Willson Contreras is being blamed by the St. Louis Cardinals for their inability to adapt to life without Yadier molina
The St. Louis Cardinals is baseball’s biggest, most perplexing disappointment so far in 2023, and as of this weekend, the club’s leadership appears to be in total panic mode. On Saturday they brought up what looked like a third catcher. announcing that marquee offseason addition Willson Contreras would be pulled from his job as the starting catcher. After some confusion, the management clarified that Contreras would not be moving to the outfield. Instead, he will take a few more weeks to become a designated batter to prepare for his return to catcher.
It is odd. Contreras is not a rookie learning a new position — a la fellow early-season Cardinals scapegoat Jordan Walker, an elite hitting prospect who was sent down to Triple-A After a rough outfield. He is not being benched as some sort of disciplinary measure, a tact manager Oli Marmol took with outfielder Tyler O’Neill last month. No, having caught more than 650 games in the majors, Contreras now seems to be failing mostly at the impossible challenge of “being Yadier Molina” while the Cardinals thrash about at an unfamiliar 11-24.
John Mozeliak, the organization’s long-tenured and heretofore wildly successful president of baseball operations, and Marmol, the second-year skipper, spent most of the weekend attempting to explain the move, to make it seem like something softer than what it was: a loud, public rebuke of the catcher they anointed as Molina’s replacement with a five-year, $87.5 million deal this winter. In an interview with The Athletic, Mozeliak declared that he still has confidence in Contreras — whom, again, the team signed about six months ago and less than six weeks’ worth of baseball ago — but said his time as the St. Louis catcher has “certainly gotten off on the wrong foot.”
Undoubtedly alarmed by the Cardinals’ horrendous run prevention thus far, Mozeliak and Marmol focused on Contreras’ defensive preparation — his work with the beleaguered pitching staff — as a reason for the team’s abysmal start. Their overall park-adjusted ERA was sixth-worst in MLB heading into MondayThe starting pitching was particularly brutal, allowing more baserunners to be walked per inning that all other rotations except those of the Oakland Athletics and rebuilding Cincinnati Reds.
While they claim they aren’t pointing fingers, the Cardinals’ leaders have directed a lot of blame toward players through just over a month of bad baseball. But the more they attempt to talk about the team’s problems — and potential solutions — the more they highlight just how poor (or delusional) their own planning seems to have been.
Does the Cardinals secret for catching go beyond “being Yadier molina”?
MLB teams do make serious demands of catchers. They essentially operate on double duty: They have to work on their hitting and prepare for the arms they’re going to face and also work with the pitching staff to plan for the opposing hitters and understand each hurler’s roadmap to success. Each catcher is responsible for juggling.
Contreras, who spent his entire career prior to this year with the rival Chicago Cubs, has never been viewed as the league’s best juggler — at least not in the pitching-first way Molina operated for the Cardinals. Contreras’ value comes from his ability to catch and hit better than other backstops. Reports about Contreras’ time in Chicago were well-known, and Cardinals officials said that they were impressed by his work ethics and his willingness to improve on defense after a wonderful meeting in the Winter.
This weekend, though, Mozeliak referred to confidence lost but didn’t provide a subject for the verb. Who lost confidence? The front office staff? The manager? The pitchers?
Molina, whose defensive record will most likely lead him to the Hall of Fame, or at least get strong consideration, has inspired Cardinals pitchers. It’s not surprising that Contreras hadn’t reached that pinnacle in a couple of months of work; in fact, it would have been absurd to view that as a possibility. But the Cardinals still seem to be in shock.
Mozeliak brought up the pitch timer’s effect on compressing communication and claimed that spring training didn’t offer a true test of pitcher-catcher relationships. That doesn’t do much to elucidate why, say, the Atlanta Braves haven’t had similar issues with Sean Murphy or how the Milwaukee Brewers have helped William Contreras — Willson’s brother — improve his defense behind the plate.
But even taking them at face value, the complicating factors don’t point to a move this drastic. If there were concerns about game-calling then the Cardinals could have had veteran pitchers use the PitchCom to call their games. While some younger pitchers cycled through in Adam Wainwright’s absence, the Cardinals rotation features five pitchers with more than five years of MLB service time. These are not rookies. Two of them have spent considerable time with other teams and non-Molina catcher.
As it stands, the Cardinals’ prescription for getting Contreras up to speed is puzzlingly vague and seems to discount the value of him actually working with pitchers in those situations Mozeliak apparently found so difficult to simulate. In the immediate aftermath of the position-switch announcement, Marmol told reporters that “there are certain things and ways we operate that Willson is still taking to and learning.”
“It’s a difficult thing coming from a different organization and learning all of it,” he said. “We have an internal strategy to help with that, that will start moving in that direction over the next several weeks.”
It’s safe to say that taking weeks or months off from the daily demands of the catcher position is not how teams usually break in a new catcher. Reading into Marmol’s words, you might rightfully wonder what is so complicated about the Cardinals’ internal strategy? Does it have a vault where classified information is kept, or Coca-Cola’s recipe? Contreras can only view the materials at specific times and locations.
Presuming that the process doesn’t involve accessing vaults or memorizing secret codes, you might conclude that the Cardinals need their catcher to have the baseball equivalent of a nuclear physics degree to field even a halfway competent rotation, which simply drives home an observation anyone — degree or not — could’ve made before the season.
The Cardinals’ pitching staff just isn’t very good.
John Mozeliak and Oli Marmol point the finger at everyone but the pitchers
A bad pitching staff was always on the table as a possibility for the 2023 Cardinals. In the absence of a pitcher who could be counted on to dominate the rotation, the Cardinals chose not to enter the pitching market during the offseason and instead added more players to an already overcrowded lineup. They hoped Jack Flaherty’s health would return and that Adam Wainwright could continue to fight against the clock.
Montgomery has at least been good. His park-adjusted ERA+ of 125 is a little better than his average career ERA. The rest of the season has not been good. Steven Matz gives up many home runs (1.73 in nine innings), which has been a problem for him all but one season. Flaherty isn’t able to consistently hit the zone since returning from injury in last season. Miles Mikolas’ tumble to a 5.79 ERA in the first year of a $55.75 million extension was unforeseen, but the decline of a 34-year-old pitcher can’t ever truly be surprising.
Overall, the numbers reveal a team that is giving up an incredible amount of line drives. Statcast data shows that only three teams allowed an average exit velocity or higher expected batting grade. A steep decline in the quality of the Cardinals’ defense — mostly because of poor play by a jumbled, ever-shuffling outfield — is probably allowing for more extra bases than the pitchers deserve, but there’s no external variable that would make these pitchers good with the flip of a switch. By the way, pushing Contreras into DH could even worsen things, as it would reduce the time available for players who are bat-first, such as Nolan Gorman and Alec Burleson.
The Cardinals seemed to be relying on their strengths to start the season by adding Contreras and hoping that their pitchers could deliver just enough. In less than two month, it became apparent that St. Louis’ usual alchemy had gone horribly wrong. Maybe Molina was behind far more of the Cardinals’ success than we could see. It’s possible that the Cardinals were terribly inept at assessing what they needed this winter. Either way, thrusting Contreras — on a fresh, five-year contract — into the spotlight to absorb the anger and frustration weeks after the team made similar, if more minor, scapegoats of O’Neill and Walker can’t be a winning strategy with the clubhouse (unless you’re a pitcher, in which case giving up a boatload of runs and getting to blame your catcher seems like a great deal).
Contreras seemed to be set up for failure by coaches and front offices. If Molina’s status was so all-consuming that the organization forgot how to teach game-planning, perhaps the offseason wish list should have included more than a new catcher.