St. Louis Cardinals’ Top Ten Starting Pitchers of All-Time

Apr 13, 2015; St. Louis, MO, USA; St. Louis Cardinal former player Bob Gibson in attendance for the game between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Milwaukee Brewers at Busch Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Jasen Vinlove-USA TODAY Sports

As we wait for the St. Louis Cardinals’ to make a move in free agency, let’s look at their top ten starters of all time.

This is the next installment in our historical series that we have been doing this offseason, first we talked with you about the top ten free agents in team history, and then we created a super team out of the best players to ever play for the Cardinals. Now, in a kind of different light, we are going to take a look at the ten best starting pitcher’s the Cardinals have ever had.

I am sure you can already guess who is going to make the top spot, you may think you know who makes the second spot, but the rest may surprise you a bit. Surprising as it may be, the Cardinals have not exactly always had this amazing pitching staff, for years it was pieced together with Walt Jocketty and Dave Duncan‘s dumpster dives.

The pitcher’s list is a bit harder to do as opposed to what a hitter’s list would be like, that will be coming next week as we take a look at the top 20 hitters in team history. That will be a fun list to create and will be a different animal from the roster that I put together last week. There are a few statistics that I will be using to base my opinion and ranking on, let me preview two of the main ones for you.

One comes from baseball-reference and is called ERA+ and the other is fWAR from Fangraphs. Fangraphs has a bit of a different formula than baseball reference in calculating WAR for pitchers that I tend to like more. You can read up on these and more advanced statistics in Chris Greene’s post on advanced pitching metrics. So, let’s get started!

Next: Bob Gibson