How defense has turned Cardinals into contenders — and set up a trade deadline dilemma
IN CREPT WILLSON CONTRERAS, closer and closer to home plate, to the point that it started alarming his St. Louis Cardinals teammates. Contreras is in his first season as a first baseman, and even if the situation called for him to crash toward the plate — eighth inning, 1-0 lead, runners on first and second with no outs and Kansas City’s Jonathan India squaring to bunt on the first two pitches — Contreras stationed himself 51 feet away, like a bunt scarecrow, as if to invite a swing from someone who routinely hits baseballs more than 100 mph.
“Scoot back a little,” Cardinals third baseman Nolan Arenado hollered across the diamond. Cardinals coaches urged Contreras to do the same. He did not oblige their requests.
“I was afraid [India] was going to take a swing and kill him,” Cardinals starter Miles Mikolas said.
None of this surprised the Cardinals. Contreras has embodied the team’s defense-first mentality — adopted last year and actualized this season — that flipped the fortunes of a franchise fallen on hard times after decades of unrelenting excellence. St. Louis is 27-23, currently in second place in the National League Central and firmly in the postseason hunt during what was supposed to be a transitional year, thanks to perhaps the best defense in baseball. And Contreras’ positioning, as much as any moment over the first quarter of the season, illustrated who the Cardinals have become.
“I don’t care. I’m not afraid,” Contreras said. “If I’m gonna die, I’ll die right there.”
With Contreras perilously close — the only first baseman in the player-tracking era to stand closer to home on a bunt attempt, according to Statcast, was Contreras’ old Chicago Cubs teammate Anthony Rizzo — India backed away from bunting and took a strike from reliever Kyle Leahy. Contreras didn’t budge. India stared at another pitch to even the count. On the fifth pitch, India hit a one-hopper to second baseman Brendan Donovan, who flipped to shortstop Masyn Winn for the force. Winn then wheeled around, ran toward third and fired to third baseman Nolan Arenado to cut down Drew Waters, turning a perilous situation into two outs.
None of it happens, Cardinals players and coaches said, without Contreras’ daring. “He’s a savage,” left fielder Lars Nootbaar said, and that can be repeated for every Cardinal around the diamond this season, from an infield of Arenado, Winn, Donovan and Contreras to Nootbaar, Victor Scott and Jordan Walker in the outfield to Pedro Pages behind the plate. All have been average or better. Arenado, Winn, Contreras and Scott are among the best in baseball at their positions, according to publicly available metrics as well as the models of three other teams surveyed by ESPN that validated the numbers. And as was the case in the May 17 game that ended with a 1-0 win in Kansas City and plenty more, the Cardinals’ gloves have carried them into contention.
“Guys wanted to take a ton of pride in their defense,” manager Oliver Marmol said. “When we look at what we can control this year, we knew we were going to have our ups and downs, but we can control the effort and being locked in every pitch. And that’s one thing I can say with confidence: We don’t give up a whole lot. Guys are making plays left and right. They’re on point. They’re locked in every pitch.”
COMING INTO SPRING TRAINING, the Cardinals looked scarcely different than the 83-79 team that was outscored by 47 runs a season ago. They signed one free agent: reliever Phil Maton, on a one-year, $2 million contract, in mid-March. They didn’t make any trades. Cardinals fans, among the game’s most die-hard, responded accordingly: attendance at Busch Stadium cratered by more than 7,000 a game to 28,464, the lowest average, outside of the 2021 season played under some pandemic restrictions, since after the strike in 1995.
Fans could not have known what they would be missing. Not even Cardinals players themselves could have foreseen this group into a constant highlight reel of glovework.
“Early on, we didn’t talk about defense,” Arenado said. “It was: ‘We’ve got to score runs. We don’t score runs.’ So that’s all we were talking about. But then as spring went on, we’re like, all right, our defense is actually kind of good. And then as the season has gone on, it’s been like, damn, dude, we’re really good defensively.”
