In their losing shootout last night against the Phillies, the Cardinals rifled three blasts over the outfield boards, accounting for four of the club’s nine runs. For the Cardinals, who with the likes of Carlos Beltran (14 home runs, leads NL),  Matt Holliday (10, fourth) and David Freese (10, fourth) lead the league in home runs, the circuit clout has become as big a part of the offense as its been since 2000.

If we consider that the home run is worth approximately 1.4 runs, the Cardinals in 2012 have scored more than a third of their runs via the long ball (34.4%):

The uptick in dependence on the long ball also correlates with the team’s run scoring. So the reliance on the proverbial three-run home run isn’t necessarily a bad thing (and Tony La Russa isn’t even here to enjoy it). The question is whether the home-run rate is sustainable: The Cardinals currently have a 14.9% HR/FB rate, which will likely regress. Not only do they play in a pitcher-friendly park, but only the Yankees (14.3%) had anything above a 13.0% rate in 2011.

As high as their home runs as percentage of runs scored has been, the Cardinals are only slightly above league average (31.8%) and rank 11th in MLB.

Other notes: In Wednesday’s game against the Padres, Jesus Guzman made contact with the ball twice — as in physical contact. The FoxSports broadcast team wondered who the last player to have been plunked three times in a game was. The answer: Austin Kearns on July 5, 2010. Since 1918, a batter has been thrice beaned only 21 times — and more than half have occurred since 2000. Lance Lynn was the offender on both of Guzman’s HBPs — the last pitcher to hit three batters in a game was Cleveland’s Justin Masterson, who dotted three Boston batters just a couple of weeks ago (May 13).

• Was it just us, or did Tyler Greene take his curtain call a little too quickly?
• Matt Carpenter got another start against a lefty and reached base twice (on an HBP and a double). So far, he has a respectable .318 wOBA vs. portsiders.
• A wise manager once said that it’s better to pull a pitcher one batter too early than one batter too late. That manager was not Mike Matheny, who made the mistake of letting Jaime Garcia face the Padre lineup a fourth time. Chris Denorfia doubled to lead off the eighth, and Garcia hit the showers. But only after Denorfia became the tying run.
• With the bullpen’s recent performance, however, it’s hard to blame Matheny too much.
• Marc Rzepczynski walked the only batter he faced. At least it was a lefty. He’s got the “one” in LOOGy covered. He just needs the out.
• Kudos to Matheny for bringing in his fireman Jason Motte to try to extinguish the eighth-inning rally. It simply didn’t work out (Motte mislocated his pitch).
• Garcia pitched beautifully, finishing with a 2.57 xFIP on seven strikeouts and only one walk.
• Nick Hundley’s sac bunt in the seventh inning actually increased the Padres’ win expectancy (by .003). But it backfired when the next batter, Alexi Amarista, struck out, enticing the Cardinals to intentionally walk Andy Parrino to bring up the pitcher. But Padre manager Bud Black, himself a former pitcher, was loathe to pinch hit for Clayton Richard, who to that point was working on a shutout, even though his line was deceiving (he wound up with a 4.08 xFIP). Richard K’ed and surrendered the lead the next inning. Turns out Mike Matheny isn’t the only one who occasionally suffers from Gambler’s Conceit.
• Do the people who lament Cardinal GIDPs also lament Matt Carpenter’s seventh-inning RBI groundout, hit too weakly for a DP? Or do they consider the latter a “productive out”?
• Despite the hype — dare we say it — Matt Adams may not be ready for prime time just yet.
• Greene’s homer off a 100-mph pitch was awesome and all, but it’s just one home run — nothing more, and nothing less. It doesn’t prove anything, though it’s certainly a positive sign. What is as encouraging is his multiple opposite-field extra-base hits in the game (he doubled in the fourth).
• The homer recalled the walk-off home run that Colby Rasmus hit off Padre closer Heath Bell back on Aug. 16, 2009 (which Richard also started). That was better days — for both players.

Thoughts after getting swept by the Kempless Dodgers:

