The Cardinals hit a speed bump in yesterday’s game when their relief pitching hit the skids. The loss of Steve Kline and Kiko Calero gave pause to the Cardinals in the offseason, but one game doesn’t make a season.
Sometimes a newspaper columnist needs to act like a city’s therapist and Bernie does this well.
In this column Bernie starts off by understanding the feelings of Cardinal nation:
… fretting Cardinals fans will undoubtedly blame their anxiety on the team’s bullpen.
He starts off talking about the game, which is fine, but it’s too detailed. Later Bernie identifies a real concern:
And that’s an issue: too many balls, too many walks, not enough strikes. Of the 92 pitches thrown by relievers so far, only 48 were strikes.
Excellent.
He wraps up with a Ray King quote.
Overall the column was good, but nothing too good. As Bernie says about the relievers is true about him as well … there are 160 games left.