About all you can say: that loss sucked. A lot of these losses have been frustrating, but I must say that few sucked more than this one. It’s a very thin line between the two.

The team loses because it doesn’t put runners in scoring position, or the pitcher keeps falling behind in the count? Frustrating!

The team loses because runners in scoring position don’t score, and their newly-acquired starter pitches one of the best games the team has gotten all year, and Russ Springer finally gives into his gopherball tendencies and serves up a 400 footer to a guy without a whole lot left in the tank? Sucks!

That said, Maroth striking out four batters was encouraging, since his strikeout rate fell below 4.5 last year and greeted 3.5 on the way down this year. (Maybe he took a cautionary lesson from ex-teammate Nate Cornejo’s career.) Four ties his season high, and this is the first time he’s done it while throwing a quality start. Maroth isn’t a worldbeater, but if the weaker competition and the time removed from surgery conspire to make him something resembling the pitcher he was in 2004 and 2005 he will be a vast improvement on the pitcher he replaces. (Whoever that is.)

One thing is certain: the Cardinals finally have a soft-tossing lefty to call their own. I haven’t seen that many sub-70 pitches since the 2006 version of Mark Mulder realized his borderline eephus curve was the only pitch he could throw. Perhaps he should throw batting practice on his off days.

In other left-handed news, favorite Get Up, Baby! long-shot Wladimir Mendoza appeared in his second game for the Appy League Johnson City Cardinals. Remember those control issues he had? In his first game, he walked three, gave up two runs, and retired two batters.

So this one’s an improvement! O, lowered expectations–Mendoza struck out the side, walking just the one and allowing a run in his appearance yesterday and lowering his ERA to 16.20. Wlad the Wmpaler watch will commence on this site soon, as promised in that earlier entry; Future Redbirds has cornered the market on excellent coverage of the Cardinals’ real prospects, so the sidebar here (as soon as I figure out how to edit it without breaking it) will be devoted to members of the Not Top-Twenty, to say the least.

I’m also excited by Jon “Sinners in the Hand of a Continued Abuse of This Nickname” Edwards, who’s hit his second home run in three days after getting off to a bit of a slow start. Some might say that I overrated him a ton in my prospect list, and to those people I say: come on, at least he’s not Mark McCormick. That said, he appears to be all out of whack, which would explain why he didn’t play full season ball this year; he’s struck out at least once in every game he’s played, for a total of twelve in 27 at-bats. Striking out in 44% of one’s at-bats is not a good sign, and it’s especially odd considering he did not have a big strikeout problem last year, even in August when he struggled.

Wellemeyer v. Fixed Oli Perez tomorrow, which is about as far from a favorable match-up as these things can get. Wellemeyer’s pitched better than anybody could have reasonably expected from a cast-off reliever with severe control problems, but eventually he’s going to have to go six innings. Is that so much to ask?

Another setback: far-off five tooler Tommy Pham, recently promoted to low-A, has been moved to center field. I realize that things did not look good for him to remain a shortstop going forward, but consider: a certain Colby Rasmus would appear to be the center fielder of the future, just as soon as Jim Edmonds becomes the center fielder of the past. Meanwhile, David Eckstein is the shortstop of the present, and nobody is the shortstop of the immediate future.

Not only that, but the Cardinals already have a young, toolsy center fielder in low-A: Daryl Jones. Sure, the move may be inevitable, but Pham is 19; there’s plenty of time to banish him to center field, should his infield glove never materialize.

Meanwhile, re: last night’s game, I mainly have this to say: MV3! MV3! MV3!

As for Wellemeyer, I think his upside is the non-scuffling version of Jeff Weaver, which isn’t so bad. (In particular the iffy-walk-rate/low-homer-rate version of Weaver, tonight aside.) Holding back Anthony Reyes, though, remains bad. And the kicker: Wellemeyer pitched exactly as Reyes must.

Wellemeyer used his mid-90s fastball everywhere in the zone, and got some swinging strikes up around hitters’ eyes, but the biggest difference was what he did with his off-speed stuff pitch. I can’t rule out that it’s just a matter of differing body language, or the results clouding my observations, but it seemed like he threw his off-speed pitches intending to get them by hitters, instead of around them.

Wellemeyer’s sinking change/slider (or whatever it is) isn’t as impressive as Reyes’s, and he still wastes a lot of fastballs, but I’ll say this: he doesn’t nibble with anything. And given the way most of the rotation has pitched lately, I’ll take that.

