The opposition ran wild on the Cardinals in 2024 but who is really to blame?
Extra bases usually mean extra runs scored against you. According to teamrankings.com the St. Louis Cardinals were 29th in the league in allowing stolen bases per game allowing 0.94 per game, just ahead of the Pittsburgh Pirates at 0.95 per game. A lot of talk this season was centered around Ivan Herrera and his needing to add arm strength to help combat some of this, but that’s only scratching the surface of the full conversation. Let’s dig in!
First, let’s address the catching tandem and how that impacts this conversation. Last offseason Ivan Herrera was the source of a lot of criticism for his arm strength and justifiably so. According to Baseball Savant on MLB.com, Ivan Herrera’s average throwing velocity was 77.5 MPH which ranked 48th out of 66 qualified catchers last season. He was also a -4 in catcher’s caught stealing above average and he ranked 57th out of 66 in that respective category. It’s been reported by several outlets than Herrera spent time at Driveline this offseason to increase his arm strength and early reports out of camp suggest he’s accomplished this task. I have no data to report any improvement so we will likely have to wait until in season to see measured results from his offseason work.
Okay, so what about Pedro? A common theme I had heard last season, and all of this offseason, was that “Pages isn’t much better than Herrera in terms of throwing runners out.” Statistically speaking that’s factual. Pages was credited with a -3 in catcher’s caught stealing above average. However, the disparity here is that Pages average throwing velocity was significantly higher than Herrera’s at (82.3 MPH) which ranked 8th out of 66 qualified catchers. It was also (+1.2 MPH) higher than Willson Contreras (81.1 MPH), who has long been credited with having an extremely strong throwing arm, but somehow that yielded a similar result to Herrera, so what gives?
The 2024 St. Louis Cardinals pitching staff was one of the worst at holding runners on and preventing stolen bases. Once again, using Baseball Savant and looking at “pitcher running game”, of 497 qualified pitchers in 2024 the Cardinals had 2 pitchers in the bottom 11 of all of baseball at “net bases prevented” which is a sum of “advances prevented” and “outs added” assigned to the pitcher. Sonny Gray was credited with a -9 and Andre Pallante earned a -8. For reference Corbin Burnes was the most egregious offender last season at -21. But, when you generate as much swing and miss and soft contact as he does in his profile it matters very little his ability to hold runners on or prevent them from stealing.
Other pitchers of note from the Cardinals staff that were offenders were John King (460th at -5), Lance Lynn (448th at -4), and Andrew Kittridge (379th at -2.) It wasn’t ALL bad, however; I know it is unpopular in St. Louis to give Miles Mikolas credit for anything, but he and Kyle Gibson each were credited with +5 at net bases prevented. Mikolas ranked 25th and Gibson ranked 18th. Shota Imanaga of the Chicago Cubs was the top-rated pitchers in this regard being credited with a +9.
When your pitchers are slow to the plate or ineffective at holding runners close to the bag then it doesn’t matter the arm strength of your primary catcher. Either way they will have no chance at effectively controlling the run game. If the Cardinals want to see tangible improvement in their run prevention in 2025 this needs to be an area of emphasis in an era where stealing bases is becoming more and more encouraged with the limiting of pick off attempts and the widening of bases. What used to be Death Valley for the oppositions run game in St. Louis (thanks in large part to Yadier Molina) has now become an Achilles’ heel to a team that prides itself in its run prevention. Just like the famous scene from the Netflix series “Squid Game” when the robot turns its head, or in this analogy the pitcher, and yells “green light”, base runners are taking off and the shooters, or in this case the catcher, has no chance at preventing the free runners from crossing the finish line.
-Thanks for reading