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Thoughts on Aroldis Chapman as a lefty option? Not to close, but more of a 7th inning guy. I don’t recall seeing him linked anywhere. If the price is right could be a nice lottery ticket?
This list looks about right at this point in time.
But replace VerHagen with Woodford, Cabrera with Thompson, and move Hudson to the Triple-A rotation until he’s needed in the majors — and add Pacheco or Packy in his place — and you’ve got something really good.
Reminders from 2022:
VerHagen 6.65 ERA and 6.53 FIP. Woodford 2.23 and 3.13.
Cabrera 4.63 and 5.62. Thompson (relief only) 0.91 and 3.18.
But all of this would obviously require a commonsense, merit-based usage of pitchers, rather than spin rates or salaries or swinging strike data. A man can dream, can’t he?
Also, the Fan graphs expectation for Woodford and Thompson is a joke>! who the heck makes up these
figures…..must be a Cubs fan.No thanks. He has been hurt. He is not close to being the pitcher he once was. He brings a lot of baggage with him.
I like Thompson and giving Cabrera another shot as the lefty in the pen. His 2022 was odd, and out of line with how things have gone.
As for Woodford, he’s your last righty in the pen or AAA starter depth. His ERA being in the low to mid 4s if managed properly sounds about right.
Cabrera’s featured a couple of extended stretches of work in which he was pretty effective. I’d also like to see him afforded an opportunity to earn his way back into the BP. However, I’m reasonably certain B. Harper hopes that his appearances in the Big Leagues are over.
I would say no on Chapman. At this point I doubt he is much better than Cabrera. As others have said, if we want to bring in a quality LH for the pen we should go after Chafin.
The Cardinals still have payroll room to do some things IMO. I predicted a payroll of between 180-185 and we are currently at 171, which is 14th highest in MLB.
“Change “VerHagen” to “Mikolas” and you could have said the same thing about the latter before he went overseas and became a better pitcher. Mikolas’ ERA as a starter with Texas had been 6.44.”
A pox upon the typewriter of anyone who mentions Mikolas and VerHagen in the same sentence!
Mikolas didn’t merely become a better pitcher overseas, he dominated, roaring through like an Orient Express. Miles was there for three seasons and posted a tremendous overall ERA of 2.18 across 425 innings. For comparison, Shohei Ohtani in his three full Japanese seasons was effectively identical, totaling 458 IP and a 2.24 ERA. Records of 31-13 for M.M. and 36-13 for S.O.. Rumors are that Ohtani hit a little better than Lizard King.
VerHagen on the other hand had a so-so 3.51 ERA in Japan, in 208 IP. That resulted in a record of 13-14. And VerHagen was worse than that just before the Cards signed him — he had a deeply unimpressive 3.80 ERA in 2021. (Mikolas had a sparkling 2.25 ERA the year before signing with the Birds.) VerHagen was awful in the majors for years, then mediocre in Japan, then awful again in Spring Training last year, then awful yet again in the regular season. Injuries or no, it would’ve been completely reasonable to release him back in June or July. I know, I’m heartless.
I don’t remember ever seeing VerHagen work until he became a Cardinal, but I recall that he got progressively worse before the Redbirds finally pulled the pin on him in mid-summer last season. I recall one game in particular in which Wainwright was the SP’er vs. the Dodgers. His pitch count was at or near 100, but he and the Cardinals held a substantial lead when Marmol went and got him in about the 6th or 7th inning and handed the baseball to VerHagen. Verhagen was only the beginning of the catastrophe, but he allowed 2 or 3 runs in an IP’ed and then other members of the BP allowed another 4 or 5 runs and the Dodgers eventually ended up winning that ballgame in the late innings by a run or two. I never saw VerHagen for the remainder of the ’22 season and it wouldn’t bother me at all if I never see him in the future. I agree that comparing him to Mikolas is not at all unlike comparing a teenaged school girl to a 28 year old centerfold model…
It seems to me that the Cardinals find an injury when someone is struggling, and need to deal with their roster spot. Not saying it’s not legit, but it’s suspect in the manner it occurs. A player stinks, then an injury is found after the fact.
RH BP possibilities
Helsley
Gallegos
Hicks
Hudson
Pallante
Woodford
Naile
Pacheco
Rodriguez
Stratton
VerHagen
Zuniga
Walsh13 for 5/6 slots
I’d say right now it’s Helsley, Gallegos, Hicks, Pallante and Woodford. Hudson will be a 6th starter/swing man type guy to start the season but could certainly work his way into the 5 man with some nice outings coupled with an injury or a lackluster performance by any one of the projected rotation of Wainwright, Mikolas, Montgomery, Matz or Flaherty. You know how it is with pitchers. Anyone of them could experience arm trouble as a result of changing in and out of their long-handles over the winter…Haha!
