Digging into the pitching staff's two-strike problems

The Cardinals are getting cooked in pitcher's counts, but there's some underlying cause for hope

Secret of the guild incoming: Sometimes when undertaking a piece of baseball analysis, you probe the numbers and then determine whether they’re saying anything of note; less frequently, you commit to bellowing your findings before you have, you know, found them. There’s hazard in the latter approach because you don’t know if the outputs are going to be at all interesting. This space, however, belongs to me and you and no one else, and if I want to vault into something without first sticking my toe the water then I’ll do that. With what follows, I’m doing that. Courageous and buccaneering stuff, you’ll surely agree. 

When it comes to the matter of Cardinal pitchers’ capacity for loud failure in two-strike counts this season, I don’t know what we’re going to find when we spelunk into the numbers in just a few seconds. The grim reality that informs this exercise is that the pitching staff in a span of 22 games has managed to allow 19 two-strike home runs (!). Relatedly, they’ve permitted an OPS of .656 with two strikes, and that’s versus an MLB-average figure of .512. If you’ve consumed pretty much any amount of the 2023 on-field product at all, neither of these facts will surprise you. 

First, though, let me say I don’t think much of the parameters that get us there. The rubric of “with two strikes” is too broad thanks to the inclusion of full counts. The 3-2 tally is quite obviously not a pitcher’s count despite the defintional presence of strike two. For instance, this season the league’s batsmen have an OPS of .762 in full counts, but that figure goes pell-mell down the slope to just .512 in pitcher’s counts. As such, the bulleted points that follow are going to reflect two-strike pitcher’s counts – i.e., 0-2, 1-2, and 2-2 – and that means full counts won’t be a part of this particular calculus. The point is to determine to what extent and perhaps why Cardinals pitchers are failing under circumstances that normally afford success. The full count is not such a thing. 

So with no foreknowledge of what we’re about to find, let’s dig in …