The shuffle at the top of the St. Louis Cardinals lineup continues as Kolten Wong will bat first tonight against the New York Mets. Since Matt Carpenter moved to the second spot on April 28th, the Cardinals have employed five different players in the lead-off spot: Jon Jay (9), Peter Bourjos (6), Kolten Wong (3), Randal Grichuk (1), and Jason Heyward (1).
“We’ve had a lot of different things happen,” explained Mike Matheny yesterday when Heyward was at the top. “Jon Jay, who was starting to fit into that spot and we were kind of liking how that was all playing out. We had to put him on the disabled list.”
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Wong struck out in both of his prior lead-off at-bats this season and is batting .211 (8-38) with six strikeouts as the first batter of an inning. However, his 5th home run of the season last night proved to be the winning run for the Cardinals and Wong has an on-base percentage of .363 on the season.
“I haven’t seen the guys just trying to hit home runs, or trying to just drive the ball, or just trying to get on base–we’ve kind of seen a little bit of everything,” said Matheny of the players who’ve rotated through. “It’s almost need-based again. We need somebody that can get on base and somebody who has done it in the past. Every once in a while, you throw something together and it clicks.”
#STLCards make their lone series visit of the season to the Big Apple. Tonight's starting lineup pic.twitter.com/u2kkAM4L78
— St. Louis Cardinals (@Cardinals) May 18, 2015
MOVE CARP BACK TO LEAD-OFF??
As adamant as Matheny was about moving Carpenter out of the top spot in the past, he now seems equally as dedicated to keeping the third baseman batting second.
“I don’t know, he’s awful good there,” answered Matheny to the possibility. “It’s kind of like we were talking about with sometimes something clicks–to me, it clicked. When we got him in that second spot, it just looked like we had different production. You hate to mess with something that looks right. Would we, could we go back? Yeah. I believe when Kolten’s going good, I could see him as a 2-guy. As aggressive as he is, you don’t often see that as a 1, but look at a Gomez in Milwaukee. There are some guys who are up there that are free-swinging that can fit in the 1-spot. We just need to see somebody that when we put him in that spot it looks like it fits them, it looks like it fits us. Jon Jay was doing that, but once again, we’re now kind of pushed into a spot of having to try something else.”
BIGGER LEADS FOR WONG
Wong has actually done the majority of his damage while batting second this season–a .375 average (6-16)/.444 on-base with 2 HRs and 5 RBIs. He’s also been effective hitting eighth–driving in 8 runs and drawing 6 walks.
The second baseman voiced his confidence last night that he can hit anywhere in the order, but did acknowledge that he is going to do some work with his stolen base attempts.
“It’s one of those things where you get into hitting slumps, for me right now, I’m kind of in a stealing slump,” said Wong. “I got thrown out my past two times trying. It’s a little different for me. I’m kind of a guy, who I pick my spots really well. It’s something I’ve got to look at tape and see what I’m doing wrong–I kind of have a feeling my leads aren’t big enough as they should be. The past times I got thrown out, it was by a step so that could be a big part of what’s going on. But that’s something I’ve got to fix.”
Wong is 3-6 on stolen base attempts this season, 26-33 in his career.
photo credit: Joe Camporeale-USA TODAY Sports
