What does it take for the Cardinals to make a run to finish 2021?
There are a couple of ways you can approach that question. You can talk about what will be needed from individual players moving forward, which gets messy and overly complex, or you can simply look at the math and evaluate what the team needs to piece together somehow.
I'm going with the second one...
So here's the deal:
- The Brewers lead the division and are on pace for 96 wins.
- The Padres are the second wild card team and are on pace for 93 wins.
- The Braves, Mets and Reds are all in the wild card hunt too.
- The Cardinals are 56-56 with 50 games remaining as I type this.
If nothing changes regarding the pace the Brewers and Padres are on, if they just maintain their current trajectory, the Cards need to go 40-10 to catch Milwaukee and they need to go 37-13 to catch the Padres. That's not encouraging.
Realistically speaking, we can't expect any team to win 3 out of every 4 games over a 50-game stretch and that's what it would take if those teams don't fall off a bit. Even if the Padres slip to a 90-win pace the Cards still need to go 34-16 just to get to 90 wins and that's the equivalent of 110-win pace over a full season.
So yeah, it's not a simple process.
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For this to get interesting in September the Cardinals need a long winning streak, likely while they're playing so many games against the Pirates (9 more times this month), Royals (3 more) and Tigers (2 games). They probably need to win 12-13 of those 15 games to make up some ground but what they really need to do, likely or not, is beat up on Milwaukee head to head.
The Cardinals and Brewers meet 13 times between now and the end of the season so beating them head to head is really the only way to make things interesting in the division. That's not an easy thing to do with the starting pitching the Brewers run out there on a regular basis. Just as an example, when the Cards and Brewers meet next week the first two games will be started by Corbin Burnes (2.39 ERA, 159 K in 113 IP) and Brandon Woodruff (2.23 ERA, 160 K in 137 1/3 IP). Like I said, not an easy task.
Coming into play today the Cardinals are 11 games behind the Brewers. To cut 7 games off that and get within hailing distance of the division lead without having to rely on getting help from other teams they'd need to go 10-3 in those games against Milwaukee while also continuing to beat up on the teams listed above. That gets you within 4 games of Milwaukee but it doesn't account for what the Reds are doing (division and wild card) or what the Padres, Braves, Mets, etc. are doing either.
Keep in mind that September also has the Reds (6 games), Dodgers (4 games), Mets (3 games) and Padres (3 games) so it's not going to be an easy month to play .650 ball.
That's a lot to overcome in 50 games. A helluva strong finish could get the Cards to 90 wins but without a lot of help that doesn't look like even that would get a playoff spot the way things are trending. The Cards need to have a finish like they did in 2011 (but over two months rather than just one) and they need the Brewers or Padres to fall apart like the Braves did in 2011...but even that doesn't account for the other teams (CIN, NYM, ATL) in front of you at the moment.
If the Cards were to make some kind of run between now and the end of September they do close with 7 of their last 10 against the recently demolished Cubs but for those games to have playoff implications there's a lot of heavy lifting that has to be done.
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