How the Cardinals became arguably the sport’s best defensive team is a story of process and buy-in. For decades, the Cardinal Way — the team’s ethos, codified in an 86-page handbook — was their bible. In a game dominated by objective data, St. Louis’ philosophy grew stale — and the franchise with it. President of baseball operations John Mozeliak is in his last year on the job, with former Boston chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom taking over at season’s end. Clean defense, long a hallmark, bottomed out in 2023, when the Cardinals ranked among the worst in baseball. Their pre-pitch positioning, in particular, lagged severely behind more analytically inclined organizations.
“We kind of as a team knew we weren’t in the right positions in ’23, but you have to go based off of whatever [the positioning suggestions given to players] says,” Nootbaar said. “So we did that last year, and it didn’t feel as bad, but you really felt a stark difference from being where it felt like you were never in opportunistic positions. Now it feels like we’re starting to get there.”
Positioning is just the beginning. With former big leaguers Stubby Clapp coaching the infield and Jon Jay the outfield, players were given specific areas to improve. For Scott, who was taking over in center field from a top-flight defender in Mike Siani, he needed a better first step and direction to complement his high-end speed. Nootbaar planned to work on his jumps. Walker, who was among the game’s worst defenders the past two seasons after moving from third base to right, needed to get better in all facets.
During spring training, Jay set three cones in a triangle, cued players to break toward one and tossed a racquetball at them. The outfielders would then break toward another cone and catch another ball, which required soft hands because of the racquetball’s bounciness. He encouraged outfielders to station themselves low, with knees bent, which ensured their engagement in every pitch, a Marmol must.
“It’s so hard to lock in every single pitch, and you don’t know which one’s going to be the one that is coming your way,” Marmol said. “So your ability to be mentally tough enough to do that usually leads to attention to detail in other areas.”
The new approach has paid off. Scott is near the top of leaderboards in publicly available defensive metrics. Nootbaar, Cardinals players and staff said, is playing the best defense of his career, with his first step a tenth of a second faster than last year, something he attributes to focusing on shagging balls during batting practice. Walker has acquitted himself well enough to earn praise from scouts, who had him pegged as a lost cause in right.
And the improvements go beyond St. Louis’ outfielders. Contreras has similarly surprised evaluators, who were unsure how he would fare at first after starting just four games there in his previous nine major league seasons, the majority of which he spent at catcher. With catching duties going to Pagés and 24-year-old Ivan Herrera, whose bat has been a revelation, Contreras’ shift to first to replace four-time Gold Glove winner Paul Goldschmidt was a risk the Cardinals needed to take. And it has rewarded them handsomely.
“He might be one of the best first basemen I’ve ever seen,” Mikolas said. “I knew he’d be bodying it up, and I knew he’d be picking it, but his range and his arm — he’s doing something special there at first base. I think he’s surprising a lot of people. Probably not himself. He knows how good he is.”
It has been matched throughout the infield. Donovan, a 28-year-old utilityman, has settled into second and leads the NL in hits. Winn, whose weakness going to his backhand side was mitigated by an arm that rates among the best in the game, improved his first step and is getting to more balls than ever. At 34, Arenado — a 10-time Gold Glove winner who is regarded as perhaps the best defensive third baseman ever — is moving better than in recent seasons and looking ageless in the field.
“I don’t want to get ahead of myself,” Arenado said, “but I don’t see a defense that’s better than us — so far that we played against — in the big leagues.”
IN BASEBALL, DEFENSE does not win championships. Sometimes it doesn’t even get a team to the postseason. None of the No. 1 defensive teams this decade has made a World Series, let alone won one. But most of the top units are at the very least successful, and if that trend continues, the Cardinals will face one of the most interesting Julys in the sport.
Coming into the season, the expectation was that St. Louis would be among the most active teams in moving players at the trade deadline. Closer Ryan Helsley is the sort of arm every contender covets. Multiple teams seen as smart with handling pitchers planned to target left-hander Steven Matz, who has excelled out of the bullpen. Right-hander Sonny Gray remains a high-strikeout, low-walk, playoff-caliber arm. Fellow right-handed starter Erick Fedde is solid, even with his lack of strikeouts, and has allowed only three home runs in 52⅓ innings. Maton has a 133 ERA+ this season and has pitched in four of the past five postseasons.
