I have been waiting for years for the Cardinals to get rid of Jack Flaherty.
And by years, I mean, almost since the beginning. Since well before his 2019 post-All-Star game Gibson imitation.
I believe my rationale for this was sound.
First of all, I was never of the belief that Jack Flaherty was all that good. This could be a mistake on my part. Pitchers are the hardest position to project out. There are plenty of pitchers that are late bloomers. Even if you do pitch well in your early years, like for example Verlander and Scherzer, how does one project the studs they would become in their 30s?
But Jack Flaherty falls along the classic lines that many Cardinals prospects do – that Masyn Winn is encountering right now – he was a mid-100s prospect that Cardinals fans treat like an immediate MVP candidate. Whereas the simple reality is, there are 30 teams, with proper dispersion a Winn or a Flaherty is but a team’s 2nd best prospect. How many 2nd best prospects are destined for immediate stardom?
Flaherty, for his part, DID his part. His rookie year was as good as one could hope for. And I was happy to cheer along. A Cardinals pitcher with a 10.85K/9? Be still my heart! The Cardinals NEVER have strikeout pitchers. We’re a fan base that has spent our time cheering for Seth Maness.
There were signs that Flaherty was lucky – his BABIP that year was .257, which broke the SABR rule (now completely destroyed) that any number straying from .300 was a matter of luck. That was always a bad way of thinking, but .257 seemed beyond the pale at that time.
But most importantly for those that had visions of Flaherty’s HOF plaque emblazoned with a Cardinals hat: contract negotiations with the Cardinals went terribly from the word ‘go.’
When a player is in their 1st 3 years of the majors, they can sign contracts, or a team can renew their contract for the following year.
The player has absolutely no power in this process. The team can offer you more money, and you can accept, or you cannot accept, and…oh well. They are going to pay you what they are going to pay you.
Usually, the best rookies will get modest pay bumps as a gesture of goodwill, an olive branch going forward if you will. Giving a guy $50K extra now might save you a million dollars in the future and might get you better production going forward because you don’t have an angry and bitter player on the field.
Around the time Jack Flaherty was coming up, the Cardinals created a cold, hard calculation for how to deal with these matters.
Jack Flaherty was offered $572,100 dollars for his 2nd season. The MLB minimum that year was $555,000.
A player can expect a modest raise above the minimum in their 2nd year, and in this case, the raise was approximately $17K, for a guy who finished 5th in ROY voting in spite of starting the year in the minor leagues.
Flaherty rejected the offer.
Uh oh.
I’m not here to tell you the Cardinal’s offer was bad. The team has the power to do whatever they want in this case, so anything above the MLB minimum is essentially free bonus money given away from a franchise that historically can’t talk enough about how limited its resources are.
I’m not here to tell you it was good, either. I don’t know that it was. What I do know is that the Cardinals went a full decade without renewing a single contract until the year prior, when it happened with Tommy Pham. And then, before the 2019 season it happened again with Jack Flaherty. Oh, and you can throw Jordan Hicks in there as well. Zero renewals for a decade, and then three in the span of two years. I don’t know about you, but it kinda sorta sounds like a penny-pinching change in philosophy for the team? It’s a little bit of bullying the most powerless members of the club – but also the ones that are supposed to be leading your future?
I can’t say that. Honestly.
Because there are two sides of the coin here, and one of those is Jack Flaherty, who in a position of zero leverage, refused to sign on for free extra money.
So what does this tell us about Jack Flaherty and his compatibility with the tight-wad Cardinals going forward? Does this sound like a guy who is going to be gushing about the team and is going to sign a long-term contract to cement his legacy here? Or does it sound like a guy determined to get every last penny a team is owed to him?
I know what it sounds like to me, and that’s a player that, like it or not, isn’t a match for the Cardinals. Players who prioritize money are not good fits for a management team that prioritizes, well, money.
And then there’s what happened next:
After rejecting the Cardinal’s offer of $572,100, the Cardinals could renew Flaherty’s contract for any amount of money. They were willing to pay him $572, 100. They renewed him for $562,100.
The Cardinals punished their star rookie for $10,000 for not bowing down to them.
And for me, at that point, the answer was simple. TRADE HIM! TRADE HIM! GET VALUE OUT OF THIS ONE! YOU DONE POISONED THE WELL!
Look, no amount of apologies are going to fix a relationship when you run over the girlfriend’s dog. It’s best to stop trying and start the healing process faster.
It’s not that time doesn’t heal wounds, and it’s not that players can’t go through this stuff and sign long contracts, it’s that $10,000 here – which was already less than Jack felt he earned – was probably going to cost a lot more in the future to make up for it. And again, we’re talking about the St. Louis Cardinals. Not a team notorious for being the highest bidder.
