His season now over, Cardinals’ Contreras can’t seem to catch a break —or avoid one (original) (raw)

It hardly came as a surprise when St. Louis Cardinals manager Oli Marmol announced Monday that Willson Contreras would miss the rest of the regular season, but the finality that accompanied that pronouncement came as another reminder of an opportunity which slipped away through a summer’s worth of power outages.

Contreras, who broke the middle finger on his right hand when he was hit by a pitch on Aug. 24, has been determined to be healing appropriately, but is still two weeks away from being able to absorb “dynamic stress,” Marmol said. That will take him past their final scheduled game on Sept. 29.

Making the postseason would require a miraculous run and the near-total collapse of three other teams, so Contreras’s second season in St. Louis can be topped with a bow.

“You look at his overall production, and it was top-end production offensively, and we lost him for a decent amount of the season,” Marmol said. “When you look at when he was in there, man, he did a really nice job of creating real offense and damage and power and all the things we’ve talked about that’s needed in order to kind of get to where we wanted to get to.”

In just 84 games and 301 at bats, Contreras posted an .848 OPS, the third-highest total of his career. By OPS+, which measures a hitter against league averages and taking home ballpark factors into account, Contreras posted the best offensive season of his career with a mark of 136, making him 36% more productive than a league average hitter.

He slugged 15 home runs and posted a career-best .380 on base percentage, all the while improving year over year in nearly every defensive metric.

As much as the Cardinals have missed expected production from the likes of Nolan Arenado, Nolan Gorman and Paul Goldschmidt this season, being limited to only a half season of Contreras was perhaps the most challenging – and least anticipated – blow the team had to absorb.

Contreras suffered a fractured left forearm on May 7 when J.D. Martínez of the Mets made flush contact with the barrel of his bat on a swing. Originally forecast to be out perhaps through the All-Star break, Contreras instead returned on June 24 and immediately leapt back into the middle of the lineup.

His productive return overlapped with the best stretch of the season for St. Louis, and they surged into playoff contention – frequently holding a playoff spot – as Contreras slugged his way through the season.

As the tide began to turn against them in August, in retrospect, it was Contreras’s second injury which truly spelled the end of any real playoff hopes.

“Absolutely, and that goes with anybody,” Marmol said when asked if he could detect an increased comfort and confidence in Contreras in his second season in St. Louis. “Talk to [Goldschmidt], and he’ll tell you that his second year was very different than his first. Talk to [Arenado] and he’ll tell you the same thing. I think it’s just part of it, but yeah, there was.”

Signed away from the Chicago Cubs to replace Yadier Molina behind the plate, Contreras’s first season got off to a rough start when he was moved away from catching slightly more than a month into the season.

A cadre of starting pitchers who saw their stuff slipping and a season sliding away found Contreras to be a convenient scapegoat, and the awkward, poorly-communicated fashion in which the move was communicated – on the eve of his return to Wrigley Field – was the first real warning sign that something was seriously wrong in the 2023 season.

The confident Contreras who arrived this year in spring training seemed to bear none of the wounds and hard feelings which might have been expected to accompany that rocky start, and the Cardinals have consistently praised both the work he did to improve his own game and his concerted efforts at developing further relationships with the team’s pitching staff.

There was ultimately no doubt that the position belonged to Contreras as the season got underway, and only two fluke impact injuries prevented him from seizing it in the way both he and the team intended.

Marmol waved away any discussion of what the position could look like for the Cardinals moving forward. Contreras will play next year at age 33 with three guaranteed years remaining on his contract.

Very few catchers remain in the spot full time past that age, and with Goldschmidt reaching free agency this winter, there would seem to be an opportunity for a timeshare at first base between Contreras and Alec Burleson.

For the moment, the Cardinals aren’t entertaining that possibility. They are instead looking back at a season which was kneecapped by an inability to deliver clutch hits at clutch times, and finding themselves wondering if the runs they needed might’ve come from their catcher if not for a few broken bones.

“It’s super unfortunate, because this is a guy who was producing at a super high level,” Marmol said. “When you look at what’s kept us right around .500, it’s been [a lack of] damage. And he was doing that, you know?”

Two years into his tenure, Contreras, through no fault of his own, remains unable to either catch a break or avoid one.

Jeff Jones is a freelance sports writer and member of the Baseball Writers Association of America. He is a frequent contributor to the Belleville News-Democrat, mlb.com and other sports websites.