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St. Louis Cardinals shortstop Jhonny Peralta suffered a thumb injury Saturday, which will delay his return from a previous torn ligament in another thumb.  

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Peralta Out for ‘Three or Four Days’

Sunday, May 29

Mark Saxon of ESPN.com reported the shortstop “cut his right thumb while opening a box Saturday.” The shortstop is rehabbing from his previous thumb injury (different thumb) with Double-A Springfield and had to receive three stitches. Saxon noted he will not play for a few days, as “the Cardinals now have ruled out his returning to the majors as soon as Friday because he needs more minor league at-bats.”

It’s been a tough season for Peralta, 34, who missed much of the early portion of the season with a torn thumb ligament. He was expected to be an important contributor for the Cardinals after hitting .275 with 17 home runs and 75 RBI last season, but he hasn’t played for the major league team yet. 

With Peralta injured, Jedd Gyorko and Aledmys Diaz will likely continue to see playing time as they attempt to replicate Peralta’s production.

The loss hurts the Cardinals, however, as Peralta is a nice source of pop in their lineup alongside Matt Holliday and Matt Carpenter. The Cardinals came into the season weakened by the loss of Jason Heyward to free agency; losing Peralta for even more time only compounds that issue.

And it certainly hurts the Cardinals as the team makes its postseason push.

You can follow Timothy Rapp on Twitter.

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Aledmys Diaz has already done one thing that’s hard to do in today’s MLB: emerge as a surprise star.

Now all he needs to do is prove this is for real. 

For the moment, the St. Louis Cardinals‘ rookie shortstop is so much more than a mere stand-in for the injured Jhonny Peralta. He’s hitting .336 with a .937 OPS through his first 43 games. He ranks fifth in the National League in batting average and is outpacing Bryce Harper in adjusted offense.

Diaz isn’t about to get caught up in his numbers. As the 25-year-old Cuba native told Cheryl Rosenberg of the Guardian: “If you start thinking about stats, you lose focus.”

But for the rest of us, not dwelling on his stats is out of the question.

After all, they’re the things highlighting Diaz as an emerging star, and he’s more intriguing than the average specimen. In the spirit of Yoenis Cespedes, Yasiel Puig and Jose Abreu, he looks like MLB’s next great Cuban star. In the spirit of Carlos Correa, Francisco Lindor, Xander Bogaerts and fellow rookies Corey Seager and Trevor Story, Diaz also fits in with baseball’s young shortstop revolution.

As recently as a year ago, Diaz didn’t seem likely to find his way into either circle.

He didn’t hit the ground running after the Cardinals signed him to a four-year, $8 million contract in March 2014, batting a good-not-great .273 with a .765 OPS at High-A and Double-A that season. Once he was sitting on a .235 average and .636 OPS early last July, the Cardinals designated him for assignment.

Ever since then, though, Diaz has been on a rampage.

In his final 49 games at Double-A and Triple-A in 2015, Diaz hit .337 with a .986 OPS. He then went on to hit .315 with a .987 OPS in the Arizona Fall League. Add that to what he’s doing this season and your eyes begin to widen as you realize Diaz has been raking for almost a year straight.

“I started feeling more comfortable at home plate, then I started making good contact and having quality at-bats,” Diaz said of his turnaround, per Mark Saxon of ESPN.com. “With this sport, it’s always mental.”

The catch is Diaz‘s ability, or lack thereof, on the other side of the ball. Both his 10 errors and his metrics characterize him as a below-average defender. There may be no fixing that, as Baseball America‘s book on him said he’s a shaky fit at shortstop at best and not at all a fit at worst.

But as long as you’re performing and looking like a legitimately good hitter, subpar defense becomes that much easier to forgive.

The fact that Diaz has drawn walks in only 5.0 percent of his plate appearances makes it look like he has an aggressive approach, but he doesn’t. Going into Tuesday, his overall swing rate of 45.5 percent and chase rate of 26.7 percent were under the league averages of 45.8 and 28.1, respectively.

