Paul Goldschmidt unfortunately cannot single-handedly will the Cardinals to victory

I’m unsure if the demographics of the readership of this website line up to perfectly understand this reference, but I’m going to give it a shot anyway. There’s this episode of SpongeBob SquarePants called Employee of the Month. Not to spoil it too much, but the premise is that month after month SpongeBob wins Employee of the Month. There is a shot where the audience is shown a huge wall of plaques of SpongeBob and his Employee of the Month Awards. Watching Paul Goldschmidt hit makes me think of that episode. It seems like game after game, when I am trying to find something good to say about it — since I have recapped only losses so far this season — it is Paul Goldschmidt that is the something good.

Even last season, though he came out of the gate with some pretty terrible batted-ball luck, he had been hitting the ball hard. I remember writing about it specifically, because I predicted based on his exit velocity and launch angle that hits would start falling. From that moment I became extremely invested in Paul Goldschmidt because I really wanted to be right. Luckily I was! And ever since then Goldy has been consistently one of the top Cardinals in exit velocity. Every game I’ve recapped so far this season I check Baseball Savant and see that Goldy had either the hardest hit of the game per Exit Velocity — sometimes the top two or three hardest hits of the game — and at worst at least one of the hardest hits of the game. That’s saying a lot too because, as I have mentioned, I haven’t recapped a win.

All this is to say that Goldy has been the Cardinals SpongeBob SquarePants for several months now and he was at it again in this game. The Cardinals took a two-run lead and the two runs they scored were off to solo home runs off the bat of Paul Goldschmidt. He reached base twice more in his third at bat with a double hitting a slider to right field, and his fourth at bat, which was a single up the middle.

With a 4-4 night going, he was exactly the player the Cardinals wanted up in the top of the ninth with the team trailing 7 runs to 3 with the bases loaded and 1 out. That is the time you want your team’s SpongeBob SquarePants up — finally with runners on in front of him. And if this were an excellent animated television show and not real life, SpongeBob would have come through and tied the game. That isn’t what happened though. Instead, he hit into a game-ending double play.

The rest of the game is a lot of the same cursed energy from the rest of the season. There were key-errors that led to runs, back-breaking homers with runners on, and hard lineouts to end innings. I don’t want to write about any of that anymore. As you might remember, I have yet to recap a win. Here are some positive things from my sleep-deprived delirious notes:

“Jordan Hicks has been pitching quite well as of late and looked really good in this appearance. He’s painting the corners with a singer[sic] that hits 103 mph, it’s bananas. Absolutely devise [sic] physics”

That sinker was devastating in this game. It reminded me of Wii Tennis where you could serve the really fast serve, but he is throwing it in real life and it moves like a Bugs Bunny changeup.

The Cardinals will try to avoid a 4-game sweep tomorrow when Miles Mikolas toes the rubber again Logan Webb at 2:45 pm CT.