When I got on the Wellemeyer bandwagon–pretty early, I might add–I was not anticipating this. I was daydreaming about the possibility he would be this year’s Kiko Calero, or maybe even Al Reyes if he played his cards right. Now he is yet another major league reliever in the Cardinals’ starting rotation. I have to imagine that Kip Wells is going to feel pretty left out during conversations.

To be honest, if it were the beginning of the season, or if the Cardinals didn’t already have Brad Thompson stretching out in the rotation, I wouldn’t be all that disturbed by this. Wellemeyer put up some solid minor league numbers, all of them in the rotation. His career home run rate outside the show is an outstanding 0.68 per nine innings, which bodes well, and his control problems weren’t nearly so pronounced. Could it be that, as I postulated with Thompson, the control issues come from an inability to pitch in relief? Sure, maybe. Results with Wonderbrad have been mixed, but there’s nothing in Wellemeyer’s minor league pedigree to suggest he’ll do much worse.

Minor Leagues   H/9   K/9  BB/9  HR/9  K:BB
WonderBrad     8.28  6.64  1.56  0.63  4.27
Todd Terrific  8.55  9.55  3.97  0.68  2.40

One more thing: I’ve noticed a lot of people talking about the straightness of Wellemeyer’s fastball, and wondering aloud how many home runs he’ll give up in Coors Field. The stats just don’t bear this out. His home run rate is pretty low. (His fastball looks pretty good to me, incidentally; straight, maybe, but he locates it very well for a guy with bad control.)

So, devoid of context, this isn’t a bad move. It might even be a good move; the Cardinals seem to be making a concerted effort to exploit a market inefficiency, Moneyball style, by putting players long pigeonholed as relievers into the rotation, where they’re much more valuable. After all, if your scout sees starter makeup in him, why keep him in the pen on the word of some other scout, who saw him when he was in AAA and decided he didn’t have enough pitches, or height, or whatever?

But the problem is who’s going out of the rotation. Wainwright’s going to be fine, but at this point one has to wonder if it really is the way the Cardinals have handled him that’ve contributed to Reyes’s lack of consistent success. Barring a complete meltdown or continued bad command in the PCL, if Reyes is gone longer than a month the Cardinals will be making a huge mistake, and doing it to one of their most valuable assets.

As if that weren’t enough, I’m not convinced Wellemeyer is even the best candidate in the bullpen for the Dave Duncan Starter Plan. When Tyler Johnson was a 21-year-old in A ball, he did this in the starting rotation:

 W  L   ERA   G     IP   H  ER  HR  BB   K  K/9  K:BB  HR/9
15  3  2.00  22  121.1  96  27   7  42 132 9.79  3.14  0.52

Yeah. Then he made ten starts in Palm Beach the following year, and then he was moved to the bullpen. What? Were the 2003 Cardinals really so pitching rich as to not need to watch a guy with a big strikeout rate develop? The move was, apparently, designed to see if his command would improve in a relief role. It obviously didn’t make a difference, since we’ve seen Johnson struggle to locate his fastball (which hasn’t really gained any velocity) as much as he ever did in the minors. With Troy Cate in the bigs as a third lefty reliever, wouldn’t it make some sense to see if a guy with one of the best pitches in the major leagues could go five innings?

Something to consider.

That was the kind of win I didn’t expect this version of the Cardinals (release notes: patch forthcoming) to pick up on a regular basis. Not only did they survive a bunch of terrible mistakes, they won big despite them. Out of context, these would all appear to be harbingers of impending collapse:

TOP 1
J Bautista grounded out to third.
F Sanchez singled to right.
J Bay singled to left, F Sanchez to second.
A LaRoche walked, F Sanchez to third, J Bay to second.
X Nady singled to right, F Sanchez scored, J Bay to third, A LaRoche to second.

One inning in and Wainwright, who’d allowed a ridiculous 42 hits in his last 24 1/3 innings, gives up a run on three hits, a walk, and an out. More or less a microcosm of his maddening season, which has seen him pitch badly peripheral-wise and see even worse results. Over those last five starts, opponents had hit .385/.452/.578 off of him. His FIP was an iffy 4.59; his ERA 8.88.

But his curveball breaks, his fastball packs a little more punch, or he just gets lucky–and the Cardinals manage to cut off the other team’s big inning, instead of one of their own.

