The last two years have been an endless stream of nostalgia for St. Louis baseball fans. Both with the return of Albert Pujols and saying goodbye to Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright, memories of happier seasons than a 71-91 have permeated throughout the Busch Stadium air.

This morning, the Cardinals signed Lance Lynn, who pitched with the Cardinals from 2011 through 2017. And while Lance Lynn will surely receive a nice ovation upon his return to St. Louis, let’s be very clear: this is not an Albert Pujols situation. Albert Pujols was a first-ballot Cooperstown Hall of Famer based on his Cardinals years alone; Lance Lynn has a squint-case for the Cardinals Hall of Fame since the standards for induction are getting lower by the year. But of these players I have mentioned, Lance Lynn is the one for whom I have the most emotional connection.

Lance Lynn’s early years with the St. Louis Cardinals feel like they were in a bygone era not just of the Cardinals but of baseball analysis. In 2012, Lynn’s first full season with the St. Louis Cardinals (though he did notably pitch in both Games 6 and 7 of the 2011 World Series in relief), the hot-button old school vs. new school debate existed in the American League Most Valuable Player discussion, with the two prime candidates being Miguel Cabrera, the Detroit Tigers slugger who had just won Major League Baseball’s first offensive Triple Crown since 1967, and Mike Trout, the Los Angeles Angels rookie center fielder who was a supremely valuable fielder, base runner, and hitter (nearly Cabrera’s equal by most single-number offensive statistics). Like most hyper-Online baseball discourse participants, I was Team Trout, preferring his more well-rounded game (and material Wins Above Replacement, still a fairly new statistic, edge), to Miguel Cabrera’s terrific but singular dimension.

At the end of the day, Miguel Cabrera won and it wasn’t super close. Mike Trout, of course, would go on to collect plenty of MLB honors and should moonwalk into Cooperstown. And eleven years later, WAR is commonly cited on the most mainstream of television broadcasts. If old-school fans who prioritize RBI over wRC+ had won the 2012 battle, they had unequivocally lost the war over WAR, as much as the Brian Kenny-type evangelists maintain grievances about how they were told Steph Curry wasn’t a good shooter.

In 2012, Lance Lynn pulled off a rare double—he was an All-Star as a starting pitcher and eventually lost his job in his team’s starting rotation. Given this juxtaposition between his early and later outings, it is poetic that the anecdotal cases for and against Lynn became a subject of division. There may have been something aesthetic to the division–it seems silly to note that, unlike beloved rotation stalwarts Chris Carpenter and Adam Wainwright, Lynn sported a beard and a few extra pounds, but groups of fans have resented players for less–but there was also a strong statistical explanation for his divisiveness: prior to his demotion to the bullpen in late August, Lynn’s ERA stood at a not-horrible-but-certainly-nothing-special 3.93, while his Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP) was at 3.56, not an unheard-of gap but arguably residing somewhere around the point where a player’s consensus straddles the line between Broadly Good and Broadly Bad. Over his previous ten starts, Lance Lynn had a more pointed gap: though his FIP sat at 3.95 (like I said with his near-identical ERA, not-horrible-but-certainly-nothing-special), probably not enough to warrant an ejection from the starting rotation, his ERA was a dreadful 5.16 during this time.

In 2013, Lance Lynn was even more a victim of the FIP differential monster. By FIP, Lynn was terrific–it would have estimated his ERA at 3.28 while logging over 200 innings. But by ERA, Lynn was quite a bit worse, reaching 3.97 by season’s end. By ERA-FIP differential, Lynn was the fifth-unluckiest qualified starter in Major League Baseball, and easily the best by both ERA and FIP. Unlike in 2012, manager Mike Matheny did not remove Lynn from the starting rotation during what was otherwise a charmed regular season for the Cardinals, which if anything may have created more animosity towards him, and after three nearly-identical postseason starts where he walked three, struck out five or six, and gave up more runs than the peripherals would have suggested, Lynn was relegated to bullpen duty for Game 6 of the 2013 World Series, where he allowed two hits and surrendered a walk among his three batters faced in what would ultimately be the final game of the season for the Cardinals.

