Newly informed of advanced stats, Matt Carpenter came along and became my favorite player
With the playoffs on the line, the Cardinals were losing 2-1 to the Pirates in the bottom of the 6th. Adam Wainwright had done his job. He had pitched 6 innings of 2 run ball with eight strikeouts. He had 100 pitches and his day was done. Opposing starter Ryan Vogelsong had done what was asked of him too. He wasn’t very good that year, and it was in fact the last start of his career, and the 38-year-old went 5 innings with one run allowed. We’ll ignore than he had more walks than strikeouts.
He was out of the game at this moment. All-time great reliever name Antonio Bastardo had replaced him. He alternated outs with allowing men on base. He walked Jedd Gyorko and gave up a single to Jose Martinez. There were two outs and Matt Carpenter was at the plate. Bastardo struggled to find the zone. He fell behind 3-0. Bastardo knew he could throw a fastball in the zone, because Matt Carpenter had literally never in his career swung at a 3-0 pitch.
And then he did.
(The Cardinals won 10-4, but they needed the Dodgers to beat the Giants, and they did not, so it did not lead to the playoffs.)
Matt Carpenter may have been the most patient man in baseball. Think about the long game he was playing. In his mind, he knew he was one day going to swing at a 3-0 pitch. He had come to the plate with a 3-0 count 158 times before that moment on the final day of the 2016 season. He never swung. Not one time. Out of all his plate appearances that year, it was the third highest leverage plate appearance of the season. Talk about picking your spots.
~~~~~~~~~~~
2011 was the year I learned about advanced stats. I earnestly argued that Adam Wainwright deserved the Cy Young in 2009 because of wins and losses. But I found this site, was exposed to advanced stats, slowly came around to learning about them, and became a proponent and user of advanced stats by the beginning of next season. And what better player to arrive at that particular moment in my life than Matt Carpenter.
You did not have to know advanced stats to appreciate Matt Carpenter at first. If you’re only familiar with the later part of his career, you might be a little mystified by rookie Matt Carpenter. He batted .294, hit 22 doubles, 5 triples, and just 6 homers in 340 PAs. The next season, he batted .318, hit 55 doubles, 7 triples, and 11 homers. I experienced this, and I have very little memory of Carpenter apparently being a huge triples guy. 12 of his 28 career triples were hit in his first 1,057 plate appearances. He even hit a triple in the 2013 postseason.
Ah yes, the postseason. We all know where I’m going with this. Matt Carpenter in 2013 was hard to strike out. He only struck out in 13.7% of his plate appearances. He made pitchers work for that strikeout. None moreso maybe than Clayton Kershaw. The legend of Matt Carpenter is not properly told without Clayton Kershaw. It was Game 6 of the NLCS and the Cardinals were up in the series 3 games to 2. Kershaw was on the mound. Kershaw looked like Kershaw for the first two innings. He actually struck out Carpenter to begin the game. And he had added two more strikeouts by the time he faced Carpenter the second time. He had 37 pitches. And then this happened.
So beautiful. You will never convince me Carpenter isn’t responsible for the rest of that inning. And perhaps why Kershaw is known as a playoff choker in general. Kershaw, now rattled and with 48 pitches and just one out in the 3rd inning, proceeded to give up 4 runs that inning. He even had to resort to intentionally walking Pete Kozma so he could face the pitcher to end the inning. Kershaw ended up giving up 7 runs and throwing 98 pitches – I don’t know why he was left in that long – in a 9-0 laugher that sent the Cardinals to the World Series. (Seriously, this was an elimination game and Kershaw was left in unfathomably long)
The version Matt Carpenter was in 2012 and 2013 was unfortunately not very sustainable. He had a .355 BABIP or so in those years. His BABIP fell to .318 in his third year, and while he compensated for it with more walks, he had his lowest wRC+ at 117. Yeah that’s how good of a hitter he was, a 117 was disappointing. This is the point where you probably need to like advanced stats to appreciate Matt Carpenter. He batted .272 with 8 homers and the doubles came a lot less frequently. But he had a .375 OBP.
