jansen right after he recorded his 400th career save and had a sub-1 ERA. That’s devil magic at its finest. You can get excited bird brains. The team will cool off, but we should expect a postseason-level team going forward. Hopefully, Mo makes a move that can truly make us a World Series contender.