The walls shook around MLB front offices last week when the Toronto Blue Jays signed free-agent starting pitcher Dylan Cease to a sumptuous seven-year deal valued at $210 million. The contract has an annual average salary of $30 million.
In terms of contract length, the magnitude of the Cease signing exceeded all projections. The crowdsourcing survey at Fan Graphs came in with an estimate of five years, $130 million. ESPN’s Kiley McDaniel predicted five years, $145 million. The Athletic projected six years, $174 million.
The reliable MLB Trade Rumors site has a good track record for making realistic and fairly accurate projections. So it was no surprise to see MLBTR closest to the mark with its Cease projection of seven years, $189 million. That’s an annual average salary of $27 million – only $3 million less per year than the actual contract.
Cease is certainly a talented and formidable starter who cranks out impressive strikeout rates. Just imagine the final cost of this transaction had Cease turned in a great 2025 season for the Padres. But his performance was valued at 3.4 Wins Above Replacement, the lowest of his career in a full season – and down from his 4.7 WAR in 2024.
And Toronto’s early signing will likely lead to larger contracts for the other coveted starting pitchers in the free-agent pool. The group includes Framber Valdez, Ranger Suarez, Michael King, Japan’s Tatsuya Imai, Zac Gallen, Chris Bassitt, Merrill Kelly and Cody Ponce.
Ponce, who pitched unsuccessfully for the Pirates, spent two seasons in Korea and a third in Japan to refashion his pitching repertoire and performance. And he did well, following the example set previously by Miles Mikolas and Erick Fedde. Initial projections estimated a two-year, $16 million deal for Ponce in his return to the majors. But in the aftermath of the Dylan Cease signing, The Athletic projects a likely three-year, $30 million payout for Ponce.
Heck, given how the rates are rising in the pursuit of free-agent starting pitching, we can probably expect to see teams bidding against each other for the likes of Zach Eflin, Tyler Mahle, Dustin May and Zack Littell. Nick Martinez may end up with a contract that tops anything he’d dreamed off.
A friendly suggestion to my fellow authors: hold off on those “Cardinals should go after (any name will do) as a lower-cost, good-value signing.” The way things are going, a lower-cost, good-value signing will get you Dakota Hudson or Cal Quantrill. I’m exaggerating for effect, but my general point holds true.
So how will this inflation impact the rebuilding St. Louis Cardinals? The upcoming Rule V Draft is one option for identifying (and grabbing) a starter with promise.
If he still has the Tampa Bay touch, Cards president of baseball operations Chaim Bloom will find a bargain starter. Surely they’re out there … somewhere.
Or he will convince potential trade partners who want Brendan Donovan to include a near major-league ready starting pitcher in the deal … a starting pitcher that Bloom and his team have been tracking and like what they’ve seen.
Or the Cards could pursue a young (and presumably available) MLB starter like Miami’s Edward Cabrera. He is just one example. Cabrera has a career 26% strikeout rate and can’t become a free agent until after the 2028 season. The cost for Cabrera would be exorbitant. And depending on how long this St. Louis rebuilding project will last, Cabrera may not fit Bloom’s timetable.
Needless to say, it’s going to be a long time – if at all – before the Cardinals will head to the marketplace ready to offer Dylan Cease money to a starting pitcher.
Cardinals chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. has no enthusiasm for investing heavily in the top-tier starting pitchers on the annual free-agent stage. The payroll obsessives will rip DeWitt for being cheap, but I can tell you from past conversations with BDJ that his reasoning is based on logic: specifically the increasing and alarming number of starting-pitcher breakdowns that put them out of action for substantial lengths of time.
And DeWitt isn’t making any of this up.
I did some research Tuesday morning and here’s what I found. As always, I’m happy to share the information with our subscribers. And for this exercise the focus is on starting-pitching injuries.
Relievers are also blowing out elbow ligaments and shoulder muscles but as a group they cost less than the show-horse starting pitchers and there are more of them. Good starters are more difficult to find. As the old saying goes, relievers are fungible.
Here’s the starting-pitcher injury scorecard for the past three seasons:
2024: 148 injured starting pitchers collectively missed 13,516 days. The total amount of salaries spent on injured pitchers who missed the 13,516 was $420 million.
