Thursday night, the Cardinals got thumped by the Reds, 11-0. Bad game. One of those games you just toss out and move on from. You might wonder what this has to do with clutch.

Conveniently, Thursday night, the Cardinals found themselves in basically zero clutch situations. For something a little more representative, consider Wednesday’s game, against the Cubs. Nine outs into the game, the Cardinals trailed 3-1. From there, they yielded no more runs; from there, they scored three more, all in the bottom of the eighth. In that way, the Cardinals won a game in which they were out-hit 11-5. They won a game in which they were out-OPSed .650-.526.

The Cardinals haven’t made a habit of that, exactly, but it gets at the idea. As I write this, the Cardinals have the best record in baseball, by a handful of games. Odds are pretty good they’ll reach or clear 100 wins. It makes sense that they also have the best run differential in the National League. Yet, interestingly, we can also consider OPS differential. By that measure, the Cardinals rank fifth in baseball, between the Pirates and the Yankees. That’s still good, obviously, but there’s something going on in between those numbers and the actual team record. Something that’s made the Cardinals look even stronger.

That something is clutch performance. The Cardinals have been clutch, far more clutch than any other team. It’s admittedly a difficult thing to quantify. And, admittedly, there are multiple definitions of “clutch.” The definition being used here is putting on a particularly good performance in pressure situations. You could think of the Cardinals as having had wonderful timing. It’s lifted their record above what you’d expect.

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Over the last few years, Matt Carpenter developed into one of the game’s most underrated stars by exceeding at the skill set embodied by the likes of Mark Grace and Joe Mauer over the last few decades; be extremely selective at the plate, rarely strike out, hit a ton of line drives, and create value through elite levels of walks and doubles.

From his rookie season of 2012 through the end of last season, no one in baseball took a higher percentage of pitches than Carpenter, and he ranked 14th overall in contact rate when he did offer at a pitch in the strike zone. Carpenter’s unwillingness to chase pitches out of the zone, and his ability to rarely whiff on swings in the zone, allowed him to post nearly even walk and strikeout rates in an era when pitcher dominance has become the norm. While he wasn’t a big power guy — he hit just 25 home runs during those three seasons — he made up for it by posting one of the highest line drive rates in the game, which allowed him to rank in the top 10 in doubles, so he wasn’t just a slap-hitting singles machine like some other elite contact batters.

This year, though, Matt Carpenter is different.

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Around little-league parks, and even on the back fields of certain schools and organizations, you might hear a common refrain from the batting cages. “Chop wood, chop wood,” is how Bryce Harper mimics the coaches he’s heard before. The idea is that a quick, direct path to the baseball — like an ax chop — is the best way to get quickly to the ball and create the backspin that fuels the power.

Turns out, pretty much all of that is wrong.

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In a slump, the mental and physical combine to confuse, and the player ends up in a spiral. “You go up to the plate and you think about your weaknesses, and you start focusing on them, and you start chasing,” Brandon Moss said before a game against the Giants, adding “it all starts to spin around.” Since having offseason hip surgery, the Cardinals’ slugger has been spinning in both facets of the game.

A recent tear might be the result of getting right, though. An adjustment to his mechanics, a milestone in his workouts, and a slight tweak to his approach all recently came together. The result looks more like the Moss that averaged 33 home runs for every 600 plate appearances coming into this season.

To illustrate how he’s gotten his game back together, there might not be a better way than to have Moss take us through three plate appearances against Rubby de la Rosa last week. The pitcher got the better of him once, but when the batter did his damage, it was the result of a convergence of factors.

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Going into the season, Stephen Piscotty was projected to be a contact and patience guy because that’s what he’d been in the minor leagues for the most part. But this offseason, he had a plan, and he changed his approach and mechanics in order to be a better player. Perhaps the projections going forward are a little light, given the changes he’s made.

Preseason Steamer projections had Piscotty with a .114 isolated slugging percentage, on par with Logan Forsythe and Ryan Sweeney. After a power surge in Triple-A for 370 plate appearances, and four major league homers, the rest of season projection is now up to a .133 level, or Coco Crisp and Desmond Jennings level.

That’s improvement, but what if he’s fundamentally changed and the projections are still light?

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Pitching to contact is a much-maligned, sometimes misunderstood philosophy. Inducing contact results in a hit 30% of the time while a runner can reach base on a strikeout only on the rare wild pitch or passed ball. The strikeout is a considerably better outcome, but attacking hitters and getting strike one, the philosophy espoused by Dave Duncan, can combine strikeouts, weak contact, and quick outs to form an incredibly effective pitcher. A half-decade after Duncan’s retirement, one of his former pupils, Jaime Garcia, is throwing strikes, getting ground balls, and keeping hitters off balance, potentially resurrecting a career that appeared doomed by injuries.

Garcia, a 22nd-round draft pick of the Cardinals in 2005, made a brief appearance in the majors in 2008 before Tommy John surgery ended that season and cost him 2009 as well. Garcia came back strong in 2010, and in July 2011, he signed a four-year contract extension that included two team options. At the time, he had pitched nearly 300 innings with a 3.06 ERA and 3.46 FIP, but a year later he would suffer another injury, this time in his shoulder. Rehabilitation failed and in early 2013, he underwent surgery, missing the rest of the season and putting his career in doubt. He was not a part of the Cardinals’ plan to pitch in 2014, but he recovered and appeared briefly in 2014 before injuries again took over. This time, Garcia suffered from thoracic outlet syndrome, the same condition ended the career of teammate Chris Carpenter. Again, he had surgery, and again, he was not a part of the Cardinals’ plans.

