The First Signings of the Winter
The good, the bad, and the ugly possibilities of the Lynn and Gibson moves.
We knew that this winter was going to be busy. We knew that the Cardinals wanted to be aggressive. We’ve seen the Cardinals complete their off-season before Thanksgiving before. Putting all that together, it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that the club went ahead and inked Lance Lynn and Kyle Gibson to contracts about the time people started defrosting their turkey.
John Mozeliak might have been unfairly characterized by using the phrase “low hanging fruit” in the past, but this fruit was barely off the ground. Lynn lives in the St. Louis area. Gibson, who went to school at a geographically relevant SEC school (given the game this week, this Razorback alum prefers to not to name it), is vice president of Adam Wainwright’s Big League Impact and yesterday, before the contract was even rumored, the MLBPA put out a video of Gibson discussing how influential Wainwright has been to him personally and professionally.
So the Cardinals have the “sandpaper” voice in Lynn and the humanitarian voice in Gibson to help out with any clubhouse issues that there may be. It’s almost like it took two pitchers to replace what Wainwright meant in the clubhouse. While we shouldn’t discount the chemistry aspect of things, what do these signings mean for the winter? Let’s take a look at it in three different ways.
Let’s take the positive viewpoint first. It seems to be the rarest one you can find in the wild.
In 2022, Lynn had a 3.82 FIP. He’d been in that range for the past five years. So while last year was terrible—44 home runs is a lot of home runs—there’s at least a reasonable line of thought that he’ll return to something closer to what he was in 2022. He’s older, of course, and that is a wrinkle to factor in, but there were a lot of outlying numbers last year. Even with the struggles, he had a 9.4 K/IP, which is significantly higher than most of the pitchers in the staff last season. He can throw a lot of innings and, if he gets back to form, they’ll be solid and respectable ones.
Gibson had a FIP 0.6 runs less than his actual ERA and he threw almost 200 innings. His strikeout rate isn’t as stellar as Lynn’s but it still is a notable step up from Miles Mikolas, for example. You could make the case that both of these guys fill the “innings and strikeouts” goal that the front office has had.
The club also got both of these guys for less than one mid-range starter, which in theory leaves significant room for an upgrade at the top of the rotation. It’s completely like the Cardinals to try to get as much cost certainty as they can before making a big plunge. We’re all guessing on the budget and contracts can be structured in many different ways, but this doesn’t rule them out of the Yoshinobu Yamamoto sweepstakes and, in truth, Mozeliak’s comments in yesterday’s press conference indicated they were still in that picture.
As the superior Substack writer Dayn Perry noted (subscription required), Mozeliak indicated that he was just thinking of three starters, with Lynn and Gibson being two of them. However, if you want to be insanely optimistic, that can be explained in one of two ways.
Mozeliak is playing his cards close to the vest. After all, Matt Carpenter was his third baseman a day before the Nolan Arenado deal.
He expects one of Gibson or Steven Matz to actually be a reliever in 2024.
You might think cost would prohibit that and perhaps it does, but we’ve seen Matz in the bullpen the last two years, when he was making $8 and $10 million respectively. So it’s not unheard of by any means. Matz seemed to click last year but then also got hurt and missed the end of the season. Could it be the club thinks he’s better suited for the bullpen?
There’s also the trade market. While Mo said that they weren’t necessarily very focused on that right now (which is a pretty head-scratching thing to say), that doesn’t mean they won’t start hunting in there soon. Grabbing a Dylan Cease or a Tyler Glasnow as well as signing a new pitcher would make this a strong offseason.
Even if not, a top pitcher plus the four on hand is a better rotation than last year. I don’t know that you say it is a playoff team but if the offense does its part, it’s probably a winning team and is at least better than 2023. Mozeliak made a number of references to the trading deadline, which makes you wonder if they don’t already have some thoughts in mind for that if necessary.
These moves don’t mean that the club hasn’t learned anything or is afraid of spending money. If they were on the status quo, Dakota Hudson and Jake Woodford would be taking these starts next year. Plus both of these guys are on a one year deal (with an option, sure, but that doesn’t have to be picked up) and conventional baseball wisdom is that there’s no such thing as a bad one year deal.
That’s the optimistic case. Now let’s look at the pessimistic.
Lance Lynn had his worst year in his Age 36 season. For a man that was very fastball-centric when he was originally a Cardinal, that’s not a great sign. It’s not impossible for a pitcher that age to bounce back but it’s not a guarantee either. While Busch Stadium may help corral a few of those home run balls, even cutting it in half would be a lot of long balls and the park effects aren’t going to impact it that much.
Kyle Gibson’s ERA+ was 87 last year. That was an increase of the year before, when it was 79. He’s only been over 100 (league average) in the category three times in his career. It’s been noted that he allowed the most hits in the American League last year and we saw how that affected Miles Mikolas, who led in the National League.