If the Cardinals spend the next two months playing like they have the first seven weeks, the prospect of them shipping off their best arms diminishes greatly. Because if anyone knows how a team can back into October and find magic, it’s the Cardinals, who turned an 83-78 regular season in 2006 into their 10th championship and a 90-win wild-card campaign into their 11th title five years later.
“I mean, a lot of us are still kind of growing,” Donovan said. “We’ve had the luxury of seeing people do it for a long time with the Cardinals and around the league, so I think it’s guys just kind of learning how to come into their own.”
Marmol has relished the growth. Now in his fourth season as manager, he has amalgamated players around a new identity of focus and structure — tenets that evoke the Cardinal Way, only modernized. Before the Contreras daredevil game, he invited a number of players into his office to give them concrete data on just how much they had improved defensively, the sort of feedback modern players particularly appreciate because of the objective nature. Gone are the bad vibes from a 12-17 start, replaced by a team that found its footing in series wins against the New York Mets, Pittsburgh, Washington, Philadelphia and Kansas City before losing a series of close games against the team with the best record in MLB, Detroit.
“The buy-in has been through the roof,” Marmol said. “And then when they can see the improvement in numbers, however many days in, it just reinforces: don’t let up.”
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Ryan S. Clark
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Kristen Shilton
There’s an ancient South Florida proverb about numbers: Not one. Not two. Not three. Not four.
Opening the Eastern Conference finals with five goals in Game 1 on Tuesday showed that at least for one game the Florida Panthers could find a breakthrough against the Carolina Hurricanes. Only for Thursday to arrive and the Panthers to once again post five more goals in a 5-0 win to take a 2-0 series lead before heading back to Sunrise for Game 3.
How did both teams perform? Who are the players to watch next game, and what are the big questions facing the Hurricanes and Panthers ahead of Game 3 on Saturday?
Say what you will about the offside goal being akin to Charlie Brown getting the football pulled out from under him by Lucy. While it’s possible that the disallowed goal could have provided momentum, there were other things that suggested the Hurricanes were going to struggle.
Under Rod Brind’Amour, they’ve become one of the teams that consistently generates the highest number of shots per game. They entered Game 2 averaging 33.2 shots per game, yet they hadn’t even cracked double digits until there was 14 minutes remaining in the third period. Natural Stat Trick’s metrics showed they had two high-danger scoring chances midway through the third period, and after giving up seven goals throughout the entirety of the second round, they’ve allowed 10 goals in the first two games.
Or view it this way: The Panthers had more goals than the Hurricanes had high-danger scoring chances. — Clark
What more is there to say about Florida, really? The term “clinic” doesn’t seem to cover it. The Panthers have done it all against Carolina in these first two games.
Thursday was another dominant performance by the reigning Stanley Cup champions in an offensive and defensive effort that requires no notes. The Panthers set a tone early with Gustav Forsling‘s goal just 1:17 into the game and never relented. The Hurricanes were averaging over 33 shots per night in the postseason (second most among playoff teams), and Florida limited their chances to seven shots through the first two periods alone — while the Panthers pummeled Carolina with 16 shots and four goals in the same span. It was enough to chase Frederik Andersen from the net, when he was replaced by Pyotr Kochetkov with a four-goal deficit.
The Hurricanes’ top scorers were simply no match for Florida’s attack or a locked-in Sergei Bobrovsky, who, while not heavily challenged, was a match for all comers in a 16-save shutout. The way Florida is playing right now, one has to wonder how the Hurricanes can get back in this series as the teams shift down to Florida. — Shilton
Three Stars of Game 2
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Panthers go up 3-0 on Sam Bennett’s power-play goal
The Panthers threaten to run away with it after Sam Bennett’s power-play goal makes it 3-0 in the first period.