With a 9.3 strikeout percentage, Diaz is also one of the hardest hitters in the majors to whiff. And according to Baseball Savant, the average exit velocity on his batted balls at the start of play on Tuesday was 90.6 miles per hour. That was the exact same as Mike Trout and Kris Bryant.

If you want to make a great hitter, a disciplined approach, an ability to put the ball in play and an ability to barrel the ball are the right ingredients to start with. Now all Diaz must do is figure out the one thing that’s gotten him into a spot of trouble recently.

After hitting .423 with a 1.186 OPS in April, Diaz is hitting just .256 with a .714 OPS in May. Some kind of downturn was inevitable after such an incredible start, sure, but there’s more than just natural forces at work with this one.

Though Diaz has maintained the solid approach he had in April, his strikeouts are up and the quality of his contact is down this month:

Pitchers have made life tough for Diaz by giving him fewer strikes to hit. He was seeing 50.8 percent of his pitches in the strike zone in April. In May, that figure has dropped to 46.6 percent.

Pitchers have also been throwing to a specific area. Per Brooks Baseball, they didn’t have a set location pattern against Diaz in April. But in May, they’ve set their target against the righty swinger to low and away:

This makes sense on two levels. This is the obvious way to avoid the damage Diaz did to middle-in pitches in April. This is also the classic way of dealing with dead pull hitters.

Hence, Diaz‘s missing ingredient. The best hitters can use all parts of the field, but he entered Tuesday pulling 48.9 percent of his balls in play. To boot, times in which he’s pulled the ball are generally the only times he’s performed like a great hitter:

• To Left: 1.581 OPS
• To Center: .767 OPS
• To Right: .739 OPS

What Diaz must do now is adjust to the adjustment against him. That’s where there’s good news. He’s trimmed his pull percentage from 52.2 in April to 45.5 in May and upped his use of the opposite field from 16.4 percent to 27.3 percent.

This hasn’t translated to results, but it’s promising that Diaz hasn’t responded to the low-and-away attack by doubling down on his pull habit. That’s a sign he might be capable of cleaning up his big exploitable weakness. 

This is not to be taken as a guarantee he’ll keep hitting .336, but Diaz doesn’t need to be a Miguel Cabrera doppelganger to pull his weight. At a time when the average shortstop is only hitting .254 with a .693 OPS, he has a relatively low bar to clear to qualify as a star-caliber hitter at his position.

Staying above that bar is doable. With nearly two full months of major league action in the bag, it says a lot about the quality of Diaz‘s bat that you really have to dig to find his fatal flaw. And if he does indeed clean that up, there won’t be many question marks left looming over his hitting talent.

To put it in straightforward terms, this guy might actually be for real.

Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.

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St. Louis Cardinals first baseman Matt Adams left Thursday’s game against the Philadelphia Phillies with a knee injury. However, he’s ready to return.

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Adams Active vs. Pirates

Saturday, May 7

Adams returned to the lineup for Saturday’s game against Pittsburgh.

Adams Provides Valuable Power Bat When Healthy

The injury bug continues to plague Adams, who missed 102 games last season because of a quad injury that required surgery.

Even in his return toward the end of 2015, he still seemed hobbled by the injury, according to MLB.com’s Jenifer Langosch:

In 2016, he’s been splitting time at first base with Matt Holliday, originally a left fielder who is starting to slow down in his 13th year in the league, and Brandon Moss.

In 27 games this season, he was hitting .273 with three home runs and seven RBI. He was starting to heat up, having hit .400 in his last four games.

Adams provides decent power and could hit around 15 home runs a year. But with his contract expiring at the end of the 2016 season, recurring injuries could lead to the end of his tenure in St. Louis. 

Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com.

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St. Louis Cardinals shortstop Aledmys Diaz accomplished an interesting feat during Monday’s 12-7 loss to the Arizona Diamondbacks, becoming the first player in baseball’s modern era (since at least 1900) to own a batting average of .500 or better at least 50 at-bats into his career, per Elias Sports Bureau (via ESPN.com).

