There doesn’t seem to be anything the St. Louis Cardinals hate more than swallowing bad contracts. Over the past few years, names like Johnny Peralta, Johnathan Broxton, and others have seemingly been dead meat on the roster moving into the Regular Season that the Cardinals didn’t seem to have reason to hang on to.
The following script always seems to play out from then. The player always performs poorly at first and is given the benefit of the doubt as it’s “still early” in the year and too soon to judge. Then the player blows a couple of games that were easily winnable.