Cardinals defy injury trends by balancing ‘luck’ and light pitching depth
It was fortuitous for the St. Louis Cardinals that, despite yet again having their schedule shaken up by encroaching rain, it happened on a day where they had an easy pitching fix. Michael McGreevy was on regular rest to handle the second game of Thursday’s doubleheader against the Chicago White Sox, and he was already in the near term plans, scheduled in theory to start on June 24 with the Cubs in town.
In theory, the Cardinals could still execute that plan, pending more rain forcing the issue. However Sonny Gray is worked back into the plans, and whatever the challenges which emerge from reaching the half dozen mark on the doubleheader counter, the Cardinals were prepared to utilize their young arms in ways they haven’t yet needed to, in part thanks to planning and in part out of sheer dumb luck.
“This just doesn’t happen,” manager Oli Marmol said last week of the team’s relative pitching injury luck. “Our math had (McGreevy) here. The fact that it hasn’t (happened) speaks to a combination of scheduling and luck. Let’s not just say this is scheduling. You need to get lucky, too.”
The only pitcher on the Major League injured list for the Cardinals – the only pitcher to have visited the list all season – is lefty Zack Thompson, who went down in spring with a strained lat. But Thompson was an extreme long shot to make the opening day roster, and whether he would’ve been expected to make any significant contributions this season at all is an open question.
When the Cardinals hit April with plans to work in a sixth starter – Steven Matz at first – it was with keeping an eye toward keeping their pitchers healthy. That’s both good practice in terms of the team’s responsibility to the longevity of its players’ careers, but also a strict necessity for a team which simply felt as though it didn’t have sufficient depth to get through the season if they had to take multiple trips to Triple-A Memphis to find starting pitching.
Minor league pitching staff
Outside of McGreevy, the only pitcher to make 10 starts for the team’s top affiliate this season is 26-year-old lefty Alex Cornwell, whose best chance to make it to the majors is almost certainly as a reliever. Cornwell has an ERA approaching eight and a strikeout to walk ratio barely better than one; that’s a tough way to get through the minors, let alone the majors.
Righty Ian Bedell has an ERA of nearly nine in nine starts. Curtis Taylor, who last started regularly in 2017 in A-ball, has put up stronger numbers, but he turns 30 next month and spent the last two years pitching his way through independent baseball and the Mexican league. That doesn’t undercut his success, but it certainly puts paid to any notion that the Cardinals might have viewed him as reliable depth entering the season.
For all the good injury luck they’ve had at the big league level, the Cardinals have struggled to carry that over to the minors. Both Cooper Hjerpe and Sem Robberse are lost for all of this year and a portion of next after undergoing Tommy John surgery. Drew Rom missed all of last year with a shoulder issue, spread 14 ⅓ innings across four starts, and is hurt once again. Tink Hence missed the season’s first two months with a rib cage injury and just this week was activated from the minor league IL and assigned to Double-A.
The situation has been sufficiently grim that it counts as good news that Quinn Mathews was sidelined by a shoulder issue that seems to have been more mechanical in nature than a structural concern. The lefty is back pitching for Memphis and has pitched to a 2.30 ERA with 20 strikeouts in 15 ⅔ innings since coming off the IL.
His big league debut, assumed to be a fait accompli in 2025, is perhaps still to come this season, though it will likely depend in part on the path the Cardinals choose at the trade deadline. Should they flip Erick Fedde as a rental starter or find a match that makes sense for Miles Mikolas, there will be starts to be taken and innings to be soaked up.
The 2023 Cardinals, upon dumping all of Jack Flaherty, Jordan Hicks and Jordan Montgomery, found themselves at such an innings deficit that they turned to veteran free agents who would be capable of keeping their heads down and grinding it out. Perhaps it’s in that context that Taylor pitches his way into his first big league opportunity, or that reclamation projects like starter Zach Plesac or reliever Tyler Matzek make it back to the big leagues in St. Louis.
There is always time for fate to arrive, and it’s possible that the surest way to invite a change in injury luck is to sing the praises of its presence to date. Such an outcome would hardly come as a surprise; pitching is bad for the arm, the Cardinals know it, and they were gritting their teeth in preparation for the first big blow.
“You’re trying to put them in the best position to stay healthy, but you also need to get lucky,” Marmol said. “Both of those have happened.”
So far.