So the calculation looked like this: Jack Flaherty the superstar, was going to leave the St. Louis Cardinals. Jack Flaherty the not-superstar wasn’t going to be worth keeping. Ergo, Jack Flaherty ought to be permanently on the trade market, especially when his value is at its peak.
The next year was Flaherty’s fantastic 2nd half stretch, which one can disagree with the true value of:
Through July 2nd, Flaherty had an ERA of 4.90
After July 2nd, Flaherty had an ERA of 0.93
So was Jack Flaherty the new Bob Gibson? Or was he the new Todd Wellemeyer? There’s a bit of a gap in those there comps.
Naturally, the truth was in the middle, but fans – and the organization – became enamored with the idea that this guy had unlocked the key to being completely unhittable, and was an ace going forward.
The metrics would tell you differently. They wouldn’t tell you he was bad, but just that he wasn’t a top-of-the-rotation ace.
Ignoring his ineffective call-up in 2017, here are Flaherty’s FIPs from 2018-to 2023 so far:
2018 – 3.86
2019 – 3.46
2020 – 4.11
2021 – 4.22
2022 – 4.97
2023 – 4.23
Neither of us are salivating over those numbers.
As a prospect, Flaherty was seen as an average MLB starter (which is very good, remember, we’re talking about STARTER, not PITCHER) who could also be an above-average MLB starter. That’s REALLY good! That’s still different from an ace.
When you look at those FIPs, and remember his amazing 2nd half is included in those numbers, the Jack Flaherty people swore existed, and that everyone has been waiting on, was a guy that never actually existed. He had an amazing, stupendous 2nd half, and the Cardinals have spent years waiting for that run to reappear. Not only has it not happened, but he hasn’t come especially close to duplicating his full-season success, which included half of a terrible season!
But I digress.
At the end of his amazing age-23 run, Flaherty could have been traded for all the tea in China. And I have no idea how much tea there actually is in China, but he could have been traded for every last drop of it, and more. Their seltzer water? Yeah, he could have fetched that too. Any cold-brew coffee? They’d be happy to throw it in. Here was the superstar pitcher of the future.
What happened with Flaherty’s contract after the season?
He was offered $614,500. He once again rejected the offer. The Cardinals once again penalized him $10,000 for doing so.
As for a long-term deal, apparently, it was explored, and Derrick Goold wrote at the time that they “were not able to find common ground for the discussion of an extension going into this spring training,”
Once again, I invite you to blame whom you would like for this, however, when you have a situation where a young player isn’t even accepting your forced deals, let alone finding enough common ground to work out an extension through his arbitration years – what does it say about the future of the relationship between team and player?
Was Flaherty a stubborn moron? Were the Cardinal’s cheap bastards? Was it something in the middle? I don’t know and I don’t care. What I do know is that Flaherty needed to be traded then.
The Cardinals steadfastly refused to trade Flaherty then. Even when they were in talks for a guy named Nolan Arenado.
From there, Flaherty’s stock began to slowly drop. His 2020 was bad. But it was 2020. There’s not much analysis worth doing. Flaherty was still seen as an ace thanks to his late-2019 success. His value was still high around baseball, and the Cardinals were still on unfriendly contract terms.
Jack Flaherty and the Cardinals were finally in his arbitration years. Jack Flaherty finally had leverage.
The Cardinals were a team that historically never went to arbitration. They had spent 15 seasons not going to arbitration with a single player. But like they introduced a new calculation for pre-arb players that was suddenly getting rejected, they also purposely went to arbitration with Michael Wacha before the 2017 season. From MLB.com:
“The organization recently adopted a trial-and-file philosophy, which meant that once it exchanged arbitration figures with Wacha in mid-January, independent negotiations ended.“
It was another indication the Cardinals were now going to be playing hardball with the cheapest and weakest of their players. As a result, you guessed it, they went to arbitration with Jack Flaherty after it was revealed that the two came within $300,000 of an agreement.
Jack Flaherty won his case. The first time the Cardinals had lost an arbitration hearing since 1994.
And while his surface numbers looked good – 9-2 with a 3.22 ERA – his peripherals didn’t tell the same tale of success. Furthermore, he managed just 78.1 innings on the year and would be starting the 2022 season on the DL.
Perhaps as a result, for the first time in his career, Jack Flaherty and the team agreed to a contract. He would be paid $5 million dollars for the 2022 season. To me it’s a sign that even Jack Flaherty knew that his stock was dropping.
