So where is it obvious that they were bad?
Jnevel, the management of the rotation was bad in the context their strategic planning lacked sufficient risk management and put them behind the eight ball right out of the gate in 2022. Every piece of the rotation had recent and significant health/injury concerns going in.
One move to mitigate this was to sign Matz, a true workhorse. If you’re going to spend millions to bolster an injury plagued staff, sign a guy who isn’t injury prone. Or if you do, pony up more to a higher target since we had/have no number one caliber guy. The higher performance potential would help balance the risk/reward scale.
Another mitigation strategy was to use Jordan Hicks as a starter. Sorry, but that was a really bad idea. It was destined for frustration from the start. Not only had Hicks already shown he has durability issues, but he’s also never been able to reliably handle one inning efficiently from the pen. How’s he going to go 5 or 6? After 8 starts with 4 losses and 4 no-decisions, where he averaged over 7 walks per 9 innings, they finally figured out Hicks is no starter. The Cards went with a 4-man rotation the first couple weeks before they finally included Hicks in the rotation. I know about days off early, but if Wainwright had been paced better with fewer innings early, then maybe he wouldn’t have cratered when they needed him the most late in the year. Speaking of Wainwright, that whole deal was handled very poorly. Who were they trying to trick with some of the talk coming from Marmol and others? They ended up looking foolish.
As for the pen, you mentioned McFarland. I’ll add VerHagen. His WHIP and ERA were worse than McFarland’s and it seemed to me he was used in more high leverage situations. June was awful and the Cards seemed willing to keep rolling with him after it was obvious something was lacking. The injury in July put an end to it. We don’t need to go into the Woodford details again, but he was a possible/probable answer to a couple of the questions the Cards couldn’t get right. And the Cards aren’t too cheap with their money since they spent millions on a couple of failed answers when they likely had a virtually free solution in house to help more. Even if I weren’t a big believer in Woodford like the Cards’ decision makers aren’t, curiosity would’ve gotten the best of me to give him more reps given the lack of reliable options at times during the year (pick pen or rotation). His 2021 should have earned him more regard than was given.
As you noted, the Cards did some good things (Q, Monty, Pallante). Those were necessary because of the problems that had boiled over to begin with. It was a case of next man up and trade deadline deals. I gave credit to Mo for pulling those strings to save the playoff chances. However, I’d give a much better grade if all of that was done to propel the Cards from a sure-bound playoff team to serious World Series contender. Instead, they were reactionary moves needed to clean up the mess that nearly had the Cards on the outside looking in for their one-game playoff experience.