The 25-year-old rookie entered Monday with 24 hits in 50 at-bats, after he recorded eight hits in 10 at-bats over the previous two games.

He then singled in each of his first two at-bats Monday night, bringing his average to an even .500 (26 hits in 52 at-bats) midway through the game.

Diaz did make outs in his final two at-bats, dropping his average to just .481, which would be the best mark in the majors if he had enough plate appearances to qualify.

Entering Tuesday’s action, Washington Nationals second baseman Daniel Murphy is the leader among qualified players with 25 hits in 63 at-bats, giving him a .397 batting average for his new team.

Murphy’s lead probably won’t last much longer, as Diaz is only two plate appearances shy of the qualification standard, which is 502 plate appearances in a season or 3.1 per game.

The rookie has 57 plate appearances through the Cardinals’ first 19 games, putting him at exactly three per contest.

Given that he’s swinging a hot bat and getting the majority of playing time at shortstop, Diaz will likely be qualified for the batting title within the next few days.

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Two former St. Louis Cardinals returned to Busch Stadium in Chicago Cubs uniforms Monday. One of them made an indelible impression in the Cubbies‘ 5-0 win.

Jason Heyward won the crowd reaction competition, hands down. The Cardinals faithful greeted the outfielder—who ditched the Cards this winter for an eight-year, $184 million deal with Chicago—with a chorus of boos and some genuine vitriol, as Dan Katz of Barstool Sports (Chicago) captured:

“If somebody boos me here, that means they were not happy to see me leave,” Heyward said before the game, per ESPN’s Mark Saxon. “I’m kind of glad that people weren’t happy to see me leave.” 

In the end, though, it was veteran right-hander John Lackey who did the damage against his former employer. And, valuable as Heyward is, Lackey could be the player St. Louis misses the most.

Lackey downplayed the negative reaction to Heyward, per Benjamin Hochman of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Maybe he wished his boos were louder. Either way, he spoke loudly on the mound.

Yes, it’s just one game, but the stat disparity is striking.

Heyward went 0-for-4, lowering his average on the young season to .188.

Lackey, meanwhile, tossed seven shutout innings, scattering four hits and striking out 11. And he even outdid Heyward with the bat, as USA Today‘s Bob Nightengale noted:

Lackey, who turned 37 in October, enjoyed a renaissance season with St. Louis in 2015, posting a career-low 2.77 ERA in 218 innings.

The Cubs and president of baseball operations Theo Epstein—who was general manager of the Boston Red Sox during Lackey’s time in Beantown—then inked the playoff-tested hurler to a two-year, $32 million pact.

Lackey wobbled a bit in his first two starts with the Cubs, yielding eight earned runs and 14 hits in 12.2 innings. On Monday, though, he turned in a vintage performance, befuddling a Cardinals lineup that paced baseball with an .872 OPS.

Which brings us back to the question of whether St. Louis might ultimately miss Lackey more than Heyward.

Yes, Heyward is a three-time Gold Glove winner and all-around offensive stud who has racked up the fourth-most wins above replacement (11.3) among MLB outfielders over the last two seasons, per FanGraphs.

But the Cardinals offense, as mentioned, has been humming along in the early going, Monday’s shutout notwithstanding.

Catcher and franchise backbone Yadier Molina looks rejuvenated after a pair of offseason thumb surgeries. And while Randal Grichuk and Stephen Piscotty, Heyward‘s heirs apparent in the outfield, have gotten off to uneven starts, rookie Jeremy Hazelbaker has been an early revelation.

That’s not to say St. Louis wouldn’t gladly slot Heyward back into its outfield mix. Nor is it to suggest the Cardinals will remain an offensive juggernaut through the dog days of summer.

But right now, they sure could use Lackey.

Ace Adam Wainwright has been downright dreadful through three starts, coughing up 15 earned runs and 22 hits in 16.1 innings. Mike Leake, the rotation’s biggest offseason addition, owns a 5.71 ERA.