2025: 160 starting pitchers collectively missed 15,037 days and were paid $460 million during the 15,037 missed days.
2023: The figures were similar, though I couldn’t find the exact numbers of starters and total days missed because of injuries. (One of the sites I lean on was in a state of malfunction.) But I can tell you that MLB teams collectively paid starters $470 million during their time lost to injury in ‘23.
During a time of change in approach and performance priorities, pitchers throw harder and harder and harder. And as the velocities have increased on those blazing fastballs, the injury-related damage report is disturbing.
Still teams are willing to take their chances with high-level velo starters and hope for the best. (See: Jacob de Grom.) Teams – and the pitchers themselves – want the higher strikeout rates. And losing the rocket arms to the Injured List is just another occupational hazard.
Let’s bring relievers into this. Here’s the total of number of days missed during a season because of injuries to starters and relievers each year beginning in 2014 and skipping the 2020 pandemic-shortened season:
2014: 16,159 days missed.
2015: 19,677 days.
2016: 19,638 days.
2017: 19,899 days.
2018: 22,397 days.
2019: 22,379 days.
2021: 29,331 days.
2022: 29,524 days.
2023: 31,592 days.
2024: 32,257 days.
2025: 30,892 days.
Good grief.
That’s some serious carnage.
Once upon a time, and for a long time, the great Bill James was a contrarian on the subject of the pitching-injury epidemic. But James conceded late during the 2023 season. As James wrote on his now-inactive web site:
“The belief that the number of pitcher injuries is increasing seems to be clearly true. The rates of pitcher value retention have decreased steadily in recent decades, and have declined sharply in the last few years. This is fully consistent with the widespread belief that pitcher injuries are increasing.
“Not as many pitchers are having full careers,” James continued. “I don’t really think there is any other explanation for it. Careers really are getting shorter, not only in terms of innings but in terms of years. Fewer top-level pitchers are able to stay at the top; fewer mid-level pitchers are able to stay in the middle.”
Look, I think at some point – when the Cardinals are in position to contend for the pennant and World Series title, ownership will have to buck up and pay the going rate for an elite starting pitcher. Do I think that will happen? I’m doubtful.
The Cardinals passed on an opportunity of a lifetime after the 2014 season when native St. Louisan departed Detroit as a free agent. Max wanted to come home and pitch for the Cardinals. He had a much larger offer from Washington and only asked that the Cardinals get closer to the Nationals’ offer. But DeWitt just believes that it’s too risky to give massive contracts to starting pitchers.
Not that the Cardinals ever spent top-price money on starting pitchers. But through the 30 years of DeWitt ownership the Cardinals endured many injuries to some of their most important pitchers.
This particular IL would have the names of Chris Carpenter, Adam Wainwright, Mark Mulder, Michael Wacha, Alex Reyes, Andy Benes, Alan Benes, Kyle Lohse, Woody Williams, Matt Morris, Jaime Garcia, Dakota Hudson, Jason Motte, Jason Isringhausen, Trevor Rosenthal, Kevin Siegrist, Jordan Hicks, Brett Cecil – and many others.
The 2025 Cardinals were extremely fortunate because they had to use only six starting pitchers all season. At no point did a St. Louis starter miss time on the IL. Maintaining that extraordinary starting-pitching health is highly improbable in 2026.
We can table the debate on DeWitt’s uneasiness with the idea of spending vast sums of cash on starting pitchers. I think reasonable people would agree with this: the Cardinals are getting back to the crucial necessity of drafting, developing or otherwise cultivating their own starting pitching.
From 2009 through 2022 the Redbirds made the postseason 10 times and their rotation was populated by home-schooled starters such as Wainwright, Lance Lynn, Wacha, Garcia, Jack Flaherty, Joe Kelly, Shelby Miller, Carlos Martinez, Hudson and Luke Weaver. The bullpen was stocked with internally developed relievers like Jason Motte, Trevor Rosenthal, Kevin Siegrist, Seth Maness, Fernando Salas, Mitchell Boggs and Jordan Hicks.
