Are the St. Louis Cardinals This Year’s Version of the 2015 Washington Nationals?

With six players already on the disabled list, a seventh having gone down during Sunday’s regular season opener, and a lack of established depth, are the Cardinals fated to end up like 2015’s most disappointing team?

The 2016 St. Louis Cardinals just haven’t been able to catch a break thus far, which was evident once again in Sunday’s regular season opener. Just one inning into the Cardinals’ first meaningful game, they lost left fielder Tommy Pham, who exited with a left oblique injury that he had previously complained about while warming up on Sunday. While the extent of his injury is still unknown, Pham’s injury was the most concerning development in a 4-1 loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates, the team’s first Opening Day loss since 2013.

Pham, who made his first Opening Day roster this year after spending parts of nine seasons in the Cards’ minor-league system, has an extensive injury history, so it wouldn’t be the biggest surprise in the world if he ended up on the DL. He’d be the seventh addition to the Cardinals’ disabled list, joining starting pitcher Lance Lynn (out for 2016 following Tommy John surgery), shortstop Jhonny Peralta (thumb surgery), shortstop Ruben Tejada (quad strain), relievers Jordan Walden (shoulder soreness) and Mitch Harris (shoulder strain), and backup catcher Brayan Pena (upcoming knee surgery). With all these injuries having already occurred, including long-term ones to Walden and Peralta that are expected to keep them out for several months, it’s worth wondering how much more the Cardinals can put up with before they’re seriously affected.

With the injury situation that they’ve encountered thus far, the Cardinals are experiencing adversity similar to that which the Washington Nationals faced last season. The Nats came into 2015 as widespread World Series favorites, having added former Cy Young winner Max Scherzer in free agency to a club that already had a dominant starting rotation and a powerful young lineup. But just like many other ultra-hyped, ultra-expensive “super teams” of late (i.e. most Los Angeles Dodgers teams since Magic Johnson took over as owner, as well as the 2015 Boston Red Sox), the Nationals failed to prepare where it mattered and didn’t acquire enough depth to survive a major wave of injuries.

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The Nats finished with a disappointing 83-79 record, missed out on a playoff spot, and cost manager

(who led them to an NL-best 96-66 record in 2014) his job.

Other than the obvious injury excuse, there’s really no other explanation for the Nats’ poor performance in 2015 besides GM Mike Rizzo and his front office’s failure to accumulate adequate organizational depth. At least for the first half, they had perhaps the game’s best pitcher in Scherzer, who had a 2.11 ERA, 0.78 WHIP, and .185 OBA before tailing off a bit after the All-Star break. They had what was widely considered to be the best rotation in baseball heading into the season, and most significantly, they had the game’s best all-around player in Bryce Harper, who hit .330/.460/.649 with 42 homers and 99 RBI. The scary thing for the Cardinals is that they don’t even have that type of dominant figure in their rotation or their lineup; their pitching staff is anchored by 34-year-old Adam Wainwright, who’s coming off a rather brutal Achilles injury suffered in 2015, and it’s highly debatable who their best hitter is. It could be Matt Carpenter, who’s a legendarily good leadoff hitter but isn’t exactly a typical lineup figurehead, or it could be either one of the club’s impressive rookie outfielders from 2015, Randal Grichuk or Stephen Piscotty. What’s for sure is that the Cardinals don’t have a dominant middle-of-the-lineup threat like Harper that’s going to pick up the slack for the others.

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Just like the Cardinals this year, those Nationals began last season with six players on the DL: righthanded relievers Erik Davis and Casey Janssen, infielder Anthony Rendon, and outfielders Nate McLouth, Denard Span, and Jayson Werth. Four of the Nats’ eight projected starting position players ended up playing in fewer than 100 games during 2015: Rendon, Span, Werth, and first baseman Ryan Zimmerman. As a result, they were forced to rely on unexpected contributors in the lineup. In the same way, the Cardinals could be faced with this type of situation if injuries continue to tear apart their position player corps.