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Heading into the season, Kris Bryant enjoyed favored status when it came to predicting a National League Rookie of the Year. When FanGraphs writers were polled before the season, 20 of 36 votes went to the Chicago Cubs’ third baseman; seven went Joc Pederson; six were cast for Jorge Soler; Noah Syndergaard, Jung Ho Kang and Raisel Iglesias each got one. A couple months into the season, Pederson inserted himself into the race with 13 home runs by the end of May. As the year has moved on, Bryant and Pederson have come back to the pack a bit while Matt Duffy, Kang and Syndergaard have moved into the conversation for the NL’s top rookie. The award is no longer a two-horse battle, and all the players who have risen up are sure to see plenty of exposure since each of them is in the middle of a pennant race.

As Owen Watson wrote, this season has been a historic one for rookies, particularly position players. With Bryant and Pederson leading the way, the rookie class is producing at a greater level than any in the past decade. It’s likely the best class in nearly 30 years, back when Barry Bonds and Jose Canseco were rookies. In the past month, Bryant and Pederson have allowed a few other players to enter the race. Pederson — a three-true-outcomes player to begin the season — has removed the two positive outcomes over the past month, walking just 3% of the time and hitting only one home run. Bryant hasn’t fallen quite as far. He’s still drawing walks, but he is striking out nearly one-third of the time and has a wRC+ of 58 over the past 30 days. Read the rest of this entry »

As digital technology and internet speeds have improved, there has been an increasing realization that consumers do not — or should not, given the incredibly powerful cable providers — need to subscribe to massive cable bundles with hundreds of channels. Netflix has shown people the amount of programming they could have for under $10 per month, and iTunes and Amazon have allowed people to purchase individual shows while Hulu has provided a combination of both options. HBO Now has lent optimism to the idea that consumers will soon be able to purchase their desired channels a la carte.

For years, MLB.tv has provided both the best and worst aspects of meeting consumer needs, providing an incredible amount of games to fans at a generally acceptable price, but accepting big cash outlays to blackout local games and help keep the current cable bundling model alive. While the St. Louis Cardinals’ new television contract, the latest in a line of local billion-dollar deals, is another example of increasing awareness in Major League Baseball that the current cable model will not last forever. How long it will last is still a matter of great debate.

In many ways, the Cardinals new deal is similar to the deal signed by other teams over the past few years. Despite a market that ranks behind Orlando, Cleveland, and Sacramento, and just ahead of Portland, Charlotte, and Pittsburgh in terms of households, the Cardinals were able to sign a lucrative deal due to incredibly high local ratings and generally high interest in the ballclub. According to Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the deal is set to pay the Cardinals more than a billion dollars over 15 years, an amount that does not include a signing bonus or a 30% stake in FoxSports Midwest, with any revenue received from station ownership not subject MLB’s revenue sharing.

The Cardinals, in the last three seasons of their current deal, are receiving between $25 million and $35 million with the new deal starting close to $55 million in 2018 when the new contract begins. Over the life of the contract, the yearly payout will increase to around $85 million, according to Forbes, who estimated that the new deal increased the value of the Cardinals’ franchise to $1.6 billion, a $200 million increase over their estimate at the start of the season. Read the rest of this entry »

This breakdown starts with the Scott Kazmir deal on July 23, but there weren’t any trades from the 16th to the 23rd, so this covers the whole second half of the month, trade-wise, up until now. I count 25 total trades with prospects involved in that span that add together to have 58 prospects on the move. Check out the preseason Top 200 List for more details, but I’ve added the range that each Future Value (FV) group fell in last year’s Top 200 to give you an idea of where they will fall in this winter’s list. Also see the preseason team-specific lists to see where the lower-rated prospects may fall within their new organization.

40 FV is the lowest grade that shows up on these numbered team lists, with 35+ and 35 FV prospects mentioned in the “Others of Note” section, so I’ll give blurbs for the 40 FV or better prospects here. I’ve also linked to the post-trade prospect breakdown for the trades I was able to analyze individually, so click there for more information. Alternately, click on the player’s name to see his player page with all his prior articles listed if I didn’t write up his trade.

I opted to not numerically rank these players now, but I will once I’ve made the dozens and dozens of calls necessary this fall and winter to have that level of precision with this many players. Look for the individual team lists to start rolling out in the next month, with the 2016 Top 200 list coming in early 2016. Lastly, the players are not ranked within their tiers, so these aren’t clues for where they will fall on the Top 200.

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The St. Louis Cardinals have reacted quickly to Matt Holliday’s injury, trading last night for Cleveland Indians’ outfielder/first baseman Brandon Moss. If Holliday, who already missed a month with a quad tear earlier this season, did not re-injure his quad in a game last night, the St. Louis Cardinals very well could have stood pat through the rest of the trading deadline. The team has had trouble all year finding production at first base, but had recently called up top hitting prospect Stephen Piscotty. With Holliday back from the disabled list, and the addition of Piscotty, the team hoped the offense would improve after experiencing some struggles heading into the All-Star break. The Holliday injury scuttled those plans, and they paid a fairly high price for a somewhat struggling Moss in Rob Kaminsky, a top-100 prospect heading into this season.

The move speaks to the lack of optimism that the Cardinals have about the return of Holliday. Already missing Matt Adams and getting little to no production from backup Mark Reynolds, the team was rumored to have been in talks with the Milwaukee Brewers for Adam Lind. Consecutive shutout losses to the Cincinnati Reds highlighted the Cardinals’ struggle to score runs, but the injury to Holliday created a real need. Even at 35, Holliday was likely going to be the Cardinals’ best hitter moving forward. His power had dropped off in the first half of the season just like it had in 2014, but a strong second half that included 14 home runs provided hope that Holliday’s bat could still do a lot of damage. His .290/.409/.420 line was still good for a 134 wRC+ and his projections for the rest of the season were in line with those numbers.

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