Over that 14-year run of success the Cardinals ranked second in the majors in starting-pitching ERA and their starters were third in quality starts and innings pitched. Only the Dodgers and Yankees won more regular-season games during that time, and the Cardinals ranked fifth in MLB for most postseason wins.
From 2009 through 2022, just over 60 percent of the St. Louis starts were made by pitchers drafted and developed by the organization.
Since the beginning of 2023, only 35 percent of the Cardinals’ 648 regular-season starts were made by their drafted-developed talent. And frankly many of those starts were made by below-average, non-factor types … mixed in with rotation liabilities. To put it another way, among the homegrown starting pitchers the dude with the most Wins Above Replacement since the start of 2023 is Andre Pallante. Enough said.
The pitcher-development program faded and died from neglect, and that led the Cardinals on a frantic search to find starting pitching on a year-to-year basis.
Over the past three seasons the Cardinals ranked 22nd among the 30 MLB teams in winning percentage. A substantial reason for the decline was their cast of starting pitchers that collectively ranked 22nd in fielding independent ERA, 25th in standard ERA, 23rd in WAR, 26th in Win Probability Added and 29th in strikeout rate.
On a brighter note …
Chaim Bloom – with considerable assistance from director of scouting Randy Flores – is quickly rebuilding the organization’s starting-pitching stock that now includes a growing number of power arms.
Not all of their best pitching prospects are high-octane heaters so this Cardinal collection features different varieties of pitching styles. And some of these arms/shoulders are rehabbing from injury – which is normal during this era. And it's an obvious reason why it's so imperative to amass as much pitching as possible.
Of course, we could see a percentage of these arms switched to relief roles based on need. And there's nothing wrong with that; bullpens are hugely important and handle a much larger innings load compared to yesteryear baseball.
The names to monitor are Liam Doyle, Quinn Mathews, Brandon Clarke, Tekoah Roby, Tink Hence, Ixan Henderson, Nate Dohm, Tanner Franklin, Chen-Wei Lin, Brycen Mautz, Cooper Hjerpe, Braden Davis, Cade Crossland, Luis Gasteum and Brian Holiday.
The Cardinals are in the process of going back in time to do something that only a few MLB organizations could match: having a consistently successful model for developing young pitching.
And with the extreme price inflation of free-agent starting pitchers, it’s a great time for the Cards to focus on farming. Grow their own pitchers. It’s smart. It’s cost-effective. And it will leave plenty of payroll space for filling other needs.
I guess I’m crazy, but I prefer this to watching the desperate Cardinals have to go out and overpay for some other team’s discarded, throwaway pitchers. But if your idea of a good time is having Chaim Bloom engage in a strong free-agent pursuit of Chris Paddack ... Well, enjoy.
Thanks for reading …
–Bernie
Bernie was inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame in 2023. During a St. Louis sports-media career that goes back to 1985, he’s won multiple national awards for column writing and sports-talk hosting – and was the lead sports columnist at the Post-Dispatch from 1989 through 2015. Before that Bernie spent a year at the Dallas Morning News, covering the Dallas Cowboys during Tom Landry’s final season (1988) plus the sale of the team to Jerry Jones and the hiring of Jimmy Johnson as coach.
Bernie has covered several Baseball Hall of Fame managers during his media career including Tony La Russa, Whitey Herzog, Earl Weaver, Joe Torre and (as an interim) Red Schoendienst. Bernie covered every baseball Cardinals’ postseason game from 1996 through 2014 and was there to chronicle teams that won four NL pennants and two World Series. He provided extensive coverage on the “Greatest Show” St. Louis Rams and has written extensively on the St. Louis Blues and Mizzou football and basketball. Bernie was/is a longtime voter for the Baseball Hall of Fame, Pro Football Hall of Fame, Heisman Trophy and the St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Fame.
You can access his columns, videos and the podcast version of the videos here on STLSportsCentral, catch him regularly on KMOX (AM or FM) as part of the Gashouse Gang, Sports Rush Hour, Sports Open Line or Sports On a Sunday Morning shows. And you can catch weekly “reunion” segments here at STL Sports Central featuring Bernie and his longtime friend Randy Karraker.