Are you a trend person?
In 2013, the Cardinals lost 3 straight games and were eliminated in the World Series by the Boston Red Sox.
In 2014, the Cardinals lost 3 straight games and were eliminated in the National League Championship Series by the the San Francisco Giants.
In 2015, the Cardinals lost 3 straight games and were eliminated in the National League Division Series by the Chicago Cubs.
Losing 3 straight games in the 2016 Wild Card round might be manager Mike Matheny’s biggest postseason accomplishment yet!
I kid.
I think.
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Holding the title of manager of the St. Louis Cardinals is one of the most stable jobs in all of professional sports. Barring an unforeseen move, Mike Matheny will be leading the Cardinals into action this upcoming season. 2016 will also mark the 20th anniversary of Tony LaRussa’s hiring.
Over 2 decades, the Cardinals have employed 2 managers. In comparison, when the Miami Marlins name their next manager, it will be their 8th. And if you want to get technical about Brandon Hyde’s one game as manager in 2011, then 9th.
Stability can be a good thing. There isn’t a single player on the Cardinals that believes the manager doesn’t have the full backing of the organization. And that produces some amazing results.
The Cardinals weren’t supposed to be a 100 win team. They shouldn’t have won one of the best divisions in baseball history. They were. And they did.
Matheny did that. You can’t take it away from him.
But just like their downtown counterparts at the Scottrade Center, the St. Louis Blues, regular season success is begeting big postseason failure.
Take a look at those stats again. Each season, since 2013, the Cardinals have been eliminated a round earlier. But – to me – the more disturbing trend is how fast each of those series have turned sour. Once momentum turned, once the pressure intensified, the Cardinals didn’t fight back – they folded. Many times aided by curious managerial decision making.
I think that’s why we’re all super frustrated with Matheny – he’s pretty brilliant in the regular season and pretty, well, bad in the postseason.
The Cubs’ manager, Joe Maddon, owned Matheny in this series. Matheny continues to manage postseason games as if they’re a series against the Reds in June. October ball requires a different, more urgent, mindset and a manager must discard regular-season principles about how to run a game. Most of all, that includes quickly pulling the plug on wobbling starting pitchers. It’s not as if Matheny lacks experience in the postseason; by now he should be much sharper and in synch with the intense, warp-speed style of postseason managing.
The whole article is worth the read, but that paragraph sums up the frustration with Matheny that so many of us are still grappling with after another postseason flameout.
Some of it’s bad luck, sure. The Cubs are the hottest team in baseball right now. The Giants ended up winning the World Series. Getting to the final two is super hard.
Yes.
But when does it get better?
It took Tony LaRussa 10 seasons before winning a World Series in St. Louis. But he’d won a World Series before. We knew he had what it took to get to the top of the mountain. (To be totally fair, outside of a OK team he had in ’96, the Cardinals weren’t giving him championship caliber rosters until the early 00’s, so that 10 years is a little misleading.)
Matheny?
He’s not going anywhere.
All we can do is hope that he’s ready and willing to come into 2016 with some fresh approaches and new ideas on how to not just grind out regular season wins, but set his team up for the most success in October. Then – when (if) he gets there – make better decisions.
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We kind of take it for granted that the Cardinals play in the postseason almost every fall. But it’s not a birthright. The more chances that the team squanders, the more the inevitable fallow period on the horizon will hurt.
Photo: MLB
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