As a Texan who spent a few formative years in St. Louis, a few things were made very clear to me during my first year outside of Texas. Mainly, Texas might produce a larger proportion of professional ballplayers, but the Midwest wholeheartedly loves and supports their baseball teams.
During the early-to-mid aughts, college, then post-collegiate adulthood, took me away from the midwest. The distance made it difficult for me to follow the St. Louis Cardinals and I found myself reading about them through online sports articles more than actually being able to watch them play.Once MLB.tv launched in 2013, that changed. I was finally able to regularly watch StL Cardinal Baseball on any internet connected device. And I certainly did. With that in mind, I’m very familiar with the organization since 2013.
So familiar, in fact, that I wanted to take a closer look at the team between 2013 and the final full season prior to COVID-19 throwing a wrench into all aspects of life, professional sports, and Cardinal Baseball.Below is the team’s list of collective WAR by the outfield (OF), relief pitchers (RP), infielders (IF), and starting pitchers (SP). You’re able to select from the dropdown menu which year you’d like to look into.
What is WAR? Here is Jon Bois's explanation of it (14:39):
While looking through the above regular-season stats, I should let you know (if you already don’t), a few things:
- these are the collected stats of all players categorized into their respective positions and you should consider that in the instance of position players, there are obviously more infielders than outfielders
- and when considering pitchers, even though there are generally fewer starting pitchers than relief pitchers, those starting pitchers have more of an opportunity to rack up positive and negative WAR (yes, negative WAR does happen and it has been applied when meeting each season’s minimum).
- about each season’s minimum, that changed year-to-year as some seasons saw as many as six outfielders all getting well over 200 ABs while other seasons proved to have a much more consistent lineup.
Knowing what I know about how successful or less-than-successful each season was, I wanted to see which organs of the team were responsible. Speaking of which, here are the Win-Loss records for each season:
Based on the relatively small data we have, I think it's apparent that what separates a successful year from a lackluster one (while keeping in mind that during these seven seasons, there's not a losing season) is how much did the relief pitchers and outfielders contribute?
All facets of a team are important, but what I see in the above is that the starting pitching and the infield seem fairly consistent while they put up good or very good numbers. During this time, it seems like the x-factors are determined by how positively did the bullpen and outfielders perform. For instance, when looking closer at 2018’s data, you see the bullpen has a collective negative WAR. What you might have guessed that the chart doesn’t reveal is that this is one of the larger contributing factors as to why there was a managerial change 93 games into that season.
What determines the success of a ballclub isn't as straightforward as I just made it out to be. One can't simply say, "Well, the bullpen needs to do better." Take the overall offensive production for example.