The St. Louis Cardinals didn't lose the National League Championship Series because of Mike Matheny. But the manager didn't exactly do the greatest job of preventing his club from losing—or even of putting it in position to beat the World Series-bound San Francisco Giants.
Matheny made more than a few questionable, second-guess-worthy decisions over the course of the NLCS, but that's almost come to be expected of the third-year skipper, who prior to becoming St. Louis' bench boss in 2012 had no prior managerial experience at any level.
Heck, there's even a cutesie—or frustrating, depending on your point of view—term for Matheny's managing: "Mathenaging."
Here's how Bernie Miklasz of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch describes it:
Matheny does a lot of things well as the Cardinals' field leader. But the buzzword has become shorthand for the quirks in Matheny's managing style. "Mathenaging" encompasses all of them: the odd lineup decisions, the dismissal of advanced statistics, the puzzling use of personnel, the helter-skelter bullpen tactics, his fickleness with young players and the way he stubbornly stands by favorite players.
None of Matheny's "Mathenaging" is being picked apart more so than his eyebrow-raising decision to bring in Michael Wacha in the bottom of the ninth inning in Game 5 of the NLCS.
By now, you know all about the outcome—a walk-off series-clinching, Cardinals season-ending three-run home run by unlikely hero Travis Ishikawa—and so it's easy to say that Matheny made the wrong call after the fact.
But it was pretty evident that Matheny was making the wrong call exactly as he was in the middle of making said call.
Wacha, after all, missed almost all of the second half of 2014 with a stress reaction in his right shoulder and hadn't pitched since Sept. 26.
Plus, Matheny had other options at his disposal. Among them? Closer Trevor Rosenthal or Carlos Martinez or Seth Maness or even Randy Choate, all of whom are relievers ready-made for that kind of high-leverage spot.
So why Wacha?
Matheny made it abundantly clear after the loss, as Matt Snyder of CBS Sports points out, that he refused to bring in Rosenthal simply because it was a tie game on the road, the sort of scenario that can lead to a save situation if the Cardinals would have gone ahead in the top half of an inning.
In other words, Matheny was saving Rosenthal for a save opportunity that never came, precisely because Wacha was allowed to stay in to surrender the season-ending blow.
"I put [Wacha] in a tough place without getting much work lately," Matheny said in his on-air interview following the loss. "That's on me."
While Choate hadn't been all that good in the series, it still would have been perfectly defensible to use the lefty specialist to, you know, get out lefty hitters like Brandon Belt, who Wacha walked, and Ishikawa, who won it.
While we're on the topic of Wacha, if Matheny was fine with using a guy who had thrown only 16.2 innings in the second half of the season in the most important, save-your-season spot of the year, then why wouldn't he have called upon Wacha as the long man in Game 4 when starter Shelby Miller had to be lifted in the fourth inning?
As Rob Neyer wrote for Fox Sports' Just a Bit Outside site: "If Matheny and the Cardinals thought Wacha could pitch, he should have pitched between Sept. 26 and Oct. 16. If they thought he couldn’t, he shouldn’t have been on the roster."
And while we're piling on, Matheny also pretty clearly underutilized outfielder Oscar Taveras, one of the very top prospects in baseball entering 2014, in October, much as he did during the regular season. Would it have been so much to ask for the lefty-swinging Taveras, who went 3-for-7 with a homer in the postseason, to platoon with righty-hitting Randal Grichuk?
Grichuk, by the way, finished the playoffs going 6-for-35 (.171) with just one walk and 13 strikeouts, most among all players in the postseason.
Given all of the above, it's no wonder the general feeling is that the Cardinals have had all their success the past three years in spite of Matheny.
It's too late for 2014 now, but there has to be hope among Cardinals fans and within the organization that Matheny can learn from the mistakes he's made in this and previous Octobers.
Hey, as Kansas City Royals manager Ned Yost is starting to show as this postseason progresses, it's possible. Yost, after all, has been frequently criticized for his handling of the bullpen and his love for the sacrifice bunt. And yet, he's also shown some ability to adjust rather than stick with conventional hard-and-fast rules.
The shame of all this for St. Louis is that the Cardinals are known as a smart, savvy organization, run by esteemed general manager John Mozeliak. It's a bit perplexing, then, that Matheny continues to make questionable moves and decisions during games—or that he's allowed to.
Look, Matheny's job won't be in jeopardy, and he won't be on the hot seat—not when he's become just the fifth manager to reach the playoffs in his first three seasons in the role.
But that success since he has taken over as manager has to do with the talent on the roster. And Matheny needs to do a better job of managing—not "Mathenaging"—that talent while it's still in place.
Statistics are accurate through Oct. 16 and courtesy of MLB.com, Baseball-Reference and FanGraphs, unless otherwise noted.
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