But starting in 2014, Lance Lynn’s career began to turn upwards in an interesting way. In 203 2/3 innings, Lynn’s ERA was actually dramatically lower than his FIP–peripherals suggested a solid 3.35 ERA, but his actual ERA was an even more impressive 2.74. Suddenly, not only was Lance Lynn considered an indispensable part of the team’s starting rotation, but his desert-dry sense of humor, which had once been viewed as somewhat off-putting when his results weren’t very good, made him genuinely popular among the Cardinals’ fan base. In his final season as a Cardinal, 2017, he most aggressively reversed his 2013 misfortune with a fully reversed campaign: a 4.82 FIP in 186 1/3 innings, but a respectable 3.43 ERA. By the end of the year, Lance Lynn had pulled off what once seemed impossible: for his Cardinals career, Lynn had a lower ERA (3.38) than FIP (3.64).

Although Lynn had a mediocre 2018, splitting time between the Minnesota Twins and the beard-hating New York Yankees, he would soon embark on a very impressive three-year run, finishing 5th, 6th, and 3rd in American League Cy Young balloting over seasons with the Texas Rangers and Chicago White Sox. By any measure, Lynn was firmly decent if unspectacular in 2022, but it was his 2023 season that created enough skepticism around Lance Lynn that a one-year, $10 million contract with a $12 million club option for 2025 could be considered remotely dangerous. And once again, Lance Lynn fell victim to the FIP monster.

By some statistics, Lance Lynn’s 2023 season was perfectly fine. He struck out 9.36 batters per nine innings, better than the year before and better than any full season he had during his first stint in St. Louis. His 3.28 walks per nine innings were up a little bit, but hardly terrible and generally quite a bit better than during his Cardinals years. Even by batting average on balls in play, normally the kiss of death for pitchers, the .292 mark was perfectly normal. What really damaged Lance Lynn was his rate of home runs allowed. This has generally not been an enormous problem for Lynn throughout his career, but in 2023, his rate ballooned to 2.16 per nine innings. And if you have any memory of 2023 Lance Lynn, it is surely allowing four consecutive home runs to the Arizona Diamondbacks in the NLDS game which ended their season.

If one were to normalize Lynn’s home run rate according not to a league-average rate but rather to a league-average rate of home run to fly ball ratio (because, to be fair, Lance Lynn did allow a fair number of fly balls), it reveals an xFIP of 4.50. Is this good? No, not really–but at $10 million for a season, the primary realistic goal for Lynn should be competence rather than necessarily excellence. Of Cardinals starters last season, Steven Matz was the only one with a materially better xFIP–Lynn was within spitting distance of Jack Flaherty and within half a run of Jordan Montgomery, who is about to become a much richer man than Lance Lynn for the near future.

But even more than expecting a rebound in home run luck to cause optimism is just a general belief that he can bounce back to some reasonable facsimile to what he has been, if not during his Cy Young candidate years than at least to what he was in 2022. And with 183 2/3 innings logged, joining a team that has lost a fair number of its 2023 innings, this is a significant factor as well. If Lance Lynn can simply be a cheaper version of 2023 Miles Mikolas, this is a solid if not especially inspiring acquisition. And if he can be an average-to-above-average pitcher during those innings, this is a substantial boon to the Cardinals.

When relatively small transactions happen, it’s worth keeping in mind that not every move has to be a franchise-altering one. This isn’t Shohei Ohtani nor Blake Snell nor Yoshinobu Yamomoto–if Lance Lynn is the biggest signing the Cardinals make in 2023-24, fans have a right to be annoyed. But any move which improves the depth of the starting rotation is a valuable one for a team that currently has a lack of that. And Lance Lynn does have a history of quieting his biggest critics while donning the Birds on the Bat.