Mayday, Mayday!
The Cardinals wasted a gem of a performance by starter Jack Flaherty who hurled six innings of shutout baseball during which he allowed only three hits, issued no walks and struck out seven only to lose out when the bullpen got scalped by the Braves who tied the game with a three-run ninth en route to a 4-3, 10-inning series clincher in the finale.
The distressing loss was the seventh consecutive series loss and dropped the club’s record in May to 7-16.
Mayday, Mayday!
The Cardinals are now treading water in the NL Central standings at 26-26, are 4 & ½ games behind the frontrunning Cubs. They are 3-7 in their last 10, and in a third-place tie with the Pirates, after being a scintillating 12-4 at one point and steadily blowing opportunities to keep pace with Chicago and Milwaukee.
The Cardinals’ play in May has been a recipe for disaster – and there are three games remaining before the month mercifully ends! If you went to bed with St. Louis ahead, only to wake up to the shocking news of one that got away, last night’s debacle pretty much summed up the Redbirds’ debilitating stretch over the last month.
- Paltry hitting
- Scant run-scoring
- Severe lack of timely hitting
- Ineffective at-bats with RISP (runners in scoring position)
- Starting pitching meltdowns
- Bullpen blowups
- Playing “down” to lesser competition
- Every day players mired in slumps and/or underperforming
- Management’s reluctance to move on from the aging veteran and chronically injured hurlers whose ERA’s are ballooning like the Goodyear Blimp.
- Dexter Fowler telling ESPN’s Alex Rodriguez the Cardinals are about to turn it around
- Questionable decisions by Shildt. Why not leave Flaherty in to finish what he’d started? He was flat-out dealin’!
- Roster construction. You’d be very hard pressed to convince Cardinal Nation that the current makeup of this team is markedly competitive, let alone better, in comparison to the Cubs, Brewers, and, yes – even the Pirates.
The Cardinals’ downward spiral is well past cause for alarm.
2019 was supposed to be so much more, hold so much more promise, be much more entertaining but loyal fans from the Show-Me state and nation-wide have witnessed first-hand the many holes that could sink the Cardinals’ Battleship if something’s not done. If moves aren’t made very soon, a stark reality, one we’ve seen the last three years, could set in like rigor mortis.
May has been very bad and could get historically worse. Do you want to be around for that? Mayday, Mayday! Time to bail out on them before the front office and ownership bails on you!
