Cardinals Struggle In Big Apple

Well, the offense seemed to make it to New York, at least in some fashion. On a good night, especially against a banged up Mets team, four runs would have been enough.  However, more and more frequently, that’s not enough with Todd Wellemeyer on the hill.

While the Post-Dispatch story indicates that Wellemeyer may not be long for the rotation, Matthew Leach twitters that Dave Duncan says no changes are imminent, mainly because they don’t feel like there are a whole lot of other options.  Wellemeyer’s numbers are really getting ugly to look at, as his good starts have been much more rare this season and overwhelmed by his mediocre to bad ones.

He’s been bad at home, bad away.  Bad in the day, bad at night.  And for all the talk that he was having trouble in the early going overthrowing his fastball, right now his BAA for his first 15 pitches is now the lowest BAA against him at .278.  Every other breakdown, people are hitting .300 or more off of him.

He can occasionally tantalize (two runs in 5.1 against Detroit, six shutout innings against Kansas City) but it’s just becoming too rare to count on.  With an offense that appears to be coming out of the doldrums, he may get some more wins, but the odds of him regaining the confidence of Cardinal Nation is pretty slim.

While Wellemeyer has to bear the brunt of the blame for last night’s loss, the offense isn’t completely without fault.  Four runs is much better than Cardinal fans were used to earlier in the month, of course, and they seemed poised to get back into it after Ryan Ludwick’s home run cut the lead to one.  However, again a pitcher with terrible numbers, a pitcher the Cardinals on paper should have dominated, held the offense basically in check.  It would be an interesting project to see what St. Louis has done against pitchers that had an ERA over 5 when they faced the Redbirds.  I would suspect it wouldn’t be all that great.

In other news, Khalil Greene has expressed his appreciation to his teammates for their support during his mental crisis.  Greene, who got another hit last night and is hitting .500 since he returned, credits the organization for trust and positive reinforcement, something that he doesn’t feel like he got in San Diego.  Hopefully this will result in a strong second half for Greene.

Joel Pineiro goes for the Cardinals tonight vs. Livan Hernandez.  Pineiro is probably glad that Carlos Beltran is on the disabled list, but still will have to deal with David Wright. Hernandez has done fairly well against St. Louis, though Albert Pujols does have three home runs off of him.  (By the way, you know how old Hernandez is?  He’s 206.)  The Cardinals beat up on Hernandez to the tune of seven earned in 4.1 back in April, so they’ll be looking for a repeat performance tonight.

Remember that at 10:30 Central time, Mike from Stan Musial’s Stance will be interviewing 1982 World Series closer Bruce Sutter.  If you can’t listen live, you’ll be able to listen at Blog Talk Radio, any UCB member site that has a player (such as this one) or download it off iTunes.

Daniel Shoptaw is the founder of “C70 At The Bat,” where he regularly writes about his beloved St. Louis Cardinals.  You can find more of his work here.