Cardinals starting pitching remains a mess. And no legitimate help appears on the way

The Cardinals do not have a day off in the first 17 days following the All-Star break. Often, when a team is short pitching, a respite in the schedule provides an opportunity to skip over some of the staffing requirements of a Major League rotation.

No such luck. And with the trade deadline punctuating the end of that stretch, there’s little to suggest they won’t have additional spots to fill. At present, four pitchers are available to start and clearly in rotation spots; one has already been removed from that role.

This is the crisis which has defined and will continue to define the season. Without innings, every team is adrift.

Jordan Montgomery and Jack Flaherty will hold their spots for as long as they’re still Cardinals. Miles Mikolas is under contract for the long haul and is likely to soon become the most important pillar in their starting group. Steven Matz, once bumped, is now scheduled to start Sunday in Chicago, inheriting the spot which opened when Adam Wainwright was placed on the injured list.

After that, starter number five is a matter of guesswork.

Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol said Friday that Michael McGreevy, the club’s first round pick in the 2021 draft, is not currently under consideration to slot into the spot most recently occupied by Matt Liberatore. Liberatore was optioned to Memphis on Thursday, and since pitchers must spend at least 15 days in the minor leagues before being returned from option unless replacing an injured player, he would not be available for the first game in which he’d be needed.

Even if he was available, it’s unlikely he’d be the team’s top choice; his most recent start saw him record only one out before giving way to the bullpen, led by Dakota Hudson.

Hudson is perhaps the most likely pitcher to take up the helm for the time being, if for no other reason than he’s both available and experienced. There’s been reticence around the Cardinals all season long to plan too heavily for Hudson’s usage, and given his struggles for Triple-A Memphis, that hesitation is simple to understand.

But Hudson, who walked three Marlins in his 2 2/3 innings of relief behind Liberatore, will provide an honest effort and is physically prepared to throw a hundred pitches at a go, which places him ahead of many other options.

Wainwright received a therapeutic injection in his pitching shoulder upon his return to St. Louis this week and is looking at a period of many weeks of rest before spooling up for the stretch run. Jake Woodford, who broke camp in the team’s rotation, is on the injured list with his second bout of shoulder soreness this season.

Not much help from Memphis

Even Memphis has very little in the way of help to offer. Connor Thomas, on the 40-man roster, has been sidelined with his own shoulder ailment, and if McGreevy isn’t under consideration, the options get even more thin. Gordon Graceffo, perhaps the starter prospect closest to the majors skill-wise, missed six weeks with, again, shoulder soreness, and is just now building his pitch count back to a regular load.

The last conceivable option among those currently on the active roster is lefty Zack Thompson, whose sudden demotion to the minors in the name of preparation as a starter for the 2024 season resulted in a walks plus hits per inning total of 2.48. That number is disastrous, and reflects a walk rate of more than 10 per nine innings.

But Thompson has had periods of effectiveness as a lefty from the big league bullpen, and at one point this spring seemed to be aligned to be the team’s highest leverage option from that side before much of the season had passed. Given his struggles as a starter in the minors, it’s difficult to see the logic in throwing him directly into the fire in the majors.

And yet with Flaherty and Montgomery seemingly on the way out and increasingly likely to be dealt before the clock strikes 3 p.m. in St. Louis on Aug. 1, finding just one starter is not enough. If Thompson can’t be relied on now, he’ll seemingly need to be within a month, unless the deals to send pitchers out result in others following back in.

Full blown cavity

There are simply more innings available than there are arms attached to bodies able to provide those innings. What was a clear weakness in the offseason has now bloomed into a full blown cavity, for which roster root canal doesn’t seem likely to offer any immediate relief.

Someone, five someones, will make starts in turn for the St. Louis Cardinals following the trade deadline. Mikolas will be one of the five. Beyond him, it would be impossible to identify the other four with any kind of confidence.

In a different season, a season where the Cardinals were buying at the deadline, that problem would be simple enough to fix. In this dismal season, somehow, it’s barely even begun.

This story was originally published July 8, 2023 at 8:00 AM.