The St. Louis Cardinals being an up-and-down team was not something many baseball prognosticators had on their bingo cards before the year.
Oli Marmol is looking at his team’s relentlessness as a sign that they’ll be OK.
Doing a lot of meaning-making out of the standings two weeks into the season typically is a fool’s errand. But the Cardinals tend to be the epitome of stability, so it’s notable that they currently sit in the basement of a largely underwhelming National League Central.
Marmol’s team is 4-7, four games behind the first place Brewers. When the Pirates – widely predicted to be one of the worst teams into baseball this season – roll into St. Louis on Thursday, they’ll be at least two games clear of the Cards in the standings.
It hasn’t helped that there’s even been a little drama around the team, with Marmol’s criticism of Tyler O’Neill getting national attention.
So, it’s been tumultuous. But Monday’s game, a 9-6 win over the Rockies, was more emblematic of the brand of baseball we’ve come used to seeing from the Cardinals -- at least from a resilience standpoint. They went down 6-2 after coughing up five runs in the fifth inning, but responded by scoring seven unanswered the rest of the game.
That resolve stood out for Marmol.
“If you think about the 10 games that we’ve had, they obviously have not been ideal,” Marmol admitted in his weekly interview with Tom Ackerman on Total Information AM. “To be able to come back in that game after being punched in the face and giving up that five-spot, that shows you where this team is mentally.
“They’re not going to give in, they know what they’re capable of doing. So, that was a big part of that, just the relentlessness and not giving in.”
This upcoming stretch could be a good opportunity for the Cardinals to right the ship. After Wednesday’s rubber match against Colorado, they have a seven-game homestand, with four games against the Pirates and three with the Diamondbacks.
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