Lance Lynn, meanwhile, is lost for the season after undergoing Tommy John surgery.

There’s talent to be found, with Carlos Martinez, Jaime Garcia and Michael Wacha rounding out the starting five. 

But in a division as competitive as the National League Central—with the Cubs loaded for bear and the Pittsburgh Pirates lurking—depth and experience matter.

Lackey boasts a 3.11 career ERA in 127.1 postseason innings. He’s pitched for a pair of World Series winners, the 2002 Los Angeles Angels and 2013 Red Sox.

And, as he displayed Monday, he’s still got it. The slider slides. The fastball is fast enough.

At least one jilted Cardinals fan burned Heyward‘s jersey when he pulled a Benedict Arnold and bolted for the North Side. Perhaps they should have been torching Lackey’s laundry instead.

In the end, Heyward will almost assuredly be the more impactful player in the WAR department. Assuming he stays healthy, a guy with exemplary defense, plus speed and double-digit home run pop is going to net more wins than all but the most ace-like hurlers. 

Lackey, though, might have filled a greater void for the Cards at a fraction of the price.

It’s too late for what-ifs now. Both men are Cubs, end of story. On Monday, one of them made that fact sting especially hard for St. Louis.

All statistics current as of April 18 and courtesy of MLB.com unless otherwise noted.

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And now for a question that’s simultaneously the last thing the St. Louis Cardinals want to ask, and also the first thing they currently can’t ignore:

What if Adam Wainwright isn’t Adam Wainwright anymore?

The veteran right-hander didn’t look the part of himself—a proven ace with four top-five Cy Young finishes—in his first two starts of 2016, and the trend continued into his third outing Saturday. Against the Cincinnati Reds at Busch Stadium, Wainwright helped turn an early 4-0 lead into a 9-8 loss by allowing seven earned runs on 10 hits and a walk. He struck out only two.

After he missed almost all of 2015 with a torn Achilles, it all adds up to a less-than-triumphant return for Wainwright. In 16.1 innings, the 34-year-old has been touched up for 15 earned runs on 22 hits. He’s faced 78 batters and walked more of them (nine) than he’s struck out (seven).

And no, it’s not just the numbers that send up red flags.

“I’ve made more mistakes these first three games than I have entire seasons I feel like,” Wainwright said after Saturday’s game, via Joe Harris of MLB.com. “The only way I’m not going to come out of this is if I get down on myself and start pouting around about it.”

And so it goes. Wainwright wasn’t happy with how he pitched in spring training. He then sought answers after he struggled in his season debut against the Pittsburgh Pirates. After that, he was still frustrated after his second start against the Atlanta Braves.

For now, the season is still in the heart of small-sample-size country. But when both the numbers and the man generating them are signaling something’s not right, the notion must be taken at face value.

Wainwright did provide a silver lining Saturday. He cruised through the first three innings, and overall he had better stuff than he did in either of his first two starts.

One of the complaints Wainwright voiced to Rick Hummel of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch after his second outing was that he wasn’t “getting everything to the correct position to drive the baseball,” which partially showed in his fastball velocity.

Courtesy of Brooks Baseball, this leads us to the silver lining:

Wainwright didn’t suddenly start lighting up the gun against Cincinnati, but he did take a step forward. And given that a fastball at 91-ish miles per hour and a cutter at 87-ish miles per hour is right about where Wainwright was with his heat in 2014 and 2015, that’ll do for a sign of progress.

Trouble is, this velocity spike didn’t do Wainwright much good. He went into Saturday’s start with a whiff rate of just 6 percent and a strikeout rate of 10 percent. Only six of his 74 pitches (8.1 percent) against the Reds drew whiffs, and he struck out two of the 27 batters he faced (7.4 percent).

