The Cardinals Sign the Last Pitcher for Miles

The Cardinals have put themselves in a bit of a bind. They take sustainability seriously, building to compete both now and tomorrow. They never rebuild, never go all in, and always balance the present and future responsibly. If your goal is to win forever, you have to think about more than just the next year when you make a decision. For all that focus on long-term planning, though, they have a lackluster rotation, and it’s slated to get a lot worse after this year.

Of St. Louis’ top five starting options, only one, Steven Matz, came into the spring under contract for 2024. That might not be a problem if there were a heaping helping of starting pitching prospects knocking on the door to the major league clubhouse, but there aren’t. Gordon Graceffo isn’t far off, and if you’re willing to do a lot of projecting, Tink Hence might be major league ready before too long, but the up-and-down fifth starters and swingmen with live arms that other teams use to bulk up their starting rotation in times of need don’t really exist here.

Now, the Cardinals have two starters under contract for 2024 after signing Miles Mikolas to a contract extension that will pay him $40 million for the 2024 and ’25 seasons, as Derrick Goold first reported. That doesn’t exactly create a complete 2024 starting rotation, but it’s twice as many pitchers as St. Louis had before last Friday. Bam, problem solved!

I mean, yeah, technically, problem solved. But there are a lot of different ways to solve this particular problem, so I thought it might be nice to use this article to contemplate both how St. Louis ended up in this particular spot and why the team chose to offer Mikolas an extension rather than make some other pitching move.

First things first: let’s look at the projected rotation. It’s not the projected Opening Day rotation, as Adam Wainwright won’t be ready in time, but if things go according to plan, these are the five starters the Cards will count on throughout the year:

While the Cardinals have turned out useful hitters in bulk amounts in recent years, they haven’t produced a starter good enough to stick in the rotation since 2017. Even that hasn’t been a walk in the park; Flaherty is tremendous when he’s on, but he’s battled inconsistency and injuries for most of his career. He’s also headed to free agency this year and probably isn’t open to a contract extension.

Montgomery is the next logical choice for an extension. He’s on the team because of that aforementioned glut of young hitters; he came to the team in a trade that sent Harrison Bader to the Yankees. He was solid for the Cardinals down the stretch, though he faded at the end of September. I still think the team would happily ink an extension with him, but I can see why he might want to test free agency given how close he is to the promised land already.

Because of that 2017–22 gap, the Cardinals don’t have a normal complement of pre-arb and early-arb starters to fill in the back half of their rotation. It’s not even an issue of no arms they can trust; there just aren’t many options, period. Jake Woodford is filling in for Wainwright to start the season, but the Cardinals prefer to use him as a reliever. Our positional power rankings shouldn’t make Cardinals fans much more optimistic. Matthew Liberatore should figure into the picture a bit, and Dakota Hudson is still around, but the cupboard is exceedingly bare.

Most likely, the Cardinals planned on needing extra starters before the 2024 season. Wainwright looked cooked from 2017 to ’20, so projecting him to be around in ’23 was far out of the picture. Even after a resurgent 2021 season, ’22 made sense as a last ride; he and Yadier Molina could head off into the sunset together. But Wainwright was good enough to stick around for another year. That’s delightful for Cardinals fans, and probably a good thing for the 2023 season, but it left no room for signing a starter this offseason.

Would your starter bump Flaherty from the rotation? Matz? Those seem like the best options, but they don’t seem like great options, particularly given that the Cardinals just aren’t the kind of team that shops at the top of the market. Taijuan Walker is St. Louis’ kind of pitcher, but it seems like a weird fit for a team full of third and fourth starters to go out and grab one in free agency without an obvious place in the rotation.

That leads me to Mikolas, who has two things going for him: he’s reliable, and he already pitches for the Cardinals, which means they won’t need to add salary this year for a role where he’d be underutilized. It’s weird to think about, but the Cardinals like to do a lot of building for next year this year, and next year was looking shaky indeed.

