If the St. Louis Cardinals collapse, this will be why

About a month into the 2026 baseball season, there are some trends beginning to develop for the St. Louis Cardinals. Several of these trends are obvious from the current collection of pitchers – and many of these trends will not be pleasant, so buckle up. Let’s hope the Cardinals continue to play winning baseball this season. Everything is obviously more enjoyable in that world, but the clear plan is to continue evolving towards the future. 

First, let me say, I have nothing against Matthew Liberatore, Dustin May, Michael McGreevy, Andre Pallante, and Kyle Leahy. In fact, I’m rooting for them. It’s just that thus far, I don’t trust any of them on the mound. In fact, we had an interesting conversation on the Redbird Rundown podcast with Post-Dispatch writer Benjamin Hochman recently.  For more individual coverage of these pitchers, we split a trust pie between them and came out with some interesting results. Check it out if you’d like, Apple and Spotify!

It’s a worthy exercise to consider which individual pitchers you trust in the rotation, but it’s also worth considering them as a whole. And, at this point, it’s getting into a Stepford Wives clone kind of situation. The Cardinals are running five extremely similar pitchers out to start each turn through the rotation. 

As a whole, the unit is dead last in the MLB in strikeouts, K/9, and K/BB rate. But they’re not just last, they’re last like the poor fifth grader at a track meet who had to run the varsity 100m dash because everyone else has the stomach bug. The Chicago White Sox staff isn’t exactly lighting the world on fire at a 7.79 K/9, but the Cardinals check in at a truly stunning 6.53 K/9. The gap from 29th to 30th is as large as the gap from 17th to 29th. It’s a chasm.

Before you protest too much and start sounding like John Smoltz (who doesn’t like baseball??), no, strikeouts aren’t everything. But why do teams chase so hard after a strikeout punch? There’s no batted ball luck involved in strikeouts. The defense doesn’t matter. Ballpark factors don’t matter. Launch angle and exit velocity are silenced. The strikeout is the holy grail of pitching and, right now, the Cardinals staff is bringing a sippy cup to that conversation. 

Currently, the problems continue for the Cardinals' staff before we even start talking about batted balls and defense. They have the eighth-worst walk rate in the MLB. For those of you keeping score at home, they are by far the worst in the league at punching guys out and in the top quartile of teams handing out free passes. Yes, this is a problem. Why? The pitchers are handing out free passes to first base like candy and then requiring the right type of contact to erase those baserunners. It’s like trying to teach a dog to sit while placing him on an electrified floor – the results are going to be unpleasant at best.

This K/BB rate is suffocating the one area where the Cardinals staff excels – inducing groundballs. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but the Cardinals' pitching is a high-contact, low-strikeout, groundball-inducing machine. These vestiges of the old approach are still front and center in St. Louis. 

Groundballs are better than line drives or flyballs, but teams are putting so many balls in play against the Cardinals that the dam is likely to break from time to time. It should come as no surprise then that the Cardinals currently rank 26th in team ERA, checking in at an unsightly 4.70 ERA.

Look, this is a rebuild. Do I love writing articles like this? No. I want these guys to succeed, but if you’re watching the games, all these stats back up what the eye test is screaming to us: this Cardinals pitching staff is walking on a tightrope of doom every game, and oftentimes that tight rope is going to snap against MLB hitters. Will guys turn in good performances from time to time? Of course, and we should all enjoy those. But, as a whole, these guys are pitching like it’s 1995 and it’s bound to bite this team in a serious way.

In fact, that’s my biggest takeaway from the early pitching trends. If this team falters, the likely culprit is going to be the gentleman trotting out to the pitching mound to hurl baseballs towards home plate. It’s an uncomfortable conclusion that we can all hope doesn’t come to fruition, but one that’s staring all of Cardinals nation right in the face.

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