The St. Louis Cardinals had a mediocre starting rotation in 2023 and four of the six pitchers who started the most games for the team last season were no longer on the team by the time free agency started–Jack Flaherty and Jordan Montgomery were dealt at the trade deadline, Adam Wainwright retired, and Dakota Hudson was not tendered a contract offer. Mixed with Miles Mikolas and his 4.78 ERA and 4.27 FIP from 2023 along with Steven Matz’s occasional flirtations with a role in the bullpen, the starting rotation entering the 2023-24 postseason was always poised to be a mess.

A core problem for the Cardinals was that they lacked both high-end starters–there wasn’t a single pitcher on the payroll who could even optimistically be regarded as better than a #3 starter–and depth–the Cardinals entered free agency with just five pitchers who had started even a single game in 2023: Mikolas, Matz, the still-unproven lefties Matthew Liberatore and Zack Thompson, and Drew Rom, a lesser part of the return for Jack Flaherty who was awful down the stretch.

The Cardinals already had other candidates on the 40-player expanded roster with potential to start games in 2024: Adam Kloffenstein and Sem Robberse have been starting pitchers in the minor leagues. Non-roster prospects such as Gordon Graceffo, Tink Hence, Michael McGreevy, and Tekoah Roby could also factor into the rotation mix next season. But all six of these pitchers fit somewhere into the Liberatore/Thompson zone, just slightly younger, where any of them individually could be very good but are more likely to fill the role of rotation filler until they are otherwise seasoned.

It is hard to know what the conventional wisdom on this rotation rebuild would be, because most teams that finish twenty games under .500 and sell off many of their highest-end players at the prior trade deadline are not in the market for high-end free agents. And based on much of the cynicism that has surrounded the trio of starting pitchers that the Cardinals have signed for the 2024 season, this would seem to have come to fruition.

It would not be unreasonable to call the St. Louis Cardinals’ rotation rebuild somewhat half-hearted. The St. Louis Cardinals signed two veterans with existing local ties, Lance Lynn and Kyle Gibson, to contracts last week befitting their likely status as #4 or #5-type starters. The overall upside of the rotation, however, improved materially today with the signing of Sonny Gray to a three-year, $75 million contract. But while Gray was a Cy Young finalist last season with the Minnesota Twins following a career season, most project him to be closer to a #2-type starter than a true ace: good enough to crack the Cardinals rotation, to put it lightly, but not as high-end of a potential signing as Aaron Nola, Blake Snell, or Yoshinobu Yamamoto would have been. I can’t say that I disagree.

Barring an unlimited payroll, the signings of Lynn, Gibson, and Gray as a collective whole are somewhat high-floor, low-ceiling. Using $47 million of 2024 payroll on the free agent market is a tricky proposition because the higher-end of talent one pursues, the more likely that he will insist on a high salary for a longer period of time–Yamamoto’s average annual value will almost certainly be lower than the collective AAVs of Lynn/Gibson/Gray, but his contract will also extend much further. And Yamamoto is the case in which this is the most defensible as he is just 25 and, in contrast to the thirtysomethings Nola and Snell, could realistically get better.

The signings of Lance Lynn and Kyle Gibson were the types of signings that lousy teams tend to make, which sounds like much more of a criticism that it actually is. I am pro-Lynn and moderately though not passionately anti-Gibson, but the two clearly fit a similar mold–sign an older pitcher to a short contract, in both cases with one year guaranteed plus a team option for 2025, and hope they can rekindle their old magic. The downside is relatively comparable to any pitcher–a bout of wild ineffectiveness or arm trouble, after which the Cardinals would inevitably let them walk to free agency. The upside depends on whether the Cardinals’ success follows that of the player–either the Cardinals have a good pitcher through 2025 or the Cardinals have the kind of trade chip that may not net extraordinary talent but which would have value to good teams. Even in the midst of the worst season of his career, Lynn was still a key part of a 2023 deadline deal–it’s certainly within the realm of possibility that the Cardinals could have a similar plan for him in 2024.

The style of the signing of Sonny Gray is one more associated with a good team–ideally, that team is adding Gray as more of a middle-of-the-rotation arm than the probable Opening Day starter he will be in 2024, but it makes some sense in and of itself. The dollar value reflects not his excellent 2023 play, which per FanGraphs would have been worth $42.3 million on the open market, but of some aging-adjusted approximation of what Gray has been: over the last five seasons, Sonny Gray has been worth an average of $30.9 million per year (adjusting 2020’s 60-game season to a 162-game pace), and over the last three, he has been worth $27 million per year. With the exception of 2016, a year in which Sonny Gray was not his best (who among us was?), he has been a consistently good pitcher, and over the last three seasons, while there has been some ERA and FIP fluctuation, his xFIP has been remarkably steady–3.66, 3.66, and 3.64, chronologically from 2021 through 2023. Gray’s xFIP-, or league-adjusted xFIP, has been better than league-average in all eleven of his MLB seasons (including his aforementioned otherwise spotty 2016), including 15% above-average in 2023.

The Sonny Gray signing has been largely complimented in the national media, from conventional sources like Jon Heyman to sabermetrically-inclined pitching gurus like Eno Sarris. But in their cases, they are viewing Sonny Gray as a good pitcher; for many Cardinals fans fresh off the worst season they can remember, they are looking for a panacea. And Sonny Gray isn’t that. Nobody is. The Cardinals could’ve had Shohei Ohtani last season and they likely still would’ve missed the postseason. I’ve seen Sonny Gray called “boring”, and aside from the fact that he looks basically like the default setting video game Create-a-Player, I’m not sure that he especially is: his 8.95 strikeouts per nine innings last season, while not transcendent, would have registered for the sixth-highest single-season rate in St. Louis Cardinals history, behind a pair of Carlos Martínez years, a Jack Flaherty, a Rick Ankiel, and a Lance Lynn, and any of his 2019-2021 seasons would have topped all but Flaherty.

Ultimately, I would rather have a handful of other pitchers that were available this off-season, but the market was closing. Aaron Nola re-signed almost immediately with the Philadelphia Phillies and seems uninterested in moving, barring a Vito Corleone-esque offer he couldn’t refuse. Blake Snell has been connected almost exclusively to teams on the Pacific Coast, most notably his hometown Seattle Mariners. Yoshinobu Yamamoto would be a more interesting signing, but would it be worth it for the Cardinals to put all of their eggs into that basket? I could see the argument, but I could also envision another David Price-like round of “the Cardinals finished second, now enjoy your Mike Leake”.

The core problem for the Cardinals is that they have not done a sufficient job of producing pitchers. This needs to change, and perhaps the latest crop of young starters will be the one to right the ship. But for now, fortifying the rotation with movable starters who could end up pitching well is just about as good as a 71-91 team was ever likely to do. The rotation now looks like Sonny Gray, Miles Mikolas, Steven Matz, Kyle Gibson, and Lance Lynn–somewhat uninspiring, but a lot sturdier than the Cardinals experienced at the end of last season. And the good news is that this is a team that is built around its offense–the rotation should simply need to be competent, and this looks like a step in the right direction. The Cardinals have now reached a point where an additional starting pitcher would always be preferred, but where the heaviest and most essential of their off-season lifting has been resolved before December.