Lack of production from young Cardinals starters during the 2020s is appalling

Andre Pallante is the most productive starting pitcher the St. Louis Cardinals have developed for their rotation during the 2020s, and it is not particularly close.

Let that sink in for a moment.

For years now, the Cardinals have been relying on mediocre rotations headlined by veteran starters making quite a bit of money. The Cardinals consistently rank among the top teams in baseball in money spent on starting pitching, and yet, since 2021, they rank 18th in starting pitcher ERA and 16th in FIP. While there is for sure an argument that the Cardinals should have been more aggressive in acquiring higher-end veterans as they did with Sonny Gray, the real travesty is their inability to develop their own starters.

When Michael McGreevy made his first Major League start in August, I did a little deep dive into the lack of starting pitching the Cardinals have developed internally that has impacted their major league rotation. At the time, the results were pretty jarring, and I decided to revisit that topic today but with a bit of a twist this time.

When I originally looked at the number of and the quality of starts the Cardinals have received from young starting pitching for the last number of years, I began with the 2021 season and looked at that production through August 2nd of 2024. Now that the 2024 season is complete, we have four full seasons of data to look at, and I also added another qualifier to this exercise that I think we can all agree is important.

This time around, I went back to 2021 and only counted the games the Cardinals played when they were clearly trying to compete for the playoffs during those stretches. So basically, I did not include any starts made by veterans or young starters from after the 2023 trade deadline and September of 2024. Why? Let me explain.

In 2021 and 2022, the Cardinals made the playoffs, so they were competing for the playoffs all season long. That means every game mattered and every start they gave out had meaning and purpose. After the trade deadline in 2023, the Cardinals waived the white flag on the season, so if we are being honest, those starts for Drew Rom and company count, but do they really? Should McGreevy's second and third starts of his career in late September count toward the bottom line? Does it matter if the Cardinals give starts to young pitchers when they are already out of it? Why reward them for starting young pitchers in meaningless games when they clearly did not trust those arms when the games mattered?

I wanted to look at how much young staters contributed to the Cardinals rotation when the club was actually playing meaningful baseball, as honestly, that is what matters most to Cardinals fans. In all honesty, it only swings the numbers by a few percentage points, but I felt like it was the best way to capture the problem at hand.

After I crunched the numbers, since 2021, excluding the post-2023 trade deadline and September of 2024, the Cardinals played in 556 games. Of those games, 361 (65%) of those were started by veterans who were signed in free agency, acquired via trade, or resigned (like Adam Wainwright), and just 195 starts (35%) were made by players that came from the Cardinals' farm system and had not accrued enough service time to be eligible for free agency.

To make matters worse, only two of those homegrown starters made 10 or more starts with an ERA lower than 4.00 as a starter. Want to take a stab at who those two starters were? One was Andre Pallante, and the other was John Gant. If you want to see how many young Cardinals' homegrown starters made 10 or more starts with an ERA lower than 5.00, only Jack Flaherty and Dakota Hudson join Pallante and Gant on that list.

Remember when the Cardinals were one of the best organizations in baseball when it came to pumping out starting pitching? The heyday of that seems to be from 2012-2015, another four-season sample size. During that stretch, in the 648 games the Cardinals played, just 234 (36%) of those starts were made by veterans, while 414 (64%) of their starts came from homegrown starters.

The quality of those homegrown starters was lightyears better as well. Lance Lynn (126 GS), Shelby Miller (63 GS), Michael Wacha (58 GS), Jamie Garcia (56 GS), Joe Kelly (38 GS), and Carlos Martinez (37 GS) all had a 3.36 ERA or lower during that stretch. Yes, you read that right. And yes, even using ERA- to adjust for the league average and park factors, all of them were well above average for the Cardinals during that stretch.

Yes, that was essentially a golden era of young pitching for the Cardinals, so I'm not critiquing the Cardinals for not having six young starters make a significant amount of starts for them with a sub-3.40 ERA, but I do think it illustrates how far they've fallen in just a decade. Not a single homegrown Cardinal starter since 2021 has made more than two starts and posted an ERA lower than Andre Pallante's 3.69. And Pallante has only made 30 starts since 2021, fewer than all six of those Cardinal starters from the early 2010s.

I find it fascinating to look at some of the metrics related to the style of pitching the Cardinal had back in the early 2010s compared to now. Essentially, Cardinals' starters are striking out batters at the same rate, walking the same amount of hitters, and producing the same amount of ground balls, but it has come with vastly different results, especially as the game has trended toward swing and miss.

You can visually see the lag the Cardinals have had in strikeouts since their prime years of pitching and how their rotation ERA- has suffered greatly in the process. With swing-and-miss being more important than ever before and the Cardinals failing to adapt to that, you can visually see an example of how the Cardinals have, in the words of Chaim Bloom, "rested on their laurels", and they got beat.

There are a lot of things the Cardinals need to do a better job with going forward if they want to get back to success at the Major League level, but it's clear to me that one of the most impactful shifts they can make is by regaining their status as one of the premier organizations when it comes to producing young pitching.

The production they got out of Andre Pallante this year is certainly a step in the right direction. Michael McGreevy's small sample size is very encouraging. The excitement surrounding Quinn Mathews and Tink Hence is warranted. Names like Cooper Hjerpe, Tekoah Roby, Gordon Graceffo, Sem Robberse, and arms developing in the lower levels give the Cardinals intriguing farm system depth. Things are certainly trending well for the Cardinals' pitching development. In fact, their system was ranked the third best in terms of pitching talent by MLB Pipeline recently.

It remains to be seen what the next four years of Cardinal pitching will look like, but the results from this next batch of starters will likely play a major role in the success of this coming "reset".