Cardinals pitching pipeline has taken steps forward, but still has long rebuild ahead

Following the 2024 season, I dug into the St. Louis Cardinals' pitching development woes since the 2020s began, and the numbers were even worse than I thought.

Prior to 2025, only two starters whom the Cardinals had developed internally had made 10 or more starts with a sub-4.00 ERA (Andre Pallante and John Gant), and only two other starters, Jack Flaherty and Dakota Hudson, made 10 or more starts with a sub-5.00 ERA over that stretch.

A decade prior, the Cardinals had six young starters combine for 378 starts with an ERA of 3.36 or lower over their own four-year stretch from 2012-2015. The fall the Cardinals have made from the very best in baseball at developing young pitching to arguably the very worst in all of baseball in just a decade is perhaps the most frustrating part of the Cardinals' regression over the last decade.

Needless to say, the Cardinals have set the bar extremely low for improvement in recent years, so while reporting that the Cardinals have made improvements over the last year isn't saying much, I do think there are things to be encouraged by at both the major league and minor league levels that can be important steps in this long-rebuild ahead for their internally pitching development.

The Cardinals have seen positive signs in their pitching development but have many years of work still ahead of them

The Cardinals' regression in pitching development began in the mid-2010s, but it was the 2020s that truly illuminated the issue and led to their surprise collapse in 2023 and settling into mediocrity since then. It's the timeless phrase "Gradually, then suddenly" at its finest.

Since 2020, it's been a self-fulfilling prophecy that the Cardinals have been unable to shake themselves from. They enter each offseason with major question marks surrounding their pitching and clearly don't trust their minor league depth, so they go out and fill their rotation with veterans in hopes that the next year they can actually roll with some young guys. The trade deadline comes around, and they still don't trust the young arms, so they trade for stopgap veterans, and by the end of the season, the club feels the need to patchwork the rotation again.

The Cardinals, oftentimes, were right not to trust their internal depth, but that's their own fault that they haven't had quality arms coming through the system. Their outdated development system, paired with targeting pitch to contact arms who lacked the swing and miss stuff that is needed in today's game, compounded over time and turned what was once an elite trait of the organization (their pitching pipeline) into a major weakness.

Instead of having a trustworthy arm they could turn to if an injury occurred, or frankly, someone they could pencil into their Opening Day rotation instead of spending $10m-$20m on a veteran stopgap, they were disappointed by the likes of Hudson, Zack Thompson, Drew Rom, Jake Woodford, John Oviedo, and until recently, Matthew Liberatore.

On top of not having young depth options, the Cardinals completely lacked exciting pitching talent that they could dream on. Liberatore was supposed to be that, but the shine quickly faded away. Alex Reyes couldn't stay healthy and by the time the 2020s rolled around, he looked like a reliever anyways. They stunted potential growth of Ryan Helsley and Jordan Hicks by calling them up before their future as a starter was fully determined and pigeon holing them into relief roles.

Things are changing on all of those fronts now, and while they are a long ways away from where they were in the early to mid-2010s, there arrow does seem to be pointing up for them.

Looking first at their cost-controlled pitching depth, the Cardinals do now have a few young arms who they can use as back-of-the-rotation starters in Liberatore, McGreevy, and Pallante. Liberatore may have a higher ceiling than that, but each of those guys can be a number five starter and do an adequate job, especially for the money they would be paid.

In McGreevy's 11 major league starts so far, he has a 4.13 ERA and is averaging almost six innings per start. The Cardinals have been paying guys like Miles Mikolas, Lance Lynn, and Kyle Gibson for years now and hoping for that kind of production. McGreevy makes the league minimum and has five more years of club control.

In 54 starts since he debuted, Pallante has a 4.28 ERA and is averaging about 5.2 innings per start. Again, nothing to throw a party about, and yes, 2025 has been a step back for him, but if he's their fifth, sixth, or especially even seventh starter next year, that's a much better position than they've been in for the last number of years.

Liberatore's numbers are the worst of the trio as a big league starter, posting a 4.91 ERA in 46 career starts, although his 4.08 ERA in 22 starts this year has been a substantial step in the right direction. It's totally fair to have concerns about him long-term as a starter due to the dip in velocity and regression lately, but if you told anyone that Liberatore would make 22 starts with a 4.08 ERA back in the offseason, that would have been seen as a win. He's at least a viable option for their rotation on a cost-controlled salary.

Cheap, back-end pitching is not what makes you a team a World Series contender, but it sure does raise the floor of a club and allow an organization to target high-end pitching it lacks or invest in other areas of the ball club. Cost-controlled pitching, even back-end quality, is valuable.

On the prospects side of things, the Cardinals now have a variety of arms they can dream on to be better than back-end starters, although injuries have thrown a wrench into the mix.

Number five overall pick Liam Doyle headlines the group alongside Quinn Mathews, as well as injured but still talented prospects in Tekoah Roby, Cooper Hjerpe, and Tink Hence. Doyle is really in a tier of his own compared to those other names as things currently stand, but the point I'm making is they do have intriguing arms down below that could present more to their rotation in the next few years than what they are currently getting.

The injuries really are frustrating, but the Cardinals are going to have to get used to that if they truly want to transform their pitching pipeline. In today's game, collecting high-velocity, high-stuff guys tends to mean you're going to have a lot of prospects go down with injuries, so even when a guy seems to be developing, you have to cross your fingers that injuries don't take them out.

Had there been fewer injuries to their top pitching prospects this year, there may be a lot more optimism around the current group they have, but I don't think it's time to write any of those names off eithe,r. Hence is someone who it's hard not to just view him as a future reliever at this point, but Roby, Hjerpe, and Mathews' stories are far from over.

If you look down at Double-A and lower, names like Braden Davis and Ixan Henderson have had breakout seasons, posting mid-2.00 ERAs with really nice strikeout stuff. Davis is a name that some are even starting to throw into that class above that I just listed, lengthening the names that could be answers for the Cardinals in the coming years.

Cade Crossland, Brycen Mautz, Nate Dohm, Chen-Wei Lin, and others add to the mix of interesting names as well. They've got a long way to go, but a year or two from now, we may be looking at the Cardinals' young pitching in a much different light than we do right now.

Baby steps.