The Cardinals shouldn't trade for pitching at the deadline, they should do this instead

As the trade deadline approaches, the St. Louis Cardinals have surprised the baseball world by playing their way into postseason contention. The surge has many local analysts arguing that the front office should act as aggressive buyers at the deadline.

Doing so would be a massive mistake.

Instead of surrendering young assets for short-term rental players, Chaim Bloom and the front office should make a different, far more impactful move to secure the franchise's long-term future: replace pitching coach Dusty Blake.

The process that brought Blake to the position stands in stark contrast to the rest of the organization's modernized coaching staff. Before joining the major league club, Blake was the pitching coach for Duke University. He never played professional baseball, nor did he coach in the minor leagues. When legendary pitching coach Mike Maddux declined a contract extension following the 2022 season, a historic franchise known for legendary pitching gurus like Maddux and Dave Duncan could have attracted virtually any highly qualified candidate in the country. Instead, without interviewing a single external candidate, the front office handed the job to Blake ahead of the 2023 season.

Compare that to the hiring of hitting coach Brant Brown, who brought an extensive external resume as a coach or assistant with the Los Angeles Dodgers, Miami Marlins, and Seattle Mariners. In his two seasons in St. Louis, Brown has successfully modernized the offense. Under his watch, the Cardinals have seen steady, sequential improvements in batting average, on-base percentage, walk rate, strikeout rate, and isolated power—even while leaning heavily on some of the youngest players in Major League Baseball this season.

Under Blake, the pitching staff has moved in the exact opposite direction. The team's strikeouts per nine innings have decreased sequentially, while walks per nine innings and team WHIP have steadily risen.

The regression is even clearer when looking at Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP), a metric that strips away defensive variance to isolate a pitching staff’s true performance. Under Blake's tenure, the team's collective FIP has worsened annually. The same trend applies to Skill-interactive ERA (SIERA), an advanced metric used to quantify a pitcher's true underlying skill based on strikeout, walk, and groundball profiles. Like traditional ERA, a lower SIERA denotes better performance. Over the last three seasons under Blake, the Cardinals' team SIERA has ballooned from 3.97 to 4.17, reaching a highly concerning 4.29 this year.

Cardinals' past results under Dusty Blake

Even more troubling than the macro statistics is Blake's track record with individual starting pitchers, where a rigid, cookie-cutter analytical approach has repeatedly backfired:

• Miles Mikolas: A former 18-win All-Star, Mikolas tossed 202.1 innings of 3.29 ERA baseball under Maddux as late as 2022. Under Blake in 2023, his ERA ballooned to 4.78 while surrendering an MLB-worst 226 hits. The struggles continued into 2024, when his ERA hovered at 4.85 while allowing 194 hits, the third-worst mark in the National League.
• Steven Matz: Matz enjoyed a stellar 2021 season with the Toronto Blue Jays, going 14-7 with a 3.82 ERA. His tenure under Blake has been a disastrous, rocky journey characterized by constant shuffles between the rotation and the bullpen, collapsing pitch efficiency, and chronic injuries.
• Jack Flaherty: In 2019, Flaherty put together a historic second-half run, finishing the year with a 2.75 ERA. Even while battling shoulder and oblique strains in 2021 and 2022, he remained highly effective when healthy. In 2023 under Blake, Flaherty looked mechanically lost, carrying a 4.43 ERA and severe walk issues. The moment he was traded away from St. Louis, he abandoned the staff's rigid pitch-shape restrictions, adjusted his vertical movement, and eventually won a 2024 World Series title as a frontline starter for the Los Angeles Dodgers.
• Jordan Montgomery: Acquired from the Yankees in 2022, Montgomery went 6-3 with a sparkling 3.11 ERA down the stretch under Maddux. Once Blake took over, constant internal friction arose as the coaching staff pushed Montgomery to abandon his signature sinker in favor of modern, high-spin vertical shapes. Traded to the Texas Rangers at the 2023 deadline, Montgomery instantly reunited with Maddux, returned to his natural strengths, and carried Texas to a World Series championship as a postseason ace.

Blake's mandate from the previous front-office regime was clear: force pitchers to abandon their natural styles to fit a singular, data-driven analytical mold. This philosophy has extended to roster management. The Cardinals shuffle starting pitchers to the bullpen and turn relievers into starters far more aggressively than most major league clubs. This constant tinkering with individual routines, arm speeds, and mechanical baselines is a primary driver of the staff's chronic inconsistency.

It has been widely understood within baseball circles that St. Louis pitchers are instructed to prioritize dugout spreadsheets over their own situational instincts on the mound—a philosophy that Hall of Fame pitchers like Bob Gibson would have never accepted.

Have the Cardinals already shown a possible change in direction?

Change, however, is possibly already underway. Under Chaim Bloom, who officially assumed total control of baseball operations for the 2026 season, the organization is pivoting. Bloom has spent his tenure stockpiling the minor league system with high-upside, strikeout-heavy arms. If the current major league pitching coach has a proven track record of making established stars like Montgomery and Flaherty worse, he cannot be trusted to guide the franchise's most valuable young prospects.

Bloom’s player-development philosophy directly opposes the rigid framework Blake represents. Bloom favors an individualized, player-first system that maximizes a pitcher's natural biomechanics rather than forcing them into a universal mold.

The writing is already on the wall. Just two months after the transition of power was finalized, Bloom made one of his first major hires by appointing Kyle Driscoll as assistant pitching coach. Brought over from the Arizona Diamondbacks' player development system, Driscoll carries a stellar reputation for using advanced metrics to enhance what a pitcher naturally does well, not to replace it.

Before the Cardinals hand away future assets for external pitching help at the trade deadline, they must address the fundamental flaw in the dugout. They need to change who is coaching the arms they already have.

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