He had two goals and a helper, as the Panthers dominated the Hurricanes in Game 2. This is Bennett’s second career 3-plus point playoff game and second career multigoal playoff game.
2. Team defense
The Hurricanes were averaging 33.2 shots per game this postseason, second in the playoffs to the Colorado Avalanche. But the Panthers, with their efficient and suffocating defense, held Carolina to five shots in the first 30 minutes of the game. Near the end of the second period, the fans at Lenovo Center were growing tired of it and started chanting “shoot the puck” at their team. Carolina did have more shot volume in the third period, ending with 17, but nothing got past Sergei Bobrovsky.
3. Offside reviews and coaching tactics
Normally, I’m not the biggest fan of lengthy offside reviews. I wish there was a timer — if you can’t make the call in 90 seconds, then the call on the ice stands. But the Florida Panthers executed one to perfection in Game 2. Up 3-0 in the second period, the Hurricanes scored, but thinking the play was offside, the Panthers called a timeout to buy more time to see every angle available, eventually calling for the challenge. It was indeed determined to be offside and the goal was taken away. — Arda Öcal
Players to watch in Game 3
Let’s start here with the Hurricanes. There’s no shortage of options. Part of the reason Svechnikov is in this space is because he leads the Hurricanes in goals this postseason. The rest of it has more to do with whether the Canes can rely on a certain postseason pattern for Svechnikov holding true. After going goalless in Games 2 and 3 against the New Jersey Devils in the first round, he responded with a hat trick. He didn’t score in the first two games against the Washington Capitals only to then score a goal in three straight games. Could Svechnikov respond by grabbing at least one goal in Game 3? Or are the Canes in store for more offensive struggles once they arrive in Sunrise? — Clark
The Panthers’ instigator had been quiet since Florida’s first-round series win over Tampa Bay, recording just five assists in eight games heading into Game 2 against Carolina. But Tkachuk looked more like himself Thursday, agitating the Hurricanes and making his physical presence felt. He also emerged early on the score sheet, registering an assist on Gustav Forsling’s game-opening salvo and adding a goal — Tkachuk’s first in 10 games — in the opening period to extend Florida’s lead to 2-0. It was a testament to how commanding Tkachuk’s line was with Sam Bennett (two goals and an assist) and Carter Verhaeghe (three assists) that he was able to finally appear as the Tkachuk of old. If this was indeed Tkachuk’s reawakening after a slow stretch, then the Hurricanes better be well aware of Tkachuk going forward because he was as dangerous as ever at both ends of the ice in Game 2. — Shilton
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Matthew Tkachuk taps it in to pad the Panthers’ lead
Matthew Tkachuk sneaks the puck past the goalie to pad the Panthers’ lead against the Hurricanes.
Big questions for Game 3
What’s the response to their worst playoff loss this year?
Several questions will be asked when it comes to what adjustments can be made before Game 3. Could one of them be about what the Hurricanes must do to get off to a stronger start? Allowing two first-period goals in Game 1 already presented the reality that the Panthers were going to remain aggressive. But to then give up the first goal less than two minutes into the first before giving up three in total in an opening frame that saw the Panthers record just five shots on net? That only adds to the degree of difficulty for a team that has now lost two straight playoff games after losing two postseason games in total over the first two rounds, especially when the last time the Hurricanes were down 0-2 to the Panthers in a playoff series was during the 2023 Eastern Conference finals in which they were swept. — Clark
Will Sam Reinhart be back at full strength for the Panthers?
Florida saw one of its top skaters exit in the first period after Sebastian Aho delivered a hit that forced Reinhart out for the remainder of the game with a lower-body injury. While Florida had Game 2 well in hand even before Reinhart became unavailable, it’s safe to say the Panthers are a better team when he’s in the lineup. Reinhart’s status going forward is significant for Florida overall. Reinhart paced the Panthers with 39 goals and 81 points in the regular season and notched 11 points in 13 postseason tilts going into Game 2. Florida must hope that Reinhart isn’t just available for Game 3 (and beyond), but that he’s not too banged up to continue operating at a high level. — Shilton
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