Defense

[Pogotheostrich]

Does it bother anyone that the Cards staff is basically built around ground ball pitchers and Renteria/Womack were replaced my Eckstein/Gruz? Marquis, Carpenter, Morris and Suppan were all in the top 25 for groundball to flyball ratio.

[SaintsOfTheDiamond]

Of course it would help to have Renteria back, but Womack really wasn't a GG caliber 2B IMO. You still have the best defensive 3B in the game to help Eck cheat up the middle and Pujols will win a GG one day at first, so I guess my short answer is not really. Eck made 6 errors in 138 games while Renteria made 11 in 149. Of course some of those could have been throwing errors on balls that Eck wouldn't have even gotten to I guess. But when you spend less than half of what you did last year at SS you can't expect the level of play to be what it was unfortunately.