When the Cardinals activated Russ Springer Monday, conventional wisdom indicated that the team option another pitcher down to Memphis. But the Cardinals did the unconventional, because they were unsure about which pitcher should’ve been optioned, so they sent down a position player, Rico Washington. The move resulted in some bad unintended consequences in Tuesday’s 12-inning affair in Milwaukee:

• Albert Pujols, who shouldn’t be throwing the ball, playing four innings at second base
• Jason LaRue, who had played all of 1.6 adjusted games at first base in his career, playing four innings at first base
• Aaron Miles, with seasons of .791 and .699 RZR at shortstop (most regular shortstops have at least an .800 RZR), playing four innings at shortstop
• Isringhausen due up second in a potential 13th inning with only pitchers remaining on the bench

Here’ s a look at the plays and moves, along with the Cardinals’ available subs, from the ninth inning on:

With the fielding moves to begin the bottom of the ninth inning, La Russa made the team weaker at three positions (1B, 2B and SS), while upgrading at one (catcher). That’s not the kind of late-inning defense a team needs. While Washington wouldn’t have prevented Miles from scooting over to short (as middling as Miles is, he’s still better than Rico), he would have at least kept Pujols at first, where Pujols is a vastly superior fielder to LaRue and kept the team’s most valuable asset in a more protected environment.

The defensive weakness wasn’t fully exploited, or the move might’ve received more attention. As it was, the pivotal stolen base may not have occurred had a normal second baseman been manning the post (Gross was only 8-for-12 in career SB attempts, and YaMo was catching). Pujols at second wasn’t the reason that the Cardinals lost the game Tuesday, but it easily could have been, and it could’ve resulted in more than a lost game. If Pujols’s elbow is in as brittle condition as we’ve been led to believe (and since he evidently has no compuction about transgressing his manager’s orders to retrain himself), moving him to second base was a ridiculous risk.

Extra-inning games are wars of attrition, so it’s reasonable for a team to find itself with few weapons at the end. But by having an extra pitcher and one fewer position player, the Cardinals managed themselves into a corner. Naturally, a manager who has 13 pitchers is going to be less judicious in deploying them; indeed, La Russa managed like he had 25 pitchers, with his relievers averaging only 5 1/3 batters faced (to be fair, Ned Yost’s relievers averaged even fewer). If your relievers can’t pitch to more than five batters in a game, you’re either underusing them or they shouldn’t be pitching in the big leagues. But the bigger problem Tuesday was that the team had no position players available to pinch hit after the ninth inning. They used Braden Looper to pinch hit for McClellan with a runner on first in the 10th and had Isringhausen been able to hold the line in the 12th, a pitcher — whether Izzy himself or one of the remaining hurlers — would’ve batted second in the top of the 13th. Though Washington wasn’t much better than a pitcher at the plate (he has a .273 OBP), he at least has other offensive options than sacrifice bunting (and he’s fast, an attribute that helped the Brewers win).

Beyond the events of the one game, more importantly, the decision to go with 13 pitchers exposed a potential misunderstanding of how to best use the pitching staff. Regardless of the outcome of Tuesday’s game, the underlying point is that no team needs to carry 13 pitchers. The team currently has eight pitchers who have shown that they can be effective for three to five innings or more, so why not use them? Happily, the team corrected the problem today, but we’re concerned about the thought process that animated such a reckless decision.

This entry was posted by Pip on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 at 3:59 pm and is filed under analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.