Cardinals’ woeful offense: What the metrics and hitting coach Turner Ward have to say

Minutes after the St. Louis Cardinals’ 4-1 loss to the Detroit Tigers on Wednesday, manager Oli Marmol was left scratching his head. Again, the offense posted a lifeless performance. Again, the bats could not string together a rally and wasted another quality start by their starting pitcher — this time, Miles Mikolas. Again, an offense believed to have been built for power mustered little to none.

If Marmol’s answers are starting to sound like a broken record, it’s because the reason for the losses keeps repeating as well. The Cardinals’ bats, from esteemed veterans such as Nolan Arenado and Paul Goldschmidt to promising young talents such as Nolan Gorman, Lars Nootbaar and Jordan Walker, have gone cold.

“We’re in every game, just not enough runs across the board,” Marmol said after Wednesday’s loss dropped St. Louis to 14-17. “All we can do is continue to work. These guys are getting after it, it’s just not coming together yet offensively.”

That’s a nice way to describe the Cardinals’ struggles at the plate. As St. Louis heads into its first homestand of May, the team has a slash line of .220/.300/.338. The Cardinals have scored three runs or fewer an NL-worst 19 times. Their 21 home runs in 31 games are the fewest in the major leagues (including a total of three from Goldschmidt and Arenado). Walker, who figured to be a key offensive contributor, was already optioned to Triple A. Gorman and Nootbaar both have an OPS under .610. The only regular starter with a slugging percentage over .400 is Willson Contreras.

Matt Manning’s 2Ks in the 4th. pic.twitter.com/cYLOW6JZbE

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) April 30, 2024

The Cardinals posted one of their worst offensive months in recent memory in April. As May begins, how will they fix it?

“If I were able to narrow it down to one thing, it comes down to being able to slug,” Marmol said.

“We’re creating opportunities and we’re not getting that next big hit,” he added. “And it’s happened often. So we have to figure out a way to get on the other side of that. It goes in cycles, just ready for this cycle to be over.”

Cardinals fans agree. But how can a team-wide slump be addressed? What are hitters working on to post better at-bats? How do you balance staying patient and trusting the process with results that just aren’t coming?

These are questions hitting coach Turner Ward has been asking himself all month.

“We have some really good hitters and a really good offense,” Ward said in a phone call with The Athletic. “It’s probably a shock, not only to me, but to everybody that the offense is not in the best place it should be.”

Before we analyze the offense, it would help to understand what Ward and his staff emphasize with their hitters. Obviously, key metrics like exit velocity, launch angle and hard-hit percentage are part of the game plan. But for Ward, it comes down to discipline and pitch selection.

“It’s not necessarily a swing issue, it’s more of a discipline issue,” Ward explained. “I think with us moving forward, it’s about how we can be in a position as an offense to be ready to swing at pitches we can do damage on. Because when you’re struggling, you just want to get a hit, so you become a strike-zone hitter. That strike zone is pretty big and the pitchers are pretty good. Learning how to shrink your strike zone and trying not to be so concerned about getting a hit, that’s easier said than done.

“As big leaguers, you all have good swings. They can mechanically break down, but the issue is more often than not, it won’t matter how good your swing is if your recognition skills aren’t there. A really great swing, with a chase, is not productive.”

For an example, Ward points to Walker, who was optioned at the end of April after posting a .155 average and a .497 OPS with zero home runs, a far cry from his expected production. Walker was entering his second big-league season and the league had plenty of chances to adjust to his swing. Ward and Walker often discussed how the opposition would attack him.

“We had conversations in spring that teams were really going to test his discipline,” Ward said. “They’re going to see how high the fastball will chase, and how low the slider. That’s nothing new to me from a sense of how (opponents) try to attack new or young hitters.”

That’s exactly what happened. Opposing pitchers recognized Walker’s inability to lay off off-speed pitches that broke down and away from the zone. Walker, in turn, led baseball in chasing pitches in that location. The same issue happened to Gorman, who was optioned in September of 2022 (his rookie season) after major-league pitching adjusted and then capitalized on the holes in his swing. His chase percentage is back up again this year, with a rate (33.9 percent) nearly identical to his strikeout rate (33.3).

Another sign Gorman isn’t capitalizing on pitches is his 85.5 mph average exit velocity, down nearly 6 mph from his 2023 rate. When Gorman finds a pitch in the zone, he’ll drive it, as evidenced by his 43.3 percent sweet-spot rate (the percentage of batted balls hit between 8 and 32 degrees of launch angle). But he hasn’t done that consistently enough because he’s been unable to regulate his chase. 

Nootbaar’s case is encouraging, even if his actual numbers are not. He’s hitting just .185 with a slugging percentage of .308, but his batted-ball profile shows that he should be producing at a much higher rate. Over 51 percent of his batted balls have registered a hard-hit rate, and his 17.1 percent chase rate is in the 96th percentile of the sport. His expected batting average (.260) and expected slugging percentage (.445) are much more indicative of the type of production Nootbaar should produce this year. In fact, it almost mirrors the actual numbers he posted in 2023 (.261 average, .418 slugging percentage).

But isn’t it in a hitter’s nature to press when the results aren’t backing up the work? For Ward, that’s the worst thing a hitter can do.

“Trying to get slug is not the answer,” he said. “These guys do want to slug, they want to homer. But when you’re trying to do that too much in this game, that can cause issues. It’s a fine line between trying to get something done, trying to make something happen and to organically let it happen.

“They’re an aggressive group, which you want. You want your hitters to be aggressive, but it’s aggressiveness in the zone and the aggressiveness of the discipline in that area that you want.”

No two Cardnals better understand the nature of being selectively aggressive than Goldschmidt and Arenado. But it’s been brutal for the Cardinals’ cornerstones as well. Nearly all of Goldschmidt’s batted-ball profile is trending down, and while he’s a notoriously slow starter, his .630 OPS is his lowest since April 2021. Arenado is doing a fine job of getting on base (.333 OBP), but he’s been zapped of virtually all his power. Of his 32 hits, just seven are for extra bases.

Arenado and Goldschmidt, who have a combined 10 Silver Slugger Awards, clearly know how to adjust to pitching. Their likely Hall of Fame-caliber careers suggest their fortunes at the plate will turn. The Cardinals will trust them to figure it out — as this offense isn’t sustainable without their production. It’s difficult to preach patience and it’s certainly a message the fan base doesn’t want to hear. But when it comes to their heart of the order, that’s all St. Louis can do.

“(Patience) is one of the things that I’ve had to work on more than anything else in this game as a hitting coach,” Ward said. “I’ve watched so many guys go through struggles. … Having some grace with (players) and patience is always good, because at the end of the season, we’re probably going to look back and go, ‘Wow, that struggle was really tough to start the season, but look how they came out of it.’”

(Photo of Paul Goldschmidt: Duane Burleson / Getty Images)