Jedd Gyorko bombs the Padres twice as the Cardinals win a close one at Busch

Lineups

SAN DIEGO PADRES	ST. LOUIS CARDINALS
Travis Jankowski - CF	Greg Garcia - SS
Wil Myers - 1B	Jedd Gyorko - 3B
Matt Kemp - RF	Stephen Piscotty - RF
Yangervis Solarte - 3B	Matt Adams - 1B
Derek Norris - C	Tommy Pham - CF
Alex Dickerson - LF	Jeremy Hazelbaker - LF
Adam Rosales - 2B	Kolten Wong - 2B
Alexei Ramirez - SS	Alberto Rosario - C
Paul Clemens - RHP	Jaime Garcia - LHP

Pregame

Paul Clemens is a young inexperienced pitcher with bad results so far, and bad expectations from projections systems. He is just not very good. Clemens takes on a proven starter in Jaime Garcia tonight. Since the Cardinals offense should be able to slice up Paul Clemens like a turkey, the edge clearly goes to the Cardinals.

The projections systems like Jaime Garcia better than his rate stats so far, it should be noted. They think he is still at the least a #2 rotation type of player. But so far this year he has seemed more like a #3 or #4 rotation pitcher, if we are ranking the starting pitchers. If you ask this guy, a player with rate stats hovering around 4.0 across the board is a #4 pitcher, or hopefully a #5 if you have a great rotation. But I have hopes he'll regress towards the ace I expected him to be during the 2nd half of the season.

His best chance to go towards that would be to lower his walk rate which is currently at 3.19. Garcia has also been somewhat unlucky this year by several stat categories. We can watch out for what he does tonight and see what happens with the walks and hr:flyball ratio, and to a lesser extent his babip and slightly lower than normal ground ball rate. As far as the offense goes, the Cardinals remain towards the top of MLB in hitting.

The biggest surprise this year has been the Cardinals ISO numbers, which have resulted in a ton more home runs (last year must have been the drought before the dinger paradise). Only the Orioles have more raw power than the Cardinals. A healthy Moss and trading Jon Jay for Jedd Gyorko has bolstered the 180 in that area. The Cards are towards the tip top of the National League in home run total, only 2 behind the Nationals and 1 behind the Mets (wasn't expecting it to be the Mets!).

Defensively, the Padres are actually even worse than the Cardinals at least according to the UZR numbers we have.

What Happened

With an out and a man on first base, Garcia battled against Matt Kemp. Kemp made him work a bit, fouling off pitches here and there and working the count a bit until it was full. Garcia left one up but Matt Kemp flied out. He then struck out Rosario... his pitches seemed a bit straight in the first inning.

With one out, Jedd Gyorko continued his onslaught against Padres pitchers by hitting the ball and going to first base. Not a home run that time but still a hit. Matt Adams hit a ground rule double! 2nd & 3rd... but Pham recorded the third out of the bottom of the first.

Garcia made short order of the Padres in the 2nd, but he did walk a batter. Unfortunately the Cardinals were unable to muster much either. This may be an opportune time to mention: this umpire sucked pretty bad. Next paragraph!

So the teams were facing off against the ump almost as much as each other, making this a pretty weird game. Gyorko didn't care though, he said eff it and just went ahead and hit another home run vs his old team. This is getting weird. Gyorko has hit a home run in 5 straight games vs the Padres. He took it personal. Half of his home run total as a Cardinal are against his old team. The Padres couldn't really touch Garcia in the 4th.

It was 1 to 0 Cardinals in the 4th inning with Pham on first base because he drew a walk. Hazelbaker was up. Pham stole a base while Hazelbaker struck out. 2 outs with Wong up. But nothing happened.

Nothing happened for a while until Jedd Gyorko was up in the 5th inning with 2 outs. Somehow I knew he was going to hit a home run by the look on his face and his track record. It was maybe the best bat flip of his yet as a Cardinal. Awesomeness!!!!! Return of the Jeddi. The Gyork. What a comedian (the Padres are helping pay for him by the way!).

The Cardinals went into the 6th with a 3-0 lead despite only having 4 hits. The Padres also had 4 hits and had to deal with more of Jaime Garcia, who was maybe not totally "on" today but rather effective nonetheless. Well, Garcia was greeted by a Matt Kemp home run and then a Norris double so maybe things were catching up with him. But that was it.

With 2 outs Hazelbaker was able to sneak one down the right side. Wong was up again. No dice. Schimpf was up for the Padres. Stephen Piscotty was realllll close to catching one, but it narrowly evaded his glove to give the Schimpf-man a home run. 3-2 Cardinals with Lyons on the mound. He wasn't looking too good tonight. Not very great stuff.

The Cardinals were able to coast in for the win with another Oh close tonight. 3-2! Cards sweep the doubleheader! I kind of nodded off a bit towards the end of the game, but not much else happened other than Siegrist was used again as well.

+Pluses+

• Jedd Gyorko has now hit more home runs vs the Padres this year than against the rest of the teams!
  
• Gyorko hit 2 home runs tonight and was the WPA commander of the evening
• Jaime Garcia .190 WPA lead all pitchers and he did well in containing the Padres tonight
• Oh and Siegrist pitched again tonight and did well day and night. Oh in particular looked superb tonight in closing out the win.
• Schimpf and Quackenbush were not liabilities to their team
• Baseball all day and no losses! 2 wins!

-Minuses-

• The Padres offense were extremely unclutch, especially Jankowski
• Clemens should not be an MLB starter
• Tyler Lyons seemed pretty bad tonight and his WPA was negative

Graphs

Source: FanGraphs

(bad ump was bad)

Call hurts #Cardinals
Strike 1 should be ball 1
Bot 5 Clemens vs Garcia
6% call same
3.6in from edge pic.twitter.com/t7D4Hme5sg

— Cards Strike Zone (@CardinalsUmp) July 21, 2016

( this was probably the most egregious error listed at https://twitter.com/CardinalsUmp )

The Cards are 7 games behind the Cubs. Tune in next tomorrow night at 6:15 to watch Adam Wainwright and this crazy offense go at it again versus the Padres. Hopefully they can pad their at home win total a bit.