While Peralta is the only player from the Cardinals’ projected starting lineup that has already been shelved long-term, there’s got to be some concern that an oft-injured player like Pham will end up missing time with the oblique injury he suffered in the season opener. And with three key players–Matt Holliday, Matt Adams, and Randal Grichuk–looking to stay healthier after having spent extended time on the DL last year, as well as Yadier Molina attempting to bounce back from a pair of offseason thumb surgeries, it certainly seems possible that injuries could create major problems for the Cards’ lineup in 2016.

While unexpected injuries to key players are a part of baseball and will negatively affect any team that suffers them, there’s one very concerning similarity between the Cardinals’ and Nationals’ situations: the significant absence of proven depth that’s available to provide in-house injury relief. We already saw how undesirable the Cards’ situation at shortstop was after Peralta got hurt last month, as the club was faced with a choice between Jedd Gyorko, who has 29 games of professional experience at short, or prospect Aledmys Diaz, who has never played in a major-league game and hit .230 prior to the All-Star break in Double-A last year. They went out and signed longtime New York Mets utility man Ruben Tejada after the defending NL champs cut him loose in mid-March, but Tejada was also hit by the injury bug earlier this week, so now the Cardinals are just forced to hope that Gyorko doesn’t lose them any games in the field while they’re waiting for Tejada to recover.

The Cardinals’ Triple-A squad projects to feature only two players with previous big-league experience–Dean Anna (23 career at-bats) and Carlos Peguero (289 at-bats)–and the players on the bench for Sunday’s opener had a collective 3,677 big-league at-bats, 3,447 of which come from presumptive platoon starters Brandon Moss and Matt Adams. Interestingly, this apparent aversion to big-league-tested positional depth from the Cards’ front office dates back to the winter of 2014, when they let longtime bench players Daniel Descalso and Shane Robinson walk and gave 40-man roster spots to career minor-leaguers Anna, Ed Easley, and Ty Kelly, a curious decision considering that all three players had already gone unclaimed in the Rule 5 Draft and received no real advantage from being on the 40-man.

This offseason, the Cardinals saw 11 position players with big-league experience depart the organization, but they brought in just five (Eric Fryer, Brayan Pena, Ruben Tejada, Jedd Gyorko, and Carlos Peguero) to offset the loss. For reference, the Cubs added 11 position players with big-league experience this offseason while losing five. Perhaps some more experienced players can be picked up off the scrap heap and assigned to Triple-A Memphis this week as some organizations cut excess contributors in order to trim down their minor-league rosters for the regular season, but if the Cardinals end up struggling to find reliable big-league bench contributors this season, the talk about the front office’s failure to assemble adequate depth during the offseason could become more prominent.

With the significant positional depth that the Cubs and even the Pirates possess, the Cardinals may have trouble competing with their top division rivals if injuries continue to occur.

In the same way, the Nationals paid the price for their failure to accumulate reliable depth players last spring as the wave of injuries hit. As a result, they were forced to rely much more than they wanted to on young center fielder Michael Taylor, who quite obviously was not major-league-ready at the plate in 2015 and hit .229/.282/.358 over 472 at-bats. The biggest area of concern was on the Nats’ bench, though, where they ended up opening the season with questionable contributors such as Mets castoff Matt den Dekker, first baseman/outfielder Clint Robinson, a 30-year-old who had accumulated all of 13 major-league at-bats heading into last season, second baseman Dan Uggla, who won a job as a non-roster invitee despite having hit .194 with rapidly evaporating power since 2012, and veteran outfielder Reed Johnson, who has had to make teams as a minor-league free agent three times since 2011.

While den Dekker (.800 OPS in 110 PAs) and Robinson (.782 OPS in 352 PAs) actually turned out to be solid additions, players like Uggla (.598 OPS in 141 PAs), longtime National Tyler Moore (.614 OPS in 200 PAs), Johnson, who went down early in the season with an injury, and 2014 San Diego Padres first-rounder Trea Turner–who was traded to Washington in June and ended up ascending from Double-A to hit .225/.295/.325 in 44 plate appearances–ended up exposing the Nats’ lack of depth.