This is a reminder that even velocity reminiscent of what Wainwright had in 2014 and 2015 may only go so far. Though he was mostly successful anyway, he wasn’t missing bats or striking hitters out in those two seasons like he was when he had better velocity during his 2009-2013 peak:

• 2009-2013: 9.3 SwStr%, 22.3 K%
• 2014-2015: 8.8 SwStr%, 19.7 K%

That Wainwright was able to put up a 2.29 ERA across 2014 and 2015 was thanks a whole lot more to his pinpoint command. But as Ryan Boyer of NBC Sports notes, that’s another thing he’s struggling with:

You can look at Wainwright’s nine walks and say “Duh,” but even those are only half the story.

Wainwright himself said he’s been making too many mistakes, and the data bears that out. According to Baseball Savant, he was up with his pitches at the highest rate of his career in his first two starts. And as this Brooks Baseball chart can show, the pattern continued in his third:

It would be one thing if Wainwright were trying to pitch up to change hitters’ eye levels. But since he basically didn’t work down in the zone at all, that’s not what that looks like. This looks like a guy who just can’t find his release point.

Wainwright has definitely been trying to find it, telling Jenifer Langosch of MLB.com that he even went as far as practicing in front of a mirror. But the way things are going, it’s possible he’s having the same issues he had in 2012. After missing all of 2011 recovering from Tommy John surgery, Wainwright told Mark Saxon of ESPN.com that it took him half the season to get right again. After sitting out most of 2015, it could be deja vu all over again.

Or, Wainwright could be battling the effects of age. It drops arm slots just as easily as it drops velocity, after all. Here’s a graph that indicates this could be happening to Wainwright’s arm slot:

If this is what Wainwright is fighting against, it could be tough for him to emerge as the winner. In such fights, age is going to win more often than not.

This is not to say Wainwright is broken beyond repair. He at least seems healthy, and that’s not to be taken for granted at his age. And even without pinpoint command and the ability to miss bats, he and Yadier Molina are both smart enough that they could come up with a way for him to survive anyway.

But a non-broken starting pitcher who’s capable of surviving is not what the Cardinals need atop their rotation. That’s where they need an ace. And if Wainwright can’t be that guy, you wonder who can.

New addition Mike Leake is a mid-rotation starter all the way. Jaime Garcia is very good when he’s healthy, but his health comes and goes. Michael Wacha and Carlos Martinez have ace-level talent, but the jury’s still out on whether they can handle the workload. Meanwhile, Lance Lynn is out for the year and John Lackey is a Chicago Cub.

The Cardinals knew all this coming into the season, of course, but they clearly figured it would all be rendered moot when Wainwright started pitching like an ace again. From the looks of things, though, that “when” may actually be an “if.”

Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.

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The St. Louis Cardinals lost some pitching depth for the 2016 season because southpaw Marco Gonzales is reportedly set to undergo Tommy John surgery. 

Continue for updates. 

Gonzales to Miss Entire Year

Wednesday, April 13

Cardinals general manager John Mozeliak confirmed Gonzales will have the Tommy John surgery, per Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

CBS Sports noted Gonzales experienced soreness in his elbow during spring training and was already out for the start of the minor league campaign. CBS Sports also added that Gonzales probably won’t return until the second half of the 2017 season.

This is yet another difficult physical blow for a promising prospect. Rotoworld said the former 19th overall pick from the 2013 amateur draft dealt with a shoulder injury for most of the 2015 campaign as well.

Thanks largely to those injuries, Gonzales has not yet established himself at the major league level. He made one start last season and gave up four earned runs in 2.2 innings after he appeared in 10 games in 2014 and finished with an ERA of 4.15 in 34.2 innings.

The good news for the pitcher is the fact he is still only 24 years old. There is plenty of time for Gonzales to turn his career around once he recovers from this setback, especially considering MLB.com ranked him as the No.7 prospect in the Cardinals’ organization coming into the 2016 campaign.

MLB.com pointed to an impressive command and a devastating changeup that combines well with his fastball to deceive opposing hitters when he is healthy.

