Four players and what they have to deliver for a Cardinals turnaround in 2024

For all that’s quantifiable and attempted to quantify around baseball at its highest levels, numbers on paper can only say so much.

That is largely the operating theory of the 2024 St. Louis Cardinals, given how far they’ve leaned into clubhouse solutions and a rebooted culture as a solution to what ailed them in 2023.

There are, however, useful guideposts to examine.

Statistics may be descriptive rather than prescriptive, but a collection of them can be used to paint a picture in whichever color the artist desires. These numbers are among a few which will gauge whether that Cardinal comeback does approach desired levels.

Nolan Arenado: Slugging percentage above .490

Taken as a whole, Arenado’s numbers at the plate since arriving in St. Louis could fairly illustrate a hitter in decline.

Between 2014 and 2019 for the Rockies, he was one point short of maintaining a .300 batting average and posted an on base percentage north of .350. Most importantly, though, he slugged an eye-popping .566. There is some amount of altitude inflation in that number, but he was a feared, damage-inducing hitter around whom a lineup could be centered.

His last season in Colorado, the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, was his only campaign as a below league average hitter since his rookie year. Upon arriving in St. Louis in 2021, he posted an .807 OPS which was largely deflated by a .312 on-base percentage. He rebounded in 2022 and finished third in NL MVP voting, providing protection for Paul Goldschmidt in his own MVP-winning campaign.

Last season, his numbers again took a tumble. The column which jumps out is doubles; he posted only 26, his lowest total in any full season.

Arenado turns 33 in the season’s first two weeks and plays a demanding defensive position at full throttle; some impacts on his body are inevitable. Still, he remains the focal point of the lineup, and if the Cardinals are a winning team, he has to perform like that’s the case.

The Cardinals can cope if he’s no longer the near-.300 hitter he once was and instead settles in the .250 to .260 range. They cannot make their offense go without damage, and so Arenado has to slug.

Kyle Gibson and Lance Lynn: Combined innings pitched above 330

Gibson and Lynn have pitched a combined 23 seasons in the majors, and in those, only twice has either turned in less than 150 innings in a full season, their debuts and 2020 excluded.

Gibson provided 147 ⅓ innings for the 2016 Minnesota Twins and Lynn battled injuries to the tune of 121 ⅔ innings for the Chicago White Sox in 2022. They have otherwise taken the ball every fifth day without interruption or complaint.

On top of their presumed impact in the clubhouse, the Cardinals also see Gibson and Lynn as keys to improving the performance of their bullpen simply by preventing the bottom from falling out of the rotation.

The Cardinals received five innings or less from their starting pitcher in 73 games last season, and 21 times that happened on back-to-back days. Five times, they got short starts on three consecutive days; it should not come as a surprise that the bullpen barely had fumes to provide.

Reaching a large innings total for Gibson and Lynn is in some ways tautological. If they achieve that total, it means they’ve pitched well, and if they’ve pitched well, of course the team has succeeded. More broadly, hitting that plateau in St. Louis means they aren’t traded at the deadline, which likely means the team avoided selling off for a second consecutive season. The innings will tell that story, but they will also help determine how it’s written.

Jordan Walker: OPS+ above 120

Obscure acronyms in combination with symbols may turn off some traditional fans, but OPS+ is one of the simplest and most elegant tools for comparing a player with his competition. It’s simply a combination of a player’s on-base plus slugging percentage expressed as a comparison with the rest of the league and adjusted for home ballpark environments. A precisely league average hitter would post a total of 100.

Walker hit 114 in 2023 but was still barely a negative value player according to Baseball Reference’s WAR calculation, which pegged him at a -0.1 (FanGraphs, by their calculation, had him at 0.2). His defense should be improved in 2024, but it’s unlikely to be a particularly strong selling point. He simply must out-hit his mistakes.

Only Willson Contreras (124) and Paul Goldschmidt (120) beat the mark in 2023, but others including Brendan Donovan, Nolan Gorman and Lars Nootbaar approached it. FanGraphs’s wRC+ projection for Walker – a similar calculation based on run value – is precisely 120 for the coming season, and their data suggests that would carry him to providing approximately 10 times as much positive value as he did in his rookie campaign.

Walker is the centerpiece for whom time is on his side, rather than running in the opposite direction. If he can take the leap from solid contributor to no-doubt focal point, then the Cardinals will have the sort of lineup depth which could perhaps better absorb their potential pitching shortcomings.