One could argue that the Cardinals will face a similar predicament in 2016, as they begin the season with Jeremy Hazelbaker, a 28-year-old career minor-leaguer who made his MLB debut on Sunday, Fryer, a 30-year-old with just 158 major-league plate appearances, and Greg Garcia, who is a career .225 hitter over 89 big-league at-bats, on their bench. If Pham ends up on the DL, his replacement will likely be an infielder among Anna, Diaz, or prospect Jacob Wilson, who’s got above-average power and plate discipline but hit just .230 between Double-A and Triple-A last year.

That lack of experience on the bench means that there will be a high level of unpredictability for a group that is going to need to cover a decent amount of innings for the 36-year-old Holliday, the 33-year-old Molina, and perhaps Grichuk, who has spent time on the DL in four of his seven professional seasons. It’s already bad enough that Mike Matheny‘s only experienced pinch hitter off the bench is Brandon Moss (possibly joined by either Pham or Matt Adams, depending on the severity of Pham’s injury), but if players like Hazelbaker, Garcia, and Fryer end up seeing extensive time, the Cardinals’ lineup will likely be weakened. With the significant positional depth that the Cubs and even the Pirates possess, the Cardinals may have trouble competing with their top division rivals if injuries continue to occur.

One thing that could help the Cards keep things under control is if their elite starting rotation stays healthy. Part of the Nats’ downfall was that two of the five starters they opened the year with, Doug Fister and Stephen Strasburg, were severely limited by injuries during 2015, resulting in both putting up career-worst numbers (a 4.19 ERA, 1.40 WHIP, and .295 opponent batting average over 15 starts and 25 total appearances for Fister, and a 3.46 ERA, 1.11 WHIP, and .236 opponent batting average over 23 starts, tainted by a 5.16 ERA, 1.49 WHIP, and .289 OBA before the All-Star break, for Strasburg). Joe Ross and Tanner Roark weren’t awful when cast into rotation roles–in fact, a diminished Fister was sent to the bullpen in August while Ross retained a starting spot–but they certainly weren’t as dominant as Fister and Strasburg were in 2014, when both received Cy Young votes.

Considering that four of the Cardinals’ five starters spent time on the DL in 2015–Jaime Garcia from March 31 to May 21 with shoulder soreness and from July 5-28 with a groin strain, Carlos Martinez from September 30 through the end of the season with a shoulder strain, Adam Wainwright from April 26 to September 30 with a torn Achilles, and Mike Leake from August 7-22 with a hamstring strain–while Michael Wacha has dealt with chronic shoulder issues in the past, it’s fair to assume that the Cardinals will need more than five starters to navigate through the season. They’ll just have to hope that a group of potential replacements that includes Tyler Lyons, Tim Cooney, Marco Gonzales, and Alex Reyes is good enough to give them a chance when called upon.

On the bright side for the Cardinals, a large chunk of the Nationals’ problems last year also seemed to stem from the toxic mix of personalities in their clubhouse and manager Matt Williams’s inability to control the situation. Despite recent revelations of trouble in the Cardinals’ clubhouse, described by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s Derrick Goold as a “spring of discontent”, it’s unlikely that GM John Mozeliak will be ignorant enough to bring a Jonathan Papelbon-like character into the clubhouse and mess up the clubhouse chemistry to the point where things boil over like they did with the famed Papelbon-Harper choking incident.

Next: Cardinals' Jordan Walden Out for Start of Season

The Cardinals have 161 games to turn things around, and considering their recent history of dominance, there’s little reason to doubt that they’ll be able to compete for a playoff spot this season. If they do, though, it will almost certainly be because they didn’t stack up enough depth to survive injuries to major contributors. That could be one of the first black marks on the record of Mozeliak, who’s had about as great of a start to his GM career as one could possibly have over his first eight seasons.