Eating innings is great and all, but if they are terrible innings that doesn’t really do you any favors. For example, Mikolas threw 201 frames last year. He gave up 107 earned runs and had an ERA+ 9% lower than average. Why do you want more of that?
These guys also may have taken a significant portion of the available budget. As noted above, we’re all just guessing on what the budget it. If it is not as high as we thought, it could mean that even Sonny Gray is out of the picture. I don’t think it’s quite that bad, but if the Cardinals come back and say they couldn’t get Yamamoto because of these deals, that’s a really rough look.
Also, how does this help sell the club to a free agent pitcher? When you look at a team that had 91 losses and that these are the big additions, doesn’t it seem a little daunting to a guy being expected to shoulder all that load? Does this make it seem like a team that is expecting to win next season? If the money is close to the same, aren’t you going to be more interested in a team that looks closer to a title?
Even if you get Yamamoto, if the rest of the rotation is Mikolas/Lynn/Matz/Gibson, it doesn’t inspire confidence. It’s better than last year, but it’s not a rotation that makes you a division favorite, much less in the World Series conversation.
So what could be worse than that? What could be worse is that 2023 made absolutely no impact on their thinking.
In truth, I don’t think that’s entirely the case. The non-tenders of Hudson and Woodford (and, to some degree, Andrew Knizner) show that there’s at least something of a different mindset within the front office. It would have been really easy to say that they figure Hudson, Woodford, Zack Thompson, and perhaps even Gordon Graceffo and Tekoah Roby would be able to shoulder the load for 2024. They didn’t do that.
However, if you could pick two “Cardinals” moves to make, these might be the ones you chose. Two guys that have experience, that apparently wanted to come to St. Louis, who are solid yet unexciting and past any prime they may have had. Again, it’s "low hanging fruit” come to life.
It’s also possible that the front office is misreading the market, which is a dangerous thing as well. Mozeliak stated multiple times that if they didn’t jump on Lynn and Gibson now, they might not be there at the end of the week. Was there really that sort of demand for players that were roughly replacement level last year? Since they’ve signed it’s hard to find teams they might have been linked to, but I don’t remember hearing a lot about them lately. Obviously Mo has more of a connection to what is actually happening but it is hard to believe these guys wouldn’t have been out there in mid-December or even later.
With the addition of Lynn and Daniel Descalso as bench coach, the Cards are doing nothing to shake this idea that they are much more worried about people fitting in than people making changes. We’ve talked for years about the club being too insular, too inward looking and these moves don’t make you feel any better about that. Are their reports on Lynn colored by their knowledge of him from the beginning of his career? Would any other team make a guy like Descalso, who had never coached before, a bench coach? Or is this the team trying desperately to reclaim some 2011 magic?
While I’m glad in general that they added Descalso and, given how Joe McEwing was hired at the last minute I am not surprised he didn’t stay as bench coach, that spot seems to be where you’d want someone with experience, maybe in another organization. Skip Schumaker was best of both worlds there, right, given all his time in San Diego as a coach? Why not add Descalso to the staff, a staff you have said you want to increase, but get an experienced old hand for Oli Marmol to bounce things off of?
In this worse case scenario, the club sees the bidding for Yamamoto get past where it wants to go. I have trouble believing that they don’t get either Blake Snell or Gray in that case, but both of those have their own issues. Could they wind up just signing Michael Wacha (to continue to play the greatest hits) and call it a day?
If so, change will be coming to the front office. It seems unlikely a team like that could be the sort of team that St. Louis demands and, if there are two straight terrible years, someone else likely sits in the POBO seat.
We’re continuing the Exit Interview series over at the blog. We’ve had ten the past two days and there will be five more today. We’ll take the break for Thanksgiving and finish it up next week.
For those that are new, I also write devotionals that use Star Wars to illustrate my faith. New ones of those can be found here starting tomorrow and running through Epiphany. If you’d rather them emailed to you drop me a note and I’ll add you to the list.
The lights are pretty much done—at least the front yard, may still tinker with the back but nobody sees that. I’ll flip the switch tomorrow night and try to share some pictures at some point. If you follow me on Twitter I’m sure they will be there first.
Hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving because you truly do have a lot to be thankful for. At the very least, you aren’t a Cubs fan. That’s worth celebrating right there.
Indeed. The Descalso Bench Coach hire seems absurd. Marmol seemed overmatched all year and the chaos around some of his head-scratching behavior can’t be appealing to folks on the outside. Are the Cards an organization any pitcher WANTS to join - FA or not? Seems like a stretch. Marmol & Descalso? Oof
I really cannot imagine any of the pitchers from the top two tiers would choose the Cardinals even if by some miracle they could get the largest offer on the table.
Can’t wait til Marmol is gone, really lost my fandom early in the season last year, dude is a 🤡