As the trade deadline nears, the Cardinals have done the unexpected and pushed themselves into postseason contention. That surge has sparked the usual calls for the front office to get aggressive and buy pitching.
But that would be the wrong move.
If St. Louis wants to make a real difference, the answer isn’t giving up young talent for a short-term arm. It’s replacing pitching coach Dusty Blake.
The case against Blake starts with how he got the job in the first place. Before joining the major league staff, he was the pitching coach at Duke.
He never pitched professionally and never coached in the minors. When Mike Maddux turned down a contract extension after the 2022 season, the Cardinals had a chance to go after just about anyone.
Instead, they didn’t interview an outside candidate and gave Blake the job before the 2023 season.
That approach looks even stranger when stacked against the hiring of hitting coach Brant Brown. Brown arrived with experience as a coach or assistant with the Los Angeles Dodgers, Miami Marlins, and Seattle Mariners, and in two seasons he has helped modernize the offense. The Cardinals have improved in batting average, on-base percentage, walk rate, strikeout rate, and isolated power, even while relying heavily on some of the youngest players in Major League Baseball this season.
The pitching side has gone the other way under Blake. Strikeouts per nine innings have dropped year after year, while walks per nine and team WHIP have climbed.
The decline shows up in the deeper numbers too. The staff’s FIP has worsened each season under Blake, and the same is true for SIERA.
That mark has jumped from 3.97 to 4.17 over the last three seasons, and it sits at 4.29 this year.
The individual cases are even harder to ignore.
Miles Mikolas was still dealing 202.1 innings of 3.29 ERA ball under Maddux as recently as 2022. In Blake’s first season, his ERA shot up to 4.78 and he gave up an MLB-worst 226 hits. In 2024, the trouble continued, with his ERA around 4.85 and 194 hits allowed, the third-worst total in the National League.
Steven Matz’s run in St. Louis has been just as rocky. After a strong 2021 with the Toronto Blue Jays, when he went 14-7 with a 3.82 ERA, his time under Blake has been marked by constant movement between the rotation and bullpen, falling pitch efficiency, and injuries.
Jack Flaherty is another example. He had a historic second half in 2019 and finished that season with a 2.75 ERA.
Even while dealing with shoulder and oblique strains in 2021 and 2022, he was effective when healthy. But in 2023 under Blake, he looked mechanically lost, posted a 4.43 ERA, and battled serious walk problems.
Once he was traded away, he moved on from the staff’s rigid pitch-shape restrictions, changed his vertical movement, and went on to win a 2024 World Series title as a frontline starter for the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Jordan Montgomery’s story followed a similar path. After arriving from the Yankees in 2022, he went 6-3 with a 3.11 ERA down the stretch under Maddux.
Under Blake, the coaching staff pushed him to ditch his sinker for modern, high-spin vertical shapes, and the friction showed. Traded to the Texas Rangers at the 2023 deadline, Montgomery quickly reunited with Maddux, leaned back into his strengths, and helped Texas win a World Series as a postseason ace.
The broader issue is philosophical. Blake inherited a mandate from the previous front office to push pitchers away from their natural styles and into a single analytical mold.
That approach has also shaped roster usage, with the Cardinals shuffling starters to the bullpen and relievers into the rotation more aggressively than most clubs. The constant changes to routines, arm speeds, and mechanics have fed the inconsistency.
Around baseball, it has been understood that St. Louis pitchers are told to trust the dugout spreadsheets over their own instincts on the mound - a mindset Hall of Fame pitchers like Bob Gibson would never have accepted.
There is, though, a possible shift already taking shape. Chaim Bloom officially takes full control of baseball operations for the 2026 season, and his early moves suggest a different direction. He has been stockpiling the minor league system with high-upside, strikeout-heavy arms, and his development philosophy is built around individualization rather than forcing pitchers into one template.
That matters because if Blake has already struggled to help established pitchers like Montgomery and Flaherty, there’s little reason to believe he should be trusted with the franchise’s top young arms.
Bloom also made an early statement by hiring Kyle Driscoll as assistant pitching coach just two months after the transition of power was finalized. Driscoll came from the Arizona Diamondbacks’ player development system and has a reputation for using advanced metrics to build on what a pitcher already does well, not replace it.
So before the Cardinals hand over future assets for outside pitching help at the deadline, they need to fix the problem already sitting in the dugout. They should change who is coaching the arms they already have.
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The reward for that rise is a long-awaited major league debut, and the timing could hardly be more important for St. Louis. He has been effective in Triple-A this year, posting a 2.27 ERA across 36 outings, and the Cardinals will now see whether that production can carry over when the games start coming fast and the margin for error gets even smaller. [Read more 🡒]