But if you didn’t properly appreciate his regular season performance, well you definitely appreciated his postseason performance. The Cardinals faced the Dodgers again in the 2014 postseason. This time it was the NLDS. Kershaw allowed a home run to the second batter of the game, but nobody else even got on base until the 6th inning. Carpenter came to the plate with two outs and homered on the 1st pitch he saw. It was still 6-2.
Kershaw came back out for the 7th and allowed four straight singles to begin the inning. He stayed in the game. With the bases loaded, he picked up a strikeout. He allowed another single. Only one run scored, bases still loaded. He struck out the next hitter. 2 outs, 102 pitches, Matt Carpenter up. He did not make Kershaw throw 11 pitches this time. He did however foul off three 2-strike pitches in an 8-pitch at-bat. Enjoy.
Boy did Kershaw have some incompetent managing that led to his reputation. He had already given up six hits that inning, had allowed a homer to the guy at the plate in his last plate appearance, and had over 100 pitches. I digress.
The next game, Matt Carpenter homered again to tie the game at 2-2. The Cardinals lost 3-2. In Game 3, he homered for the third straight game. When the Cardinals made the NLCS, he homered in Game 2. What is going on? Matt Carpenter, he of the 8 homers in 709 PAs, homered in four of the 9 playoff games in 2014. Again, if you are only familiar with later Matt Carpenter, I don’t know if you can properly understand how shocking this was.
As it turns out, he figured something out that postseason. He became a home run hitter. I know I know there are those who wish he stayed the Matt Carpenter who never struck out, who was a doubles machines. My argument is that he would never duplicate that. He would probably be an above average hitter on the strength of his walks, but the near MVP Matt Carpenter? Nah he wasn’t doing that again.
We knew he was different when he hit 8 homers in the first 2 months of 2015. That matched his entire home run total from the previous year. We also noticed he was striking out a lot more. The strategy was clear. Accept a few more strikeouts for home runs. Well, it worked. I promise you, Matt Carpenter without home run power was not hitting for a 140 wRC+ like he did in 2015. Or a 136 wRC+ the next season. And actually doubles Matt Carpenter never left either. He led the NL in doubles in 2015 with 44.
He had an abnormally low BABIP in 2017, although still managed a 124 wRC+. And he got off to an unbelievably slow start in the 2018 season. He had a 60 wRC+ and the strikeouts had gotten out of control with a 28.6 K%. He gone 0 for his last 19 with just one walk. I’m not sure if anything in particular changed, but he went 3 for 5 with two doubles on May 16th. For the next three months, he was Barry Bonds. This is not an exaggeration.
(In the midst of that run, he went 5 for 5 with 3 HRs and two doubles against the Cubs in one of those six games)
Here was his line from May 16th to August 15th:
365 PAs, .326/.430/.707, 30 HRs, 14.8 BB%, 20.3 K%, .381 ISO, .343 BABIP, 199 wRC+
Why did I stop at that date? Well he got hit in the hand on August 15th. He hit just three homers the rest of the season. Who’s to say how his season ends if he never got hit. Maybe he was always due for a huge slump. But it’s a very mighty coincidence if the HBP had zero effect on his play the rest of the season.
And that was the end of prime Matt Carpenter. He was never as bad as people thought he was past 2018. He was league average in 2019, but it came with a .226 average. He had another improbable surge in 2022 playing for the Yankees when he hit 15 homers in 47 games, but that too was prematurely ended by an injury. In his last season, Carpenter was about the same hitter he was back in 2019 when he was league average – but since he was primarily a DH and pinch hitter, he was below replacement.
Matt Carpenter’s legacy is that he was the best Cardinals players after Albert Pujols. He represented the failure to win a World Series so he got more hate than he deserved. If he was the Jimmy Edmonds to an Albert Pujols, he wouldn’t have taken as much criticism as he did. After the magical 2011-2015 run of postseason games, they missed three straight postseasons. Matt Carpenter was the face of that.
