St. Louis Cardinals pitching staff taking on water. Can team find reinforcements?

The reality of the injury situation with which the St. Louis Cardinals pitching staff is currently faced is a stark one — without adding a pitcher from outside the organization in the near, perhaps immediate, term, the Cardinals face an uphill climb to still be in contention when the July 31 trade deadline arrives.

With Jack Flaherty and Miles Mikolas missing from the rotation and Jordan Hicks from the bullpen until at least August, the Cardinals are primarily in search of innings and secondarily in search of quality innings.

Getting through it comes before getting to a level of success.

“I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve seen how seasons come and go, and the ebb and flow of a season, and these are just part of it,” Cardinals President of Baseball Operations John Mozeliak said from Busch Stadium on Thursday.

“Ideally it’d be great if you could go through a season without any injuries and without having to figure out a way to backfill for these types of losses, but you know, ultimately, a lot of teams are going through injuries right now, so we’re no different.”

Different or no, the roster aches and pains the Cardinals are suffering are certainly acute. Flaherty’s oblique strain removes from the rotation a pitcher who spent the first two months of the season cementing himself as the team’s ace. He was certainly on his way to making a first All-Star team and would have been a contender to receive some votes for the Cy Young Award.

Now, in his stead, the Cardinals are planning to re-insert Johan Oviedo into their rotation in the hopes his results improve by virtue of enjoying a consistent schedule. In his first five big league starts this season, Oviedo completed five innings only once, so the improvement will need to be immediate.

Mikolas is in the second year of a four year, $68 million contract extension, under which he has recorded a total of 12 outs. The Cardinals gambled that last season’s flexor tendon issues had been addressed after surgery and a year of rehabilitation, and yet he was slowed by shoulder soreness in spring and left his return to the majors in abbreviated fashion.

The search for bodies is on, and the call is unlikely to come from inside the organization.

“I don’t think we have a lot of confidence in doing that,” Mozeliak said of the possibility of pursuing aggressive promotions to the majors for top pitching prospects like Matthew Liberatore and Zack Thompson. “I just want to be very careful that we don’t try to just do something as a knee jerk reaction to what’s happening here at the big league level.”

The free agent market also seems to be off the table; Mozeliak expressed skepticism that a pitcher who might need a month to ramp up to a Major League workload would fill their immediate need.

Any pitcher who’s still a free agent at the beginning of June is a pitcher who’s likely to be a marginal upgrade at best, and by that point, a more developed trade market is likely to yield better options.

Trade market in the Cardinals’ future?

Instead, the Cardinals will pursue the trade market in the short term, even if the prices paid for talent may exceed that which they would prefer to pay. For a front office that’s been in part defined by their reticence in recent years to make mid-season additions, it’s uncomfortable to be boxed into a corner in which the only way out may be to pay through the nose.

“Obviously we’re going to try to do whatever we can to keep this together until we can get to a point where we’re getting some of these players return,” Mozeliak said. “If the word is ‘accelerate’ or starting now versus starting a month from now, I think the key for us is, wherever we can, just adding incremental upgrades over the course of these next few weeks and months is going to be critical.”

The issue with making trades early in the season, as general manager Michael Girsch outlined last week, is there are relatively few teams who are already willing to declare themselves out of the race by sending away big league pitching talent. And, moribund teams may not have talent that’s worth mining.

Possible pitching options for St. Louis

Some pitchers do fall in that narrow slice of the league represented by teams who are already out of the race but skilled enough to offer a real improvement; Texas’s Kyle Gibson and Detroit’s Matthew Boyd are two who may fall in that category.

Larger upgrades, like Washington’s Max Scherzer, are unlikely to be available until the July 31 deadline nears.

Those are moves for then. The Cardinals need a move now.

“It’s not like you can simply say ‘let’s just be patient’ and try to muddle through this,” Mozeliak conceded. “We’re going to have to look at ways to strengthen our club. Obviously, there is no timeouts in this business, so we got to keep going.”