While offense & defense sizzle, St. Louis Cardinals pitching remains big question mark

The front office and dugout leadership of the St. Louis Cardinals presented an unambiguous and united front on the season’s earliest days when asked about which aspect of their team they felt was being underrated.

It was the offense, they insisted, that had been overlooked, and would vindicate their offseason strategy.

To date, that’s largely been correct. But it also serves to obfuscate the larger concern which burst into crisis last June before being quelled by additions who turned out to contribute more than just muddling through.

The problem, as ever, is pitching.

With the best defense in baseball playing half its games in a ballpark built to swallow mistakes, the Cardinals have learned to lean into the double-edge of having just enough offense. Winning games 3-1 is possible — arguably desirable, even — as long as they cover the necessary innings from the mound.

Two turns through the rotation for four of the team’s five starters have included one strong start and one poor start for each of Adam Wainwright, Miles Mikolas and Steven Matz. Dakota Hudson, starting still just his second full season as a member of the rotation, muddled through his first game before being unable to find the strike zone in his second. And Jordan Hicks, ostensibly the fifth of the group, spent those first two turns providing sterling work behind Hudson as his starts were pushed off the schedule.

Combined, the starters provided 36 1/3 innings in the team’s first eight games. With 70 innings needing to be covered across those games, the bullpen has had to handle nearly half of the time on the mound thus far.

Early season limitations or not, that will eventually pose a serious challenge.

Low pitch counts

When the Cardinals broke camp, they advertised Wainwright, Mikolas and Matz as three pillars around whom they would be able to structure their rotation. In their first six combined starts, only Mikolas threw more than 90 pitches, tossing 91 in Milwaukee.

Matz didn’t crack 80, with tallies of 75 and 77 — though it should be noted manager Oliver Marmol revealed the morning after his first start Matz found himself coping with a blood blister on his pitching hand which sapped his feel and finish, an issue which he’s battled at least three previous times in his career.

These are not atypical numbers from baseball at large; indeed, through games April 18, one single pitcher — Boston’s Nate Eovaldi on April 13 — has thrown 100 pitches in a single game.

This marks a wild change from 2021, when 21 individual pitchers threw 100 pitches within their team’s first 10 games. That fraternity included one Cardinal, Jack Flaherty, who is traveling with the team and ramping up his throwing program in preparation for a return from shoulder bursitis diagnosed upon his arrival at spring training.

Lockout, weather causes issues

Spring training’s short duration, sparked by the owner-imposed lockout, is the main culprit for the limitations on starters, and expanding rosters to at least 15 pitchers means more managers are looking for more opportunities to get more pitchers more work. The end result is a self-fulfilling limitation in which starters are being brought along slowly to protect their health while, simultaneously, needing to leave room for relievers to stay healthy themselves.

The weather may have been bothersome to Cardinals fans who saw two lost games on the team’s first homestand, but it has largely been generous considering their need to patch holes. Hicks’s first start will come more than a week after it was originally meant to take place, and the short runway remaining in April means the Cardinals will only have two turns through the rotation in which to bring him close to covering the four innings Marmol said would be necessary to make his placement sustainable.

Marmol also said it’s a little too early for him to consider how the team will trim two hurlers off its roster to reach the 26-man limit (with a maximum of 13 pitchers) that becomes mandatory May 2. He noted those problems tend to fix themselves, though even with the extra bodies in the bullpen, the Cardinals somehow seem ill-equipped to cover for any injuries which may crop up along the way.

Should the team have added more pitching depth?

That was the plan designed in spring, when the Cardinals opted not to dive back into the free agent or trade markets for depth. Matz, whose deal was completed in November, was the headline addition to the staff. Aaron Brooks and Drew VerHagen, signed from Korea and Japan, were advertised as rotation candidates, but neither was able to overcome the benefits the Cardinals see both to and from short starts from Hicks.

As a result, the club is currently carrying what Marmol has frequently advertised as three long men in its bullpen — Brooks, VerHagen, and Jake Woodford, who was effective and reliable in starts down the stretch last season but received apparently limited consideration for his incumbency this spring.

The plan has been executed, to date, as designed. If it takes the Cardinals through May and into June in the same way it did in 2021, it will be worth asking why a repeat was deemed necessary.