Imagine a world where the Cardinals went into the offseason with no one other than Matz retained. Could they count on Graceffo and Liberatore to lock down two rotation spots? Not exactly; realistically, penciling them in for 30 combined starts is probably closer to the mark. That would leave the Cardinals hunting for three starters in free agency next winter, and it’s not a banner year. Maybe Max Scherzer wants to play one last year where he grew up. Maybe the Nootbaar bromance from the WBC brings Shohei Ohtani into play (not likely). Short of that, though, it’s Julio Urías, Luis Severino, or a variety of sketchy options.

It’s a tough year to need three starters. Any year is a tough year to need three starters, but this one seems particularly tricky. Three might even undersell it; there’s no guarantee that the youngsters will hold down their spot. This same rough predicament happened to the Mets this season, and it’s a good thing that Steve Cohen is as rich as Croesus, because their solution was to sign Justin Verlander, Kodai Senga, and José Quintana, a move the Cardinals certainly won’t be duplicating.

That brings us to Mikolas, and I should probably talk about him at least a little bit in this article about his new contract. He did exactly what the Cardinals hoped for in 2022, throwing 200 innings with a dead-average FIP and a ton of balls in play. That let the best defense in baseball feast, and feast they did: Mikolas’ 3.29 ERA was comfortably better than his true-outcome stats would suggest. If he delivers that performance in each of the years of his contract, the Cardinals will be quite pleased with the deal.

That level is no guarantee, though. Mikolas made only nine starts in 2021, and he missed the 2020 season entirely. When he’s healthy, 200 innings of average baseball is what he delivers — he had roughly the same season in 2019 — but health is clearly not a given, and some of his peripherals started to slip in 2022 even as his surface-level statistics still shone. ZiPS, which makes a habit of digging into peripheral and predictive statistics as a matter of course, thinks Mikolas will be worth only 1.6 WAR this year, followed by a *combined* 1.6 WAR in the 2024 and ’25 seasons. You hardly have to do the math; if he hits that projection, things won’t work out for the Redbirds. Some of that is injury risk — ZiPS calls for a combined 250 innings in 2024 and ’25, which is far less than a full complement — but some of it is just what happens when a starter who never possessed top-notch stuff starts aging.

So yeah, two years at $20 million a pop sounds high for that. If you were evaluating this on a dollars-per-WAR basis, I don’t think you could convince me this deal makes sense for the team. Busch Stadium is a perfect fit for Mikolas’ skill set, and he’s beaten the projections before, but $20 million will sign you an average starter for *sure* in free agency these days. Chris Bassitt, Jameson Taillon, and Walker all signed for roughly that amount just months ago.

To me, this deal is all about reducing uncertainty, even if it means making an offer too generous for Mikolas to refuse. Competing every year is hard; competing every year with a semi-consistent payroll is harder. Doing so when you need a huge talent infusion in the starting rotation is harder still. It’s entirely possible that the Cardinals could have filled their starting needs next season, but I’m fairly certain that they didn’t want to mess around and find out what might happen.

Probably, Mikolas will be good but not great for them this year. Probably, they’ll go into the offseason looking to add starting pitching. Probably, a few guys who pitched better than Mikolas in ‘23 will sign for less than him in the offseason, and Cardinals fans will grumble about it. Those aren’t bold predictions; they’re median expectations.

If you told John Mozeliak, the Cards’ president of baseball operations, that all of these things would happen, I doubt he’d be surprised. I think the median outcome of this deal is that the Cardinals spend slightly more money employing Mikolas than they’d have to if they acquired similar production in free agency after the season.

That’s just the cost of protecting against downside risk, though. It was easy to imagine some truly bad scenarios for the Cardinals after this year. Maybe Matz would get hurt again, Graceffo wouldn’t pan out as smoothly as expected, and they’d go into next year needing an entire new rotation. Maybe they’d miss out on their top five targets in free agency because they misjudged the speed of the market and end up offering big contracts to players they weren’t sure about. If you aren’t willing to take a year off of competing and don’t have an internal pipeline providing cheap innings, you have to worry about these eventualities.

Each of them is less likely after this extension. Even if Mikolas ends up being an overpay, it’s a risk-reducing overpay. I’m fairly certain that St. Louis will still try to engage Montgomery in contract extension talks and would do the same with Flaherty if it thought he might accept. Continuity is important, and having enough trustworthy pitching to fill an entire season is not a given. The Cardinals just showed how much they believe in those statements with this contract extension.