Here is why Cardinals free-agent swing Dustin May is getting crushed

It’s fair to say that Dustin May is not off to the start to 2026 he was hoping to give the St. Louis Cardinals. I’m struggling to see these days without my contacts in, but I don’t need my contacts to see that’s the case. Here are the ugly facts: May has two starts for the Cardinals at the time of this writing and has a 15.95 ERA. When your ERA nearly qualifies for a driver’s license, it’s not a good sign. If you prefer fielding independent ERA, which takes some of the fielding luck out of the equation, he’s running a 6.46 FIP. That number should make you shudder. Go ahead, I’ll give you a second.

Over on our Redbird Rundown podcast, we dove into the metrics of this young season as a way to talk about several key players for the Cardinals. Dustin May was discussed, and we drew a surprising conclusion that you can listen to if you’d like! (Apple and Spotify)

What’s interesting about May is that he’s been quoted after his second start as saying he has no earthly idea what’s going on. That’s not what you want your professional starting pitcher to say, but at the time of this writing, he’s scheduled to huddle up with Cardinals pitching coach Dusty Blake to see if they can identify what’s leading to these poor results.

I’d like to step in for our audience and attempt to simulate what they may be looking at in that meeting. The Cardinals surely have access to pitching data that’s not available to the public, so I’ll be using publicly available data, but those numbers are certainly telling a story. 

May's results thus far have abandoned who he is as a pitcher.

Let’s establish something first and foremost. Dustin May is a groundball pitcher, though he does have some strikeout punch — this is not Andre Pallante we’re talking about here. So far in his very brief Cardinals tenure, he’s not been forcing nearly as many groundballs. For his career he’s running a 46.2% groundball rate, but in his two starts in 2026, that rate has fallen all the way to 32.1%. That’s a gargantuan drop off, and many of those groundballs have been replaced by much more dangerous flyballs — go look at his 2026 ERA and FIP at the top of the article if you want proof that flyballs do more damage than groundballs. This is obviously a huge change from his career norms and a real problem.

What’s causing this? A likely answer can be found in his arsenal mix. So far with the Cardinals, he’s throwing his fastball 30.7% of the time, which is the highest rate of his career. At the same time, his sinker usage has plummeted to his lowest rate of 13.6%. This will probably normalize over the course of the year, but it is a notable change that could be directly leading to fewer groundballs. His velocity is very good, but the problem is his fastball is getting torched. So far the Stuff+ for his fastball is 84. 100 is league average, and Stuff+ measures velocity, spin rate, and movement profile. Speed is not enough to dominate major league hitters, and Dustin May’s fastball has started out very flat this year.

I should caveat here that even throwing the way he is now, May is unlikely to continue as the worst pitcher in the history of major league baseball. He’s currently running a BABIP of .556. Over the course of the season, BABIP (batting average on balls in play) usually runs right at .300 for the year. May’s BABIP is laughably high and will come down. What’s that mean? In addition to his fastball getting smoked, he’s run into some incredibly bad luck on batted balls. Combine those two things, and you have the recipe for disaster that we have watched so far.

May's issues are being compounded by poor command.

A third issue is his command. FanGraphs puts his Location+ at a measly 92 for his first two starts. He’s leaving too many balls over the plate and batters are taking advantage of those mistakes. Specifically, he’s making mistakes to parts of the strike zone that are allowing batters to hit the aforementioned far more dangerous flyballs rather than May’s usual mix of groundballs.

What’s interesting is that May cited the Cardinals pitching development as specifically a reason to sign with the team. In my mind, that’s a good thing. It’s good that he’s sitting down with Dusty Blake to try to make sense of all this. I have no doubt that they talked about the fastball, the bad luck, and the location in their meeting. I’d like to see him use his sinker at his career norms, and he’s clearly got a mechanical issue to work through to regain his command. Hopefully, Dusty Blake and his crew can help him work through the changes he needs to make. He looks healthy. The velocity and spin rate data on his pitches look great. So, it looks to me to be something deeper going on.

The good news is that he’s unlikely to continue pitching at this horrendous pace. He won’t be in baseball very much longer if he has too many more starts like this. This is looking like the nadir of Miles Mikolas’s career — not a place you want to be.