I’d say right now it’s Helsley, Gallegos, Hicks, Pallante and Woodford
I’m afraid not TD. Here’s how it will be. You can count the reasons for yourself.
1) Gallegos 4.75mil
2) VerHagen 3.0mil
3) Stratton 2.8mil
4) Helsley 2.0mil (estimate)
5) Hicks 1.8mil (est.)No Andy or Woody? Say it ain’t so! I thought about Stratton, but I’m hoping VerHagen gets tangled up while changing into his long-handles this winter…Haha! At any rate, we’ll see what happens. Things get fluid in ST. They really get fluid when VerHagen begins allowing 2 or 3 ER’s in an IP’ed…
Thanks Bob for the stats on Mikolas and Verhagen, I just don’t understand the Verhagen signing. Being mediocre overseas shouldn’t be a reason for the Cards to sign Verhagen. Common sense tells us that there will be regression in his return. And you give 2 years? Why? A single year with an option year, perhaps using vesting.
I know hindsight is 20/20, but it seems to me that I would rather see the Cards give free agents less years, and perhaps more money in the form of a final year buy out, or some sort of bonus structure.
“Thanks, Bob, for the stats on Mikolas and Verhagen; I just don’t understand the VerHagen signing. Being mediocre overseas shouldn’t be a reason for the Cards to sign VerHagen.”
You’re welcome, 27. And you’re absolutely right that VerHagen’s two-seasons of mediocrity across the pond should’ve precluded the Birds signing him at all — much less to a multi-year deal.
Here’s a Post-Dispatch article from March that’s all about VerHagen. If you can get past the nauseating gushing of Derrick Goold, you’ll probably glean some idea of what the Cards mistagenly saw in him.
C27 said:
It seems to me that the Cardinals find an injury when someone is struggling, and need to deal with their roster spot. Not saying it’s not legit, but it’s suspect in the manner it occurs. A player stinks, then an injury is found after the fact.
You cannot be talking about VerHagen.
I get that people that don’t like him and think he was a bad signing, but the guy was never right in 2022. It sure doesn’t look like it was made up after the fact.
Here is his 2022 timeline:
Spring training – reports of hip soreness
April 22 – to IL with right hip impingement
May 14 – off IL
June 24 – to IL with right shoulder injury
July 13 – off IL
July 17 – to IL with right hip impingement
August 3 – season-ending hip surgeryI’ve never had a hip injury, but I can guess that it can limit one’s ability to perform at a high level physically. And one wouldn’t have surgery unless doctors felt it was needed.
P.S. On the more general concern, every single player has to deal with nagging injuries over the course of a long, six-month season. Usually they get treatment and can play through it and we don’t even know about it. But sometimes it gets bad enough that the best answer is full rest and a move to the IL. It may look to outsiders as if it came from nowhere, but that isn’t really the case.
Well yeah, that’s reasonable, BW. However, a legitimate question would be that if he was “never right” why did the Redbird manager continue to hand him the baseball up until mid-season? It doesn’t add up to what could be called a reasonable degree of simple observation when even a casual observer can clearly see that a pitcher isn’t right. A glaring example of a failure to see that a pitcher wasn’t right would be the visitor half of the 9th in the most important game the Cardinals had played up until that point during the ’22 season. I was always under the impression that a field manager and his coaching staff were predisposed to keep a close eye on their players. Especially pitchers. It often appears that when they fail to do so, they cover their backsides after the fact by claiming there was a malady that they weren’t made aware of.
I was always under the impression that a field manager and his coaching staff were predisposed to keep a close eye on their players. Especially pitchers.
This is what concerns me about Wainwright. A staff of professionals, who have been watching him work all year or many years, don’t observe an alleged problem with his mechanics. This when they were standing right there the whole time and had every delivery on video. Absolute nonsense. So we have no idea what we can expect from him this year. He/they could at least come up with something plausible if they want to keep the matter close to the vest.
I agree. What are they watching on the top step of the dugout or on the endless feeds of video? Sometimes I think it’s reruns of Hogan’s Heroes. At any rate, I’m reasonably certain that the cover of a mysterious and unnoticed injury or mechanics issue is often used by all teams as a shield for poor decisions.
Well, it was floated as the explanation for the dead arm. So there is an actual explanation that we don’t know about.
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