And then there’s that late inning defensive meltdown, a personal favorite; the game log didn’t quite do it justice, so I improvised where necessary:

X Nady singled to right.
R Doumit reached when Wellemeyer had an quantum physics moment and started looking for the ball on the ground even though, as he maintains, he felt sure it was in his glove, X Nady to second.
R Paulino reached on a small-infielders-have-no-range gambit, X Nady to third, R Doumit to second.
J Wilson fouled out to the Greatest American Hero.
N McLouth struck out looking.
J Bautista walked, X Nady scored, R Doumit to third, R Paulino to second.
F Sanchez safe at first on error by former shortstop D Eckstein, R Doumit scored, R Paulino to third, J Bautista to second.

That was a fun one because it covered all the bases. It had the where’s-the-ball? moment; the he-shoulda-caught-that moment; the I-can’t-believe-he-walked-him moment… even the oh-man, he-did-field-that moment. And it was all done with Jason Bay coming up and the mop-up pitcher with the nine-and-change ERA on the mound. I’ll say this for the Cardinals: when they decide to screw up an inning, they make sure to keep things fresh and unpredictable, and they do it with all the bombast and fireworks of a Jerry Bruckheimer production.

And then there were the exotic double plays. There’s Yadier lining out to double off Juancar–although I guess when you blow a situation in which Juancar gets on base and Yadier hits a line drive you’re playing with house money–or Eckstein having the Worst Idea Ever and trying to run on a mid-range flyout hit to a converted catcher with a running start; if that weren’t enough, there was one of Jim Edmonds’s annual baserunning headscratchers, to nip a big inning in the bud.

I don’t know quite how this one happened the way it did–it seemed to me that both teams played like squads ready to give up nine runs–but since this is The Easy Part of the Schedule where they need to Make a Run and Get Things Together and we’re all About to Give Up, they’ll need to come up with these phantom nine run outings as often as possible.

As for Wellemeyer, I didn’t see whatever it was that had me convinced he was a stud way back when, but he looks like he might be a keeper. His control was spotty, but aside from nearly braining Yadier on that hit batsman he would either miss way out of the zone or hit the corners perfectly. That explains how a guy with such terrible control and a relatively straight fastball has kept the ball in the park as well as he has over his career–his control issues don’t seem to manifest themselves as a lot of terrible pitches over the middle of the plate.

If he gets control of that sinking change, or whatever it was, he could be a setup guy; as it stands now, he’s at least someone the Cardinals can count on to rack up some strikeouts. If you’re going to have a long reliever, he might as well be able to fulfill some specific role, instead of just being average across the board.

Multiple series can be compared to that White Sox series from last year, where the Cardinals (read: Mulder and Marquis) allowed thirty-three runs in two games. A bad game pushes an undercurrent of worry and dread right up to the foreground, and here we are.

Panic is a lot more justified this year than last year–when this blog was, if you’ll remember, pretty firmly anti-panic–but I’m not counting them out, if for no other reason than it’s May and summer looms large. What else is there to do, but follow this baseball team and hope for the best? To quote the movie that helped bring back my second-least-favorite Oscar-grab tactic (playing a mentally handicapped character with a few lovable quirks and foibles who teaches us all a valuable lesson): That’s all I have to say about that.

So, uh, how about that Todd Wellemeyer? I believe I am one of the few people outside of his immediate family who has a Todd Wellemeyer story, so here goes: I have a very vivid memory of the first time I saw him pitch. I was at a Cubs fan’s house, working on a school yearbook project, and something about him impressed me. Not just impressed, really; I was enamored of whatever this thing was. Now, three or four years later, I can’t for the life of me remember it. (Judging by his ERA since then, he doesn’t remember it either.) It wasn’t the velocity; I want to say it was some sort of nasty sinking change up, combined with a weird delivery. In any case, now that I’ll be seeing him on a regular basis I’ll have something to do when the mop-up pitcher comes in, which will be nice.

Incidentally, I think this is a much better at-least-he-throws-hard gamble than Jorge Sosa was. If I’m given the choice of a guy like Wellemeyer, who has no idea where the ball is going but has an average home run rate, and Jorge “So Long” Sosa, I’ll take Wellemeyer any time. He’s also managed to translate his stuff into strikeouts; I’ll never understand how Sosa’s struck out fewer than six guys per nine innings with a high-90s fastball.