• Our ESPN Power Rankings summary for the week: Cardinals’ defense, health have begun to fail them as they commit 10 errors in seven-game span and lose Jon Jay, Allen Craig, Kyle McClellan and Lance Berkman to the DL.
• Mike Matheny has five right-handers in the bullpen and he chooses to stick with his LOOGy* to face a right-handed batter? Van Slyke’s at-bat was the second-highest leveraged of the game (from the Cardinals’ defensive perspective); why not use your best reliever in a platoon advantage? With all due respect to Marc Rzepczynski, unless your last name is Chapman, we don’t want a lefty pitching in that situation.
• We’re a bit surprised that Matheny hasn’t faced more scrutiny after the weekend series. The intentional walk in Friday night’s game was disastrous. After Rafael Furcal stole second in the first inning of Sunday’s game, Matheny perhaps fell victim to the gambler’s concept and tried a double steal in which Furcal’s caught stealing negated the positive WE gains. And as a coup de grace, he left lefty Rzepczynski in to pitch to righty Scott Van Slyke. The players play the game, but the manager puts them in positions that nudge them in a direction toward or away from success.
• With the team obviously trying to eke out some runs early on (to wit: the stolen-base attempts), we wondered why  Matheny wouldn’t order a squeeze bunt with Kyle Lohse in the second inning with the bases loaded (Lohse struck out, and the Cardinals failed to score).
• Congrats to Matt Adams, who hit the first major-league pitch he saw for a single. Here’s to many more total bases.
• Speaking of firsts (of a more dubious kind), David Freese hit for the golden sombrero for the first time in his career. (He once struck out four times, but it was in a 13-inning game back on May 26, 2010.)
• Derrick Goold reviews the minor league system and finds little left-handed relief inventory in the warehouse. That’s fine, as we’re not convinced that the Cardinals should focus their farm system on developing LOOGys. If they happen to occur organically, so be it. But how valuable are LOOGys, anyway?
• The wages of age is injury. The Cardinals have lived by the sword of undervalued veteran talent — their 30-something signees Carlos Beltran, Rafael Furcal and Lance Berkman have averaged 7 WAR/600 PAs this season (hat tip: Carson Cistulli) — and now they must die a little bit by that same sword.
• Matt Holliday has the right perspective: “It’s a long season and you’re going to go through periods like this.” As an investing-wise friend once remarked about bear markets, you’ve got to hold through the pain. As is it with investing, so it is with the long season of baseball.
• The good news is that the Cardinals have had enough bats to go around, from Matt Carpenter to Allen Craig now to Matt Adams. Adams is perhaps the best pure hitter of the bunch (read: has the least position versatility) having raked at a .391 wOBA clip last year in AA and a .412 wOBA this year in Memphis.
• The Cardinals-Dodgers series featured a curious commonality between the teams’ closers, each of whom broke in as a catcher. Kenley Jansen had a .310 OBP as a minor-league, and  Jason Motte hit .220 OBP.
• A full 20% of the opening-day roster has turned over, two of the opening-day roster are no longer with the team and three on the DL (four, if you include Allen Craig, who would’ve been opened the season):

Opening Day	20-May
JC Romero	Brandon Dickson
Kyle McClellan	Eduardo Sanchez
Lance Berkman	Matt Adams
Jon Jay	Adron Chambers
Erik Komatsu	Skip Schumaker

• With the additional playing time of players late of Memphis, the team’s defense has perhaps suffered. In Friday’s disappointment, Matt Carpenter was particularly un-Hernandez-like going after Tony Gwynn Jr.’s triple down the line, and Shane Robinson and Adron Chambers looked rather amateurish in letting a fly ball drop between them. Neither play received an error, but better fielders would’ve made outs. Rafael Furcal’s throwing after (after catching the throw needlessly barehanded) led to the go-ahead run in the seventh. The team has committed 10 errors in their last seven games. If you don’t think there’s a connection, consider that the Cardinals have won only two games  in that span, and those were the only two in which they didn’t commit errors. It may not seem like much, but the pitching staff simply isn’t overpowering enough to pitch through bad fielding; they rank 11th in the league in strikeout rate but lead in groundball rate (50.9%). Overall, the Cardinals are at best average (1.7 UZR/150) and second-tier in Revised Zone Rating.

*The LOOGy is dead. Long live the LOOGy.

In their game against Matt Cain and the San Francisco Giants yesterday, the Cardinals shot out of the gate. They reached the typically stingy Cain for 12 total bases over the first three innings and scored four runs. But Cain stinted the rally and settled in to quash the Cardinal bats the rest of the way. The Cardinals didn’t score again until Yadier Molina hit a home run in the eighth that barely moved the win-expectancy needle to 6.4.

The following chart visualizes the Cardinal offense by inning (the line is Gross-Production Average each inning):

Cain not only has been getting better each year of his career but also with each inning of a game — or, at least, he doesn’t decline as much as most pitchers do over the course of a start:

After this afternoon’s sad showing, perhaps it’s better to dwell a bit on the recent past — as in Wednesday’s game, in which Jaime Garcia pitched one of the best games of his career. Shall we?

By Fielding-Independent Game Score, Garcia’s nine-strikeout start was the fourth-best of his four-year career:

Astute fans will note that three of his top four games have come against the Giants (two of which were in the city by the bay). And of the three nine-strikeout games that he has thrown, two were against the Orange and Black.

It’s not like the Giants swing a bunch of swiss-cheese bats — over the last three years, they have a league-average strikeout rate (18%). Perhaps it’s as Mike Shannon noted during the broadcast: The thick air of San Francisco gives Garcia’s pitches just enough extra heaviness that he is able to miss a few more bats.

Those two nine-strikeout performances were both in SF, so if the hypothesis is valid, we would expect to see more swinging strikes as a percentage of Garcia’s total:

Compared with his career rate of 17%, the 25% in the Frisco games may indeed bear out Shannon’s idea. It’s just a couple of games, of course, but it’s worth paying attention to. If we were really geeky, we’d be interested in the weather conditions during those games. (Okay, fine.) According to Robert Adair, temperature, barometric pressure and humidity affect the flight of a baseball:

The canonical 400-foot home run will go about three feet farther for every one-inch reduction in the barometer and as much as ten feet farther on a 95-degree July day in Milwaukee than on a 45-degree day. The effect of temperature differences on the elasticity of the ball will also have an effect on the distance a batted ball travels.

The conditions at AT&T Park:

Average pressure in St. Louis the last 10 years has been 1017, so it’s fair to say that the colder temperature, rather than the air pressure, contributed more to Garcia’s success, to the slight extent that weather conditions impact play at all.