Hunt and Peck

If the MLB season ended today - A Hunt and Peck

Our collective nightmares were realized.

By lil_scooter93 Aug 12, 2019, 1:00pm EDT

Today is an offday for the Cardinals so there will be no Cardinals baseball game this evening. It is a coincidence, but a fitting one that they will not play today. See, today, August 12, is the anniversary of the MLB work stoppage in 1994.

stlcardsfan4 details it very well in his article posted this morning A timeline of the 1994 baseball strike. It is a great refresher on all the shady deals that led up to the work stoppage that ultimately led to the season ending on August 11, 1994. There was no pennant winner. There was no World Series.

With similar talks of collusion and unrest among a players, striking had been brought up once again. The first strike caused quite a negative impact on the game and its public image; it hard to imagine such an event happening again. The current Collective Bargaining Agreement is set to expire in 2021, but it appears players will have specific issues they would like addressed. What if they do not want to wait?

If the baseball season ended today the Cardinals record would be frozen at 61-55 at second place in the NL Central. The team’s MVP would be Paul DeJong with 3.1 fWAR. Marcell Ozuna would be the team’s top hitter at 118 wRC+, just edging past Paul Goldschmidt at 112. Goldy does pass Ozuna in homeruns, though with 26 to Ozuna’s 22. Kolten Wong would lead the team with the most Defensive Runs Saved at 12 with Harrison Bader and DeJong at second and third with 10 and 8, respectively.

Jack Flaherty would lead the pitchers in fWAR at 2.3. He would lead them in bWAR at 2.5. Giovanny Gallegos leads the relivers in fWAR at 1.5 and has the lowest ERA of all pitchers that aren’t Jedd Gyorko at 1.96. Gallegos has the highest strikeout percentage of pitchers with over one inning pitched at 37.3%. Flaherty leads the starters in that cateogry with 28.6%. The lowest walk rate on the team goes to Miles Mikolas at 4.0% with Gallegos right behind him at 5.4% (so Gallegos is like, really good, guys, just putting that out there). Mikolas also leads the team in innings pitched at just over 137. Carlos Martínez has only pitched 31 innings but has given up the least homeruns at 2. Michael Wacha in 89.1 innings has given up 21.

... But if there were no playoffs, does any of it really matter? Would this all be for nothing?

'Oh my God, how can we do this?' -- An oral history of the 1994 MLB strike | ESPN

MLB: Remembering '94 strike and fans' rage at both sides | Yahoo! Sports