I take no pleasure in calling for someone's job. That's especially the case with Mike Matheny, who by all accounts is a first-rate individual and someone who cares deeply about the game of baseball. However, it's become increasingly apparent that Matheny is out of his depth as a big-league manager. 

I say this despite the fact that he's been plainly successful as Cardinals manager. After six seasons on the job, he boasts a .560 winning percentage. He's never had a losing season, and he's led the Cardinals to the playoffs four times -- including to the World Series in 2013. All of that has to be acknowledged and appreciated. Just as it must be acknowledged that he's also worked with good-to-great rosters. 

That's not the point, though. The point is this: counting the postseason, Matheny has managed more than 1,000 major-league games, and he still struggles to run a pitching staff. Early in his career, his rigid, paint-by-numbers bullpen decisions rankled. Increasingly, though, it's his thoroughly defective instincts when it comes to removing his starting pitcher that stand out.

Making pitching decisions is one of a manager's most basic tasks, and it's one of the ways he can most directly move the needle -- for better or worse -- for his team. Every manager screws this up from time to time, and sometimes what looks like a poor decision is explicable based on things we on the outside can't know. When similar mistakes happen over and over and across the years, though, it's fair to wonder whether it's a chronic deficiency on the part of the manager. 

Over at the Viva El Birdos blog, Tyler Kinzy recently studied the extent to which managers this season have helped or hurt their teams by sticking with the starter too long. It's very well done, and it includes a table showing how all 30 teams grade out. Be sure to check it out. Here, though, is the key takeaway for our purposes ... 

There it is. Quite literally nobody in all of Major League Baseball has been burned by a slow hook as badly as the Cardinals.

There it is indeed. It should be noted that this was written before the events of Sept. 27. On that night, the Cardinals faced the Cubs in a must-win Game 158. At the time, they were 2 1/2 games behind the Rockies and one game behind the Brewers in the race for the second NL wild-card berth. Going into the top of the seventh of this game, the Cardinals led 1-0. Here's how that frame went for starter Michael Wacha: single, single, home run, double, double, walk. The Cubs wound up scoring five runs in that inning and winning the game by a score of 5-1. The loss effectively ended St. Louis' season. 

Maybe at some point before your starter, who has one career complete game, allowed those first six baserunners to reach, you go to the pen in order to, you know, limit the damage in a game you must win. As the excellent Derrick Goold notes, Matheny justified this by saying his bullpen was fatigued. Really, though, the relievers he favors were fatigued. These, of course, are the days of expanded rosters, and Matheny had plenty of live, capable arms at his disposal. They just weren't the ones he preferred. So he let Wacha, after he'd plainly hit the wall, lose the game.

Again, Matheny had the most untimely hook in baseball even before this particularly egregious example unfolded. 

This is also a manager who's copped to riding a struggling starter just so he can get five innings and possibly qualify for a win. Sometimes, that's cost the team a win. This is the manager who, in the 2014 NLCS, made one of the most puzzling pitching decisions in postseason history. When it comes to illustrating the problem, we've got a cornucopia of examples at our disposal. These are basic competencies that a major-league manager should have figured out at least to a passable extent -- certainly by the thousandth game of his career. Matheny, though, hasn't done that.

If the Cardinals are going to contend in the near- to mid-term, which is their stated aim, in a division that also houses the powerhouse Cubs and the rising Brewers, then they'll need to eke out every edge they can. Losing games in the dugout and making managerial mistakes that even casual fans would recognize as such isn't acceptable. That's why the Cardinals need a new manager -- one who isn't part of the current staff. 

That doesn't appear likely to happen this offseason. Owner Bill DeWitt recently called Matheny "the right guy to lead us into the future." Again, you can marshal a defense for this. He's won games. Those with a close view of the team praise Matheny's abilities to relate to players on a one-on-one basis. All of that provides sufficient cover to keep him in the dugout. 

The reasonable assumption from the outside is that the front office has deemed Matheny's recurring tactical blunders as being worth it in light of the, well, je ne sais quoi that Matheny is said to bring to the job. If those indefinable qualities are so valuable, then perhaps he's a better fit for a coaching role or as a free-range assistant to the GM with player-development responsibilities.

Beyond that, the human touch isn't that hard to find among managers. Every so often you'll find a guy who can't run a clubhouse or relate to players, but those sorts tend not to last too long. You can turn up a "roster whisperer" elsewhere on the staff if need be, but you darn sure need a manager who can tell with some regularity when it's time to amble to the mound. Matheny has proved time and time again that he can't do that, and there's no evidence that he's learning. I have no doubt that Matheny can help a major-league organization, but right now he's in the wrong job. 

I'm going to repeat myself: I don't enjoy thundering all over the internet that someone should lose his job and thus have some level of upheaval visited upon his life. Matheny, however, has shown no ability to pass muster at one of the most foundational parts of his job. Replace him with a capable lever-puller these last two seasons, and the Cardinals probably make the playoffs in each of them. That's a damning thing to be able to say about a tenured manager, and it's a sure sign that change needs to happen.