But I really do think Carpenter is underrated by most Cardinals fans. From 2013 to 2018, Carpenter was the 11th most valuable player in all of baseball. With a minimum of 500 games played, Carpenter’s 134 wRC+ in that span was the 19th best in baseball. Hey here’s a stat: Matt Carpenter had the 7th highest BB% in that six-year span. Four of the six ahead of him are likely Hall of Famers (Votto, Harper, Trout, and Goldy). The other two, if you were wondering are Carlos Santana and Jose Bautista.
I began this post with an excerpt about Matt Carpenter’s extreme patience for a reason. When I think of Carpenter, I do not think of home runs. I do not think of doubles. I don’t think of strikeouts. I don’t think of his ugly looking throws from 3B. I honestly don’t even really think of his playoff performance against Kershaw. I think of his walks.
He made me, new advanced stat nerd, a believer of the value of a walk. In his admittedly down 2014 season, I remember rooting for him to get 100 walks in a season. I was strangely obsessed with how much he walked. He made me root for walks. In his prime, he refused to swing at just about anything that wasn’t his pitch until he got to two strikes. And then he may not have swung then either as an umpire rung him up on a ball off the plate. Matt later did get to 100 walks in a season, twice, in the 2017 and 2018 seasons.
You could probably say, with a straight face, that Matt Carpenter got the absolute most of his talent. This is not a player who should have gotten anywhere near 31.5 career fWAR. Consider his journey. It’s 2007, he’s a junior at TCU who doesn’t really stand out who is recovering from Tommy John surgery. His head coach considered him 30+ pounds overweight. He had a conversation with his coach that his hard work on the baseball field wasn’t happening in the rest of his life, in the classroom or in the weight room.
And… that was all it took. The literal next day, he was in the weight room and his diet completely changed. He prepared his own meals and lost that weight. He made second-team All-Conference as a redshirt junior and then batted .333 as a redshirt senior. It was enough to get him drafted in the 13th round.
But he was still a 23-year-old drafted in the 13th round. He was sent to the lowest level possible at the time for such a player to be sent: short season A ball. He hit .469 with twice as many walks as strikeouts in 9 games before the Cardinals decided he was too good for that level. He walked more than he struck out in Low A too and the Cardinals decided to really test him after just 29 games. He was drafted THAT year and he made his way to High A from the lowest realistic level he could be sent in just 38 games. He struggled for the only time in the minors finally in High A.
But he adjusted. Oh boy did adjust. In 28 games the next season, he had a 161 wRC+. The Cardinals decided “okay yeah you’re too good, let’s see if you’re challenged by AA.” He wasn’t. He had a 146 wRC+ in AA. He played the rest of the season there even though he could have been promoted. In AAA the next season, he had a 129 wRC+. He only saw 19 plate appearances, and he of course walked in 4 of those.
You’re not going to see many stories like Matt Carpenter. 23-year-olds who get drafted are organizational fodder and since he was drafted in the 13th round, I don’t think the Cardinals thought he would be different. Only when he mashed the hell out of the ball did they maybe change their minds. And even then, he didn’t get his first proper MLB exposure until he was 26 and he was purely a bench player that season. Or he was meant to be. He certainly forced his way into starting more than I think was planned.
Try to find a career like Matt Carpenter. I don’t think you can. He is a singularly unique player with a story like no other who managed to reinvent himself in college so he could get drafted, and in the middle of his career when he wasn’t satisfied with a down season. He managed to make himself a lock for a Cardinal red jacket and on the downslope of his career, he sort of made himself into a Yankee legend, which I find kind of cool. In an age where I find it somewhat difficult to root for former Cardinals for what I think are obvious reasons, I never had any issues whatsoever being very happy that Matt Carpenter had his 2022. It extended his career two more seasons, and he got to retire as a Cardinal.
Matt, I love ya and I can’t wait to see you every Opening Day with a red jacket.