Cardinals rebuilt with pitching and leadership. Here’s why it will work and why it won’t

The theory of the case is straightforward for the 2024 St. Louis Cardinals.

Those who make the team’s most important decisions believe that the disastrous 2023 season was the result of a collapsing supply of innings exacerbated by insufficient clubhouse leadership, and they trust that an offense which tracked well until the team’s trade deadline sell-off will allow them to absorb some of the predictable blows which accompany the stability they have sought on the pitching side.

They may well be right. They may well be wrong.

With only a week to go before opening day in Los Angeles, there are still unanswered questions around the makeup of the roster and the apportionment of playing time. What the six weeks of spring have demonstrated, though, is that a person should be able to choose their own adventure based on what the team has shown so far, and they can gloat (or mourn) from there.

Why They Will Be Right

There is no more precious commodity than innings. A team which wins a baseball game is required to record 27 defensive outs, and whatever shortcomings Kyle Gibson, Lance Lynn and Miles Mikolas may have as pitchers, all three took the ball for at least 30 starts and at least 180 innings in 2023. Mikolas was the only pitcher who did either for the Cardinals last season; no one else made more than 21 starts for St. Louis or eclipsed 121 innings.

With those outs came hits and runs, to be sure. But they also brought protection for both the bullpen and fellow starters, and if those effects are compounding, the whole could well exceed the expectations of the component parts.

The offense will also be more complete with a full, healthy season from Brendan Donovan and continued growth from Nolan Gorman and Jordan Walker. Even as Nolan Arenado and Paul Goldschmidt age – and neither should struggle as badly as they did last season – that trio represents the team’s new offensive core, joined by Lars Nootbaar when he’s not recuperating from a series of freak injuries that speak more to terrible luck than insufficient conditioning.

The defense, too, should be much improved.

Whether Victor Scott II makes the team out of spring training and stakes his claim to center remains to be seen, but a full season of Masyn Winn at short will shore up the infield. So too will Walker’s winter improvements in right, as well as shifting Nootbaar from center, where he’s below average, to left, where he should be one of the top left field defenders in baseball.

Even with Keynan Middleton’s spring arm issues, adding Andrew Kittredge to the bullpen mix will provide another reliable late-inning option, and Andre Pallante’s offseason work has introduced a new curveball which entirely changes the makeup of his arsenal and should level out some of his reverse splits, allowing him to be freely deployed against righties as well as lefties.

Watch, too, for Matthew Liberatore to be slowly but firmly transitioned to the bullpen, completing his metamorphosis into Andrew Miller for a new generation.

Why They’ll Be Wrong

Quantity of innings is important, but the Cardinals might still be seeking quality. Sonny Gray is fully prepared to take on the challenges of being a rotation ace, but he has to be on the field to be able to do so. Instead, he’s recuperating from his third right hamstring injury since 2022. This one seems to be minor and could cost him only one start, but it still represents a recurrence.

So too does Middleton’s ailment, his fourth differently-classified arm injury in the last four years. His timeline is still murky, and without him, some of the much vaunted swing and miss that the Cardinals sought will be on the shelf. Neither pitching injury is yet a cause for panic, but both are causes for alarm.

If Scott makes the team, it will be because Tommy Edman’s persistent wrist injury will have him on the shelf for a significant period. Five months out from surgery, Edman still has not been able to swing at live pitching, and multiple times this spring had to back down from workouts due to lingering soreness before being shut down. Despite his shortcomings at the plate, he still projects to be a stronger offensive player than Scott in the short term, and his initial foray into centerfield came with rave reviews.

Perhaps most importantly, there’s an argument to be made that neither Arenado nor Goldschmidt’s poor 2023 seasons were outliers and are instead the start of a bend in the aging curve. Goldschmidt turns 37 in September and Arenado turns 33 next month. Neither reached those ages with low mileage on their respective personal odometers, and Father Time, of course, remains undefeated.

Whatever patches have been applied to the pitching and whatever healing has helped out the positional depth, the team’s success will follow in the wake of its cornerstones. If last season’s downturn was an anomaly for the first and third baseman, so too will it be in the standings.

If it was a trend, there may not be much gloating to go around.