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My gut feeling is we are not going to do much before or at the deadline. Just ride it out, maybe keep an eye out for freebies. See what happens in the second half.
So this year the Cardinals should not go with an unproven OF but next year they should rely on a rotation of 1 proven starter, 2 starters coming off major elbow injuries and 2 unproven youngsters? What’s the difference?
IMO, I would rather have a proven starting pitching staff, great defense and upgrade 1 position with a better hitter. If that means one of the free agent shortstops, do it. We could upgrade, offensively, at SS, OF and 2B. Right now, all 3 positions have hitters who are below league average. Sure, all 3 have players capable of doing better but they aren’t. There is nothing that says the corner OFs have to be power hitters. The most important thing is to have a balanced lineup no matter what position they play.
Flaherty – should be an ace
Hudson – coming off TJS
Mikolas – elbow issues last year and this year, shoulder issues in spring
Oviedo – struggled with consistency in the majors and control
Liberatore – been up and down in AAA, this year.That rotation seems like the kind of thinking that got us where we are right now. Great if all goes perfectly but virtually no realistic chance of that.
Liberatore and Oviedo should spend a good part of next year in Memphis rotation and get some feel for pitching to advanced hitters.
Mikolos is physically highly questionable. It is absurd to pencil him in.
Hudson may or may not come back his former self. His former self is somewhat of a smoke and mirror guy anyway. Racked up an impressive W-L record with abnormally high BB/9 and WHIP for a supposedly top end type. (16-7, 1.400 whip) Almost Gant like.
As to Flaherty, any injury to a pitcher that takes months to come back from is alarming. More so when it is not a situation where you can get surgery and most likely be fine. We have no idea how things will go for Jack. There is the chance he will have to make an adjustment to avoid it happening again.
Bottom lime, we need to go into next year with a ton of rotation depth, and there seems little likelihood we will.
dac – IMHO it’s the exact opposite. The pitching is the side of the equation that’s been hit by injuries this year more than the offense.
Bccran, I agree the pitching has seen injuries. But it’s also true our depth in pitching is way worse which is why I feel we need to spend in free agency to fix it. Our rotation was more lucky than good even when healthy in my opinion, but once we had key injuries it was game over. With the offense, I just feel like it is not as desperate of a situation because we should have Gorman next year, hopefully better luck with health, and we can spend to improve our depth so injuries don’t hurt us as much. We have some hitters working their way through the system that should be ready to contribute over the next couple years, whereas with pitching it is not the same.
Also, I don’t think we need to spend to get a star pitcher like a Scherzer. I would be happy signing a few guys who look like good values, like we did with Mikolas and Kim.
Lastly, we keep investing resources to fix the lineup and it never seems to get fixed. Maybe we should be looking more at coaching for that? Part of the problem is that Busch is one of the most pitcher friendly stadiums in baseball and it really kills power, particularly right handed power. Maybe if we are going to try to sign a bat we should focus on left handed hitters?
This team was cruising in first place until all of our pitching injuries hit. The offense isn’t great but it is good enough when our pitching is clicking. We overestimated our pitching depth, got rocked by injuries, and are paying the price. We don’t need to make the same mistake next year.
I agree we could use one more good LH bat but I would spend the rest of the money on pitching and more pitching.
Flaherty
Hudson (DL)
Kim
Mikolas
Martinez
Wainwright
Reyes
Gant
Ponce
Woodford
Oviedo
Cabrera (starter in the minors)
Helsley (starter in the minors)I guess I mistakenly thought this was enough potential starter depth going into 2021.
Kim is a free agent, Mikolas hasn’t been healthy, who knows what you’ll get from Hudson, if Reyes can stay healthy as a starter, and most of the other names you have listed have not demonstrated they can seriously be counted on as viable starting options. I know you are disappointed in outfielders like Bader and O’Neill, but they have proven far more at the mlb level than Woodford, Ponce, Cabrera, or Helseley have as viable starting pitchers. I’m for bringing Wainwright back, but outside of him and Flaherty, who on that list are you even confident could regularly give you even five innings as a starter and keep the team in the ballgame? There is a reason a lot of those guys are in bullpen roles. Not to mention, if you take them out of the pen, those roles will need to be replaced.
There is a difference between depth and quality depth. Sure, we have a lot of names on the depth chart but most of them have either been injured or underperformed. It turns out that we don’t have nearly as many quality pitchers as we thought we had. Time to re-stock.
dac:
still feel the pitching is a bigger problem going into next year as it has been an abject disaster this year, we have no depth outside of Liberatore to speak of in the high minors to pencil in the rotation,
The AAA team is supposed to have players ready to move up to the MLB if the need occurs. There was no one at Memphis good enough to step up so the Cards picked up some players beyond their prime to plug up the holes. The thing that bothers me is that Memphis has been neglected and stripped down to its bones. Who the heck is leading this organization? It seems someone is playing a fiddle upstairs.
14NyquisT, I feel it isn’t so much the front office neglected Memphis. For me, it goes back to making three trades for a premium bat with Ozuna, Goldschmidt, and Arenado. Those trades pillaged our young pitching depth in service of the offense to make us competitive with teams like the Cubs and the Brewers. Mozeliak went to that well too many times. I think Mo would probably not do the Ozuna and Goldschmidt trades again if given the chance to do it over. If we still had Gallen, Alcantra, Weaver, and Kelly with Voit at first and Arozarena in the outfield, how much better are we? Maybe the only good trade this front office has made in the last five years is the Arenado deal. Mo and Girsch went through a pretty rough five year stretch of moves that involve both bad talent evaluation of our own prospects and betting on veterans past their prime to beat the aging curve.
dac – All 3 trades looked good on paper. Very few people on here complained at the time. Most cheered.
