On the day Jack Flaherty was drafted thirty-fourth overall by the St. Louis Cardinals in the MLB Draft, the Cardinals played the Kansas City Royals. For some perspective on how long ago this was:

• Two players who started this game, Óscar Taveras and Yordano Ventura, were deceased within two days of the start of Donald Trump’s presidency. I promise not all of the facts I list here will be this morbid.
• Of the ten players who started for the Cardinals, only four are still in Major League Baseball (which, given how long ago this was, is actually surprisingly high)–San Diego Padres Matt Carpenter and Michael Wacha, Seattle Mariner Kolten Wong, and Colorado Rockie Randal Grichuk.
• One of the players in the Cardinals lineup, Matt Holliday, has been retired long enough that he is already in the St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Fame. Yadier Molina will presumably join him in a couple years.
• The game was saved by Kansas City Royals closer Greg Holland, who would be named an All-Star a month later and received Cy Young and MVP votes that season. The next year, he would win a World Series title with the Royals. He would bounce among six different teams, including an ill-fated stint with the St. Louis Cardinals, which cost the St. Louis Cardinals the #59 pick in a draft which turned out to be used on Ryan Jeffers, the quite-good catcher for the Minnesota Twins.

Much of the discourse which has surrounded Jack Flaherty throughout his career has been centered around what he hasn’t been. His 2019 Cy Young-chasing season, in which he finished fourth, turned out to be the lone season in which Flaherty received Cy Young Award votes. Jack Flaherty has never been an All-Star. In what has essentially amounted to three seasons worth of 162-game Major League Baseball played between 2020 and 2023, injuries have limited Jack Flaherty to 264 1/3 innings and a 4.12 ERA, exactly average by ERA+.

Jack Flaherty has largely been burdened by expectations and a perception that he could have been better than he was, but these expectations were largely caused by a spectacular run from Jack Flaherty–in a sixteen-start stretch to close out the 2019 season, Flaherty threw 106 1/3 innings and posted a remarkable 0.93 ERA and 2.32 FIP. Over this stretch, he was arguably the best pitcher in baseball–the only other pitchers with any sort of case for such a title were Gerrit Cole, Jacob deGrom, and Justin Verlander.

It would be reasonable to be disappointed by Jack Flaherty’s 2020s; what is not reasonable is to believe that Jack Flaherty himself is not disappointed by his 2020s. There was an outcry among Cardinals fans to extend Flaherty following his 2019 apex, and had the Cardinals and Flaherty agreed to terms which bought out his arbitration years and some of his free agency years, with the gift of hindsight, it is almost certain that Jack Flaherty would have made more money than he will once he reaches free agency following the 2023 season, where he will likely be signing a short, “show-me” deal, hoping to demonstrate health and that he can be some reasonable facsimile of what he was in the summer and early fall of 2019.

I have never in my life seen more proclamations that a player wanted to “go home” than I have assertions that Jack Flaherty, native of Burbank, CA, has been looking for a reason to sign with the Los Angeles Dodgers. The only semi-close comparison has been Mike Trout, famously avowed Philadelphia Eagles fan, supposedly wanting to go to the Phillies, but at least in that case the rumors are coming from Phillies fans who unsurprisingly want Mike Trout on their baseball team. The sense that Jack Flaherty is insistent on returning to his hometown far exceeds any belief that Jordan Hicks wants to go to the Houston Astros, or that Nolan Gorman wants to go to the Arizona Diamondbacks, or that Dylan Carlson wants to go to one of the Bay Area teams. Is it because Flaherty tweets a lot about the Los Angeles Lakers (if so, I have some bad news about the volume of professional athletes who are just super into Kobe Bryant)? Is it some sort of post-Pujols, post-Rams residual effect where we just naturally assume that anything that we love in St. Louis actually just wants to go to Los Angeles?

Jack Flaherty has been with the St. Louis Cardinals organization for nine years. He has been in the Cardinals organization longer than every player in the organization with the exception of Adam Wainwright, a player for whom Flaherty has been nothing but publicly reverent. He probably won’t be on the St. Louis Cardinals next week, much less next season, but spending nine years in one’s teens and twenties is not an insignificant chunk of significant years of personal growth. It doesn’t mean that one will remain with that job for the rest of their career, but it does have an impact.

Even if Jack Flaherty was a Los Angeles Dodgers fan, say, from age 4 through age 18, those years were surely less adamant than his time with the Cardinals. For all intents and purposes, Jack Flaherty is a St. Louisan and a St. Louis Cardinal now. Does he have specific non-monetary loyalty towards the Cardinals? Maybe not, but ultimately that’s up to him to decide–if somebody wanted to write a big check, this website would be Cincinnati Bullpen faster than you can misspell “traitor” on social media. There is no evidence that Jack Flaherty hasn’t given his all to the Cardinals.

Jack Flaherty admitted to The Athletic‘s Katie Woo that he believes yesterday was his final time pitching for the Cardinals, and while the reasons for this means no hard feelings are felt–he is a pending free agent and for as much as Flaherty might not want to change jobs, it would enable him to compete for a title in 2023–it still was an emotional feeling for him. It is abundantly clear from the article that Flaherty shares the disappointment felt by Cardinals fans, that he wishes he could have done more for the Cardinals and that he wishes the team had won a title while he was there. It’s fair for both parties to have wanted more. It’s unfair to assume that what we got was the result of negligence rather than of circumstance.

So much of the discourse around Jack Flaherty’s departure from St. Louis has been angry, whether at the Cardinals for not spending big money to keep their homegrown ace locked down or at Flaherty for not “wanting” to be a Cardinal enough, but ultimately I can’t really blame either side. The Cardinals believed Jack Flaherty was a future big-league contributor and they were spot on; of the 1,181 players drafted after Jack Flaherty, only six (Alex Verdugo, Logan Webb, Rhys Hoskins, Dylan Cease, Brandon Woodruff, Ramón Laureano) signed and have been more valuable players by Wins Above Replacement, never mind that Flaherty had a truly stunning peak and that WAR does not account for his postseason performance, which includes two six-inning, one-run, eight-strikeout performances in winner-take-all games (these are largely forgotten because in the first of these, the offense scored 10 runs before Flaherty ever threw a pitch, and in the second, the Cardinals were shut out). In the free agency era (keep in mind that we have no idea if Bob Gibson or Dizzy Dean would have stuck around St. Louis if they could have potentially earned more money elsewhere), he is easily one of the best couple dozen pitchers the Cardinals have had; he isn’t going to have his number retired and he probably isn’t even a Cardinals Hall of Famer, but the sixteen guys ahead of him by fWAR are all guys generally remembered fondly by Cardinals fans. And in time, Jack Flaherty should be no different.