ST. LOUIS -- A few weeks ago, the Cardinals seemed to have course-corrected from their worst start in decades, finally giving their fans some reason to believe the roster was as good as the team kept insisting it was.

They had beaten Clayton Kershaw in a Sunday afternoon game and taken three of four from the Dodgers, capping a run of 11 wins in 14 games and pulling them within six games of .500, just five games out of first place. The Redbirds finally seemed to have taken wing on that May 21 afternoon.

That’s about the time they clipped a wire and came spinning back down to earth. The Cardinals simply have stopped hitting, wasting gains from a starting rotation that has finally hit its stride. And now, after Wednesday’s deflating 8-5 loss to the San Francisco Giants in 10 innings, they’re not only back to square one. They’re a notch below it.

The Cardinals, who didn’t score after the third inning and struck out 17 times on Wednesday, are a season-worst 15 games under .500 after losing their fifth straight game. This one came with a nasty little kicker: blowing a two-run lead in the ninth. Giovanny Gallegos gave up a game-tying home run with two outs and two strikes to Mike Yastrzemski, then the Giants piled three runs on struggling lefty Steven Matz in the 10th.

If this isn’t rock bottom, the Cardinals don’t want to see what that particular locale looks like. They’re off to their worst start to a season since 1978.

After the game, their comments echoed the precarious position they’re now in as they embark on a long road trip that will take them to New York, Washington and London. Frustration doesn’t even begin to describe how this team is feeling as it waits to see whether the front office will shake things up in the coming days.

This isn’t a team that has gotten comfortable with being at the bottom of the National League standings even though they’ve spent a good chunk of this season there.

“At some point, you’ve got to do something about it,” manager Oliver Marmol said. “You get punched in the face, punch back.”

The Cardinals are averaging three runs per game in their last 20 games, in which they have gone 6-14. Perhaps sensing that the front office might reach for a lever as the team continues to flounder, 11-year veteran Nolan Arenado, who all but forced a trade to St. Louis two winters ago, seemed to stand up for Marmol and his coaching staff amid a wave of criticism from some corners of the fan base.

“This has nothing to do with the coaches, it has to do with the players and, as players, we just don’t execute,” Arenado said. “I’m not good with runners in scoring position, we’re not getting outs when we need to, putting guys away. We’re not playing defense. I mean, we don’t execute, and that’s why we’ve been playing the way we’re playing.”

Marmol said he didn’t bring the team together for a meeting following the stinging loss, saying,  “There’s nothing to address. At some point, you just get the job done.”

Jordan Montgomery steadied himself after a rough first inning, giving the team his second quality start in a row, and Tommy Edman broke out of a miserable slump that had seen him hit .146 in his first 11 games of the month with a second-inning grand slam. The Cardinals would add a run in the third, but then post zeroes in the next six innings, including the 10th, when they started with a runner at second.

That meant they were, yet again, left to try to explain how a roster they all thought would contend has remained the least-effective in the National League through its first 69 games.

“Listen, expectations are high here and that’s why I came here and I love that,” Arenado said. “But I don’t know. We’ve played 3 1/2 months of bad baseball. I don’t know what to say. Do I think we have better players in here than we’ve put out? For sure. But there comes a point where you have to go and do it and we don’t do it.”

Poor pitching early in the season accounted for the Cardinals’ uncharacteristic 10-24 start, but a stalling offense has been the reason they’ve been unable to emerge from the hole their pitching dug them.

“There are a lot of things that don’t go our way, but you usually can fight through that stuff when you’re playing good baseball,” catcher Andrew Knizner said. “Every single game is going to have times where a ball bounces this way, you don’t get this call or you don’t make this play. Every single game is like that, but we just compound it by playing not as good as we should be playing and it just kind of piles on you.”