St. Louis Cardinals should consider Dallas Keuchel

The St. Louis Cardinals need pitching help and Dallas Keuchel is a free agent. It is time to get those two together.

Dallas Keuchel, 2015 Cy Young award-winner and two-time All-Star, is still a free agent roughly three weeks into the season. Keuchel posted a perfectly respectable 3.74 ERA in 204 innings, with a 3.69 FIP and allowing just 0.8 home runs per nine innings.

But Keuchel is still unsigned and we are about to enter May. This is despite many teams seemingly needing pitching help. No one can make the argument that the Red Sox and the 6.16 ERA they’ve received from their staters is good enough. Or the 5.81 from the Brewers rotation. Or the 4.72 from the Phillies.

These are all contending teams that are in need of pitching help.

Maybe none more so than the St. Louis Cardinals.

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So far the Cardinals have gotten an ERA of 5.11 from their starters, and just 111 innings on top of that. Not nearly good enough for a team that is trying to return to the postseason for the first time since 2015 and is in the middle of their longest playoff drought since the 90s.

To make matter worse, Michael Wacha went on the injured list this week with knee tendinitis and it was announced that Carlos Martinez will be working back from a shoulder injury as a reliever rather than as a starter (Reminder that from 2015-2017 Martinez was one of the best starters in the league, ranking inside the top ten in innings pitched, strikeouts and top fifteen in ERA).

It’s true that the Cardinals are one of the few teams that boasts an entire stable of young pitchers that can step in to fill these voids, but they are entirely unproven. Dakota Hudson, who won the fifth spot out of Spring Training, has been hit around for a 5.89 ERA in just 18 innings. Austin Gomber and Daniel Ponce De Leon didn’t even make the big club out of Spring.

Even Jack Flaherty, who put up a 3.04 ERA and placed fifth in ROY voting last year, has been touched up for an ERA of 5.25 so far.

The St. Louis Cardinals need a stabilizer and they need one badly. Enter Keuchel.

St. Louis Cardinals

This isn’t to say that the former Astros pitcher is the answer to all of the Cardinals problems, far from it. But with Flaherty and others struggling it would be a step in the right direction.

It’s true that Keuchel may not be the award-winning pitcher he once was, but he is still more than capable of helping boost a rotation.

Consider this, last season Keuchel not only had an FIP lower than his ERA (for those not familiar FIP is an indicator of what a pitcher’s performance actually was, so in this case Keuchel was actually better than his ERA indicates) but also didn’t allow many free passes, walking just 6.6% of batters faced, his lowest walk rate since 2015 when he won the Cy Young.

As of this writing, the Cardinals have walked 46 batters this year, tied for tenth most in the league.

One of Keuchel’s strengths is keeping the ball on the ground and allowing his defense to do its job. This works for the Cardinals because under manager Mike Shildt the Cardinals have become a much better defensive team, including two legitimate Gold Glove candidates in Kolten Wong and Paul Dejong up the middle as well as Paul Goldschmidt (who has three Gold Gloves of his own) at first base.

Finally there’s Cardinals pitching coach Mike Maddux. While it isn’t easy to quantify just how much a pitching coach can affect a pitcher, consider that Maddux helped mold the likes of Stephen Strasburg and helped turn Max Scherzer into a year-in-year-out Cy Young contender. And in his first year in St. Louis last year he helped guide Miles Mikolas to an All-Star appearance and 2.86 ERA.

Next. Cardinals Mount Rushmore. dark

The St. Louis Cardinals have the need and Dallas Keuchel is available. It’s time to pick up the phone.

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