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St. Louis Cardinals: Potential 2021 bounce back candidates
By Matt Benson
Jack Flaherty
Flaherty started off 2020 strongly with a 1.93 ERA through his first four starts, allowing just four earned runs and striking out seventeen through 18.2 inning pitched. With the bittiness of the 2020 season, Flaherty’s performances tailed off towards the end of the year and he ended the season third in the rotation behind veteran Adam Wainwright and Korean rookie Kwang Hyun Kim.
Flaherty finished with 0.6 fWAR which ranked him as the 86th best starting pitcher in the majors, a whole 2.6 fWAR behind the major league leader Shane Bieber (3.2). Flaherty finished 2020 with a 4.91 ERA which was particularly accentuated with a nine earned run, three inning outing against the Milwaukee Brewers in September. This all combined to a distinct drop off from 2019, after Flaherty closed out the 2019 season with a 0.93 ERA over his final ten games.
Flaherty finished in the top seven percent of the league in 2019 for both exit velocity and wOBA which were both key contributors to his rise to a top four finish in the CY Young and 13th in the MVP race. These numbers unfortunately didn’t quite hit the heights for JFlare in 2020, where he finished outside of the top third for exit velocity and didn’t even finish in the top 150 qualified pitchers for wOBA (behind the likes of Spencer Turnbull and German Marquez!
There thought was certainly sign of hope from Flaherty, who ended 2020 with a 3.42 xFIP which ranked in the top 25 of all starting pitchers with at least 40 IP. So potentially the drop off of 2020 may have just been down to a number of unfortunate events in both the current world climate, as well as on the baseball diamond. I would expect a bounce back from Flaherty, returning to his 2019 standards in the coming season.