As for the impact on the Cardinals, this is another hit to their pitching depth. Lance Lynn is already out for the season because of Tommy John surgery, and John Lackey left in free agency during the offseason. Still, St. Louis boasts a deep rotation that finished with the best ERA in all of baseball last season, per ESPN.com.

Ace Adam Wainwright is back and healthy after only appearing in seven contests in 2015 because of injuries, and the Cardinals added Mike Leake during the offseason. They also have Jaime Garcia, Carlos Martinez and Michael Wacha as quality options as well.

This injury probably has more of an impact on Gonzales’ long-term development than the Cardinals’ ability to compete on the field this season thanks to what was already a strong rotation.

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The St. Louis Cardinals set a new MLB record during Friday’s 7-4 win over the Atlanta Braves, becoming the first team ever to hit three pinch-hit home runs in a single game, per MLB Stat of the Day on Twitter.

St. Louis actually got off to a poor start in the contest, with starting pitcher Jaime Garcia allowing four runs—including three with two outs—in the bottom of the third inning thanks to five singles and an intentional walk. 

The Cardinals did bounce back to score three runs in the top of the fourth, but the game was stuck at 4-3 until the top of the seventh, when outfielder Jeremy Hazelbaker came in to pinch hit for Garcia and responded with a game-tying solo home run.

A 28-year-old rookie, Hazelbaker now has two home runs and three hits through the first six at-bats of his career.

The Braves then sent out left-handed pitcher Eric O’Flaherty to start the eighth inning, which led the Cardinals to remove first baseman Matt Adams in favor of shortstop Aledmys Diaz, who responded with a go-ahead, pinch-hit home run.

Not yet done, the Cardinals got some insurance with one out in the top of the ninth when second baseman Greg Garcia provided the record-setting third pinch-hit homer, doing so as a replacement for relief pitcher Kevin Siegrist.

Two batters later, starting right fielder Stephen Piscotty extended the lead to 7-4 with the Cardinals’ fourth solo homer of the game.

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St. Louis Cardinals relief pitcher Jordan Walden was diagnosed with a Grade 2 lat strain on Sunday.

Continue for updates.

Walden Out ‘A Few Months’

Sunday, April 3

MLB.com’s Jenifer Langosch reported the news from Cardinals general manager John Mozeliak, who provided the estimated timeline for Walden’s return.

Injury has plagued Walden since he joined the Cardinals in a November 2014 trade from the Atlanta Braves. The 28-year-old had a nagging right rotator cuff issue and was on the disabled list in 2015 due to biceps inflammation.

After pitching in only 12 games last season, it appears St. Louis will be without its capable reliever for a prolonged period of time.

The Cardinals do have a loaded pitching rotation that finished first in quality starts last season, and their bullpen helped the club finish first in team ERA (2.94). Walden would make St. Louis’ pitching even better based on 2015’s small sample size, when he posted a stellar 0.87 ERA.

With a fastball that can hover near triple digits on the radar gun and a biting slider, Walden is a dynamic force on the mound who towers at 6’5″ and 250 pounds. His presence can’t be imitated, but the Cardinals have grown accustomed to winning without him.

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St. Louis Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina has returned to the lineup after dealing with a right foot contusion.

Continue for updates.

Molina in Lineup vs. Nationals

Tuesday, March 29

Rick Hummel of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported the news of Molina’s return to the lineup against Washington after passing training room tests.

Molina Is Vital Element of Cardinals‘ World Series Hopes

Molina’s foot issues added to his well-documented injury history that includes thumb injuries and multiple surgeries this offseason to address the issues with his left catching hand.

When he’s healthy, the 33-year-old backstop is arguably the best at his position in all of baseball. He boasts stellar defense in addition to a better bat than many catchers, posting a .283 career batting average entering the 2016 campaign.

The Cardinals brought in former Cincinnati Reds catcher Brayan Pena this past offseason to provide insurance for Molina if he goes down during the season. Pena weakened a National League Central rival and is a competent player who can fill in adequately as part of St. Louis’ championship-caliber lineup if needed.

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