As far as the rotation going into this year, I probably looked at the glass as half full. Kim and Mikolas were simply outstanding overseas, and I wouldn’t discount that. And here?
Mikolas was 18-4 with 2.83 ERA in 2018. That’s nothing to sneeze at. Kim, in the shortened season had an ERA of 1.62. That’s crazy good. Reyes had an ERA of 3.20 last season. And Martinez had an ERA of 3.11 in 2018 and 3.17 in 2019. If all stayed healthy and pitched up to their abilities, we had a very strong staff.dac – All 3 trades looked good on paper. Very few people on here complained at the time. Most cheered.
My response to that is our fan base is always clamoring for the big, sexy move every offseason that is going to solve all our problems. Maybe we should have been more skeptical of Ozuna, who was injured and had only been dominant for one year? Maybe we should have wondered why Arizona was willing to give up Goldschmidt? Some of the advanced metrics from his last year in Arizona showed he was struggling with fastballs, a sign of declining bat speed that comes with aging. Maybe we should have expected Goldschmidt to be declining or at least not extended him before he even played for us?
The Arenado deal I have no complaints about but it is also still early. In isolation, maybe none of these trades look bad to the average fan at the time they happened. But when the overwhelming majority of trades we’ve made, going back to the Gonzalez-O’Neill deal to the present, haven’t worked out, I think it’s fair to question our process and the decision makers. I think we’ve had too many glaring examples of losing trades not to take a second and evaluate ourselves at this point.
The Cards were seriously lacking MOTO bats. Mo went out and got 3. Maybe the best that could be gotten at the time. Again, posters were very happy about all 3. Looking back after the fact is so easy.
And the O’Neill trade? My recommendation is that you wait to cast judgement on that deal. Tyler is playing in his first full season as a starter. And he’s starting to come around nicely.I hate to say this but was Luhnow the better talent evaluator that made Mo look good? He left in 2011. What has happened since then?
Mo and Girsch kept playing older players that were playing terribly come hell or high water, keeping them from finding out what we had in our AAA players, then when we needed a new player they’d trade prospects to get a similar old player that they’d push above all else, and now those older players are playing terribly still and we suddenly don’t have much to trade and our AAA and minors are really hurting as a result…
I agree we needed moto bats. That is why everyone was hoping he would sign Harper or Machado, but instead Mozeliak chose to make three trades for big bats rather than use free agency. This meant he wouldn’t have to give out a ten plus year contract, which he preferred. But it also meant he would get older players that teams were willing to move on from and because he did these trades multiple times, it also means he depleted our system of its young players who could be the core of the next good Cardinals team and comprised our depth. This is why we are having the year we are having now, our depth is terrible.
Forsch, Luhnow was definitely a big part of our success and probably the biggest loss from our front office, but we also lost Kantrovitz who was great as scouting director and was responsible for us drafting Flaherty. Thankfully, Flores seems to be really good based on his results so far and our system is getting rebuilt.
Mo and Girsch kept playing older players that were playing terribly come hell or high water, keeping them from finding out what we had in our AAA players, then when we needed a new player they’d trade prospects to get a similar old player that they’d push above all else, and now those older players are playing terribly still and we suddenly don’t have much to trade and our AAA and minors are really hurting as a result…
I agree Logan. Like I have said before, the Cardinals have a reputation as a build from within organization but I often wonder if that is really the case. They try to be but then panic and make a trade, signing, or extension that they regret.
I would also say that we probably are one of the oldest clubs in the league which isn’t a good thing IMO.
Waino 39
Molina 38
Miller 36
Carp 35
Goldy 33
Mikolas 32
Kim 32
Arenado 30
CMart 29
Gallegos 29
Ponce 29And still paying money to Fowler who is 35.
dac-gscott-Logan and Forsch all have made excellent points concerning the decline in the organization. I would like to feel more confident in the FO but the recent track record has proven to be brutal.
VEB’s John LaRue is doing a four part analysis of Mozelial’s performance as the top guy in the FO who is responsible for how we got where we are today.
There is some well thought out hindsight and LaRue tells it like it is. A must read.
https://www.vivaelbirdos.com/2021/7/2/22555456/the-mozeliak-years-free-agency
Wainwright will be back next season. I say that because there will be an opening for him in the rotation. Does anyone feel confident of four starters after Flaherty next season?
Agree with the comments about Luhnow and the scouting. A big part of this was also the Analytic capabilities the Cards had relative to their peers. The club was recognized as having one of the best, if nit the best, Analytics group in the business.
IMO, the Front Office did not mind the store in this space over the past five years. The Cards fell behind … I fear way behind according to some reports. Dewitt made it a point this off-season to say that they were starting to reinvest in improving the capabilities of the group this off-season.
My guess is theCardinals have a lot of catch up to do and it could be one or two seasons before we see the effects of the re-investment.
I think its been coasting on momentum for 10 years, since Luhnow departed. I would agree that from a point a few years after that it was a disaster, as evidenced by the state of the system. Flores has been director of scouting or better for 5 or 6 years now and I do not see evidence of great improvement in the mid levels, but others will have their list of wonderful prospects. They aren’t winning at least.
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