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Welcome to The On Deck Circle, Brewers beat writer Kyle Lobner's weekly preview of the team's week to come and beyond.
Today the Brewers turn the corner into the second week of the regular season, and they have a road trip ahead to visit their first divisional opponents as they travel to St. Louis and Pittsburgh to face two 2015 National League playoff teams.
The Cardinals have reached the postseason in 12 of the last 16 seasons but find themselves heading into 2016 significantly overshadowed by the Chicago Cubs, the clear favorites to win the National League Central. To preview this week’s series and the 2016 season’s 19 meetings between these two teams, we talked to Viva El Birdos managing editor and FanGraphs writer Craig Edwards.
For fans who haven’t been following them closely this winter and spring, what’s different for the Cardinals this spring?
Well, the offseason didn’t really go as planned for the Cardinals. They chased David Price and Jason Heyward and lost out on both of them. Heyward signed with the Cubs, and then John Lackey also signed with the Cubs. So you’ve got a team with a lot of the same returning pieces, and the Cardinals are hoping for internal improvements to get back to the division title.
Most of the players who were on this team last year are still with the team, and they decided to go with Randal Grichuk in center field, Steven Piscotty in right field and then Brendan Moss and Matt Adams at first base, and a little bit of Matt Holliday there as well.
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But then in spring Jhonny Peralta got injured, so they went out and signed Ruben Tejada. He got injured. And now they’re trying out Jedd Gyorko, Aledmys Diaz and Greg Garcia for the shortstop position. Gyorko has the inside lead, although Diaz, who wasn’t even on the Opening Day roster, is really making a push for the position.
You mentioned Jhonny Peralta, but in addition to that the Cardinals are also without Lance Lynn (who will miss the 2016 season while recovering from Tommy John surgery) and Jordan Walden (rotator cuff and lay injuries). Which of these guys is the toughest to replace?
It’s definitely Peralta. The Cardinals, I think, planned their offseason around not necessarily having Walden after he was gone all of last season. They re-signed Jonathan Broxton, who obviously Brewers fans know, and they brought in Seung-hwan Oh, who is from Korea but had been playing in Japan the last two years. The bullpen is pretty well fortified in Walden’s absence.
And then Peralta… there isn’t really a good replacement for him internally and I think shortstop is a fairly difficult position to fill for any team. Ruben Tejada fell into their laps, but he wasn’t really a long-term fix, and after he got injured they just sort of let Jedd Gyorko, who is really a second baseman, start the year at shortstop. So maybe Aledmys Diaz can pick up the slack, but aside from that they’re looking at a pretty big dropoff from Peralta.
One of the names we’re hearing a lot about this spring and one of the names that’s surprised me this week is (center fielder) Jeremy Hazelbaker (6-for-15 with two home runs in his first six games). He’s a guy a lot of fans probably haven’t heard much about. What can you tell me about him?
He’s not a player that Cardinals fans would have known about, honestly, before this spring. He was set loose by the Dodgers in the middle of last season, the Cardinals gave him a call to come play at AA. He played well at AA, he played well at AAA last year, and he continued to play well during the spring. From what he’s saying, he made some adjustments but just couldn’t quite get the playing time with Los Angeles to let those adjustments play out.
St. Louis gave him the playing time down in the minor leagues, and we don’t really know how this is going to play out but it’s certainly a very good run so far. He’s very fast and he’s got power, and it looks like he can handle center field. In fact, he’s taking playing time away from Randal Grichuk, who played very well last year but obviously has some strikeout issues and those played out in the first two games to the point where the Cardinals decided to see what they have in Hazelbaker. Their early returns are positive.
So all the talk around the NL Central, and I’m sure I’m seeing the same stuff you are, has been about the Chicago Cubs and how much better they’re getting, the strides they’re making and the great year they had last year. Do you feel like the Cardinals, in light of the strides the Cubs have taken, are the underdogs in the NL Central?
I think there’s no doubt about it. The Cubs only finished a few games behind the Cardinals last year, they were a very young team then and they went out and made major free agent signings in Jason Heyward and Ben Zobrist and John Lackey and got themselves better at the expense of the Cardinals. So I think the Cubs are definitely the favorites, and have got a very good team. Right now the Cardinals are behind them and chasing them but I don’t think anybody’s really counting the Cardinals out at this point.
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So, in light of those comments, what does a successful season look like for the Cardinals?
I think for the Cardinals, you’ve just got to make the playoffs. I think their goal every season is to win the division, and that still is a reasonable goal. Any time you give yourself a chance in the playoffs, I think that’s a successful season. And that might mean the Wild Card this year.
Looking up and down this roster you do see several guys on the north side of 30 years old, some well past that mark. Is this a Cardinals team that’s window to win is coming to a close, or is this the start of a new process?
The Cardinals are in a bit of flux right now because, as you mentioned, Adam Wainwright, Yadier Molina and Matt Holliday are all in their mid-to-late 30s. But those guys also weren’t that much of a contributing factor last season. Wainwright was gone for most of the season, so was Holliday, and Molina was compromised. And so they had young guys step up. In the rotation you have Carlos Martinez, who has ace potential and showed a lot of that last season, and Michael Wacha, who is kind of an X-factor for the team this year, and then Steven Piscotty, Randal Grichuk, Kolten Wong, and Matt Carpenter is sort of in the middle between the older, aging core and the new, younger core that the Cardinals are hoping to have emerge this season.
I think this is a transitional season, and they need their younger players to take that step forward and become the new core as guys like Holliday and Molina and Wainwright maybe take a step back.