And what’s amazing about this journey is that the Cardinals kept depending on him being an ace. He was always the answer to their pitching problems. He was always the offseason optimistic output that “with the return of Jack Flaherty…” Hey! The top of the rotation actually looks pretty damn good!
Of course, it got worse from there. Jack managed a total of 36 innings in 2022. They weren’t great. It wasn’t to be unexpected. He was years away from both health and success at this point.
And that took us into 2023. Jack Flaherty once again agreed to a contract with the Cardinals, this time for a modest raise up to $5.4 million. And Jack said a curious thing when asked about his contract situation.
When talking about staying with the Cardinals for his entire career, Jack said, “That would be awesome.”
Yeah, I bet it would buddy! After years and years of not agreeing to anything, suddenly Jack, at his absolute lowest value, is ready to sign a long-term contract! Why, I’m astounded at this turnaround in opinion!
And while Jack was at the lowest value, guess what? There are reports that the Cardinals never went into contract talks. Well, of course not! That ship had sailed!
That seems reasonable, doesn’t it? Why are you going to sign a long-term contract with a pitcher that has been so unreliable? Forget all of the contract animosity. A few years before, you’d be willing to commit 5-10 years to Jack easily. Now? Forget it! Who would have been crazy enough to do that after last year?
That’s all well and good, except it was the Cardinals who purposely were depending on him. It’s the Cardinals who sought no additional pitching help. It’s the Cardinals who, once again, went into this season hyping Jack in the rotation. Mo said he “never felt better” about him.
Never felt better! About Jack! The Ace! That they won’t offer a multi-year contract to! At a time when they had basically no pitching under contract for the following season!
So, if you don’t mind me asking, after a season of absolutely maddening pitching and a “who-da-thunk it?” attitude at the ineffectiveness of the staff, why were we made to think once again that Jack Flaherty was going to be the answer to the team’s need for a top pitcher when the team itself clearly didn’t believe it?
Now here we are at the trade deadline. Jack hasn’t had a great season. He’s an average starter. Again, an average starter is a good thing. But an average starter isn’t an ace. He isn’t your go-to guy. He’s an average starter.
And 4 days before the trade deadline, 4 years removed from Flaherty’s multi-month glimpse of stardom, we find out that the Cardinals are hoping to extend his contract at the last minute before the deadline sands disappear.
Excuse me while I puke.
This is, of course, not a sign that the Cardinals are trying to win next year. Jack Flaherty wasn’t a piece for them to win this year. It’s not a sign of a bold, new standard in spending money on pitchers – which was just reported to us two days ago. It’s a sign that Jack Flaherty, average starter, has had his stock drop so much that now he suddenly looks like just the guy the Cardinals sign again and again from Lohse to Leake to Mikolas to Matz. He’s an average starter getting an average starter’s salary. Let’s play it safe, boys. We need to compete again in 2024, and how we’re going to do that is with the same formula we used in 2023.
Perhaps the Cardinals have seen that their return packages for Flaherty are just not worth it. I can see that. They’ve bungled this from the beginning. What did I say before? Superstar Jack was never going to stay, so trade him. Not-superstar Jack isn’t worth keeping, so trade him.
Instead, the Cardinals have let day by day and year by year tick by until there became an option 3. Non-superstar Jack has fallen so low, he’s cheap enough to stay. And Jack is smart enough to know it didn’t work out the way he had it planned. But he still gets to be rich, and suddenly the Cardinals might just be in the ballpark of what his best offers are going to be.
So I’ve waited for years for the inevitability of Jack Flaherty being gone, and perhaps, strangely enough, he’s going to stay.
You might think I’d be miffed at this. And I am. In my opinion, The Cardinals have been meticulously screwing this up for a half-decade. I’m still bewildered and frustrated at the front office.
But I’m not mad at Jack. I’ve spent years labeling him one way, before seeing him as another. I try my best to remember that players are humans. I’m never going to personally insult a guy. I’m never going to forget that they have weaknesses. If you have a 12 ERA, I’m going to say you suck because at a MLB level, you do. But I don’t mean it at a personal level, and I don’t want your 2nd cousin reading it and being upset by it. I have tried to keep both aspects in mind at the same time. There’s a cold-hearted business here, and there are humans here.
I watched Jack’s post-game interview. I watched his emotions. I watched how sad he was to be leaving. I don’t know what that sadness is. I remember being sad to leave my High School, but thrilled to go to college. Maybe that’s all this is. But humans are complex creatures like that. I wrote off Jack saying he’d love to stay in St. Louis before the season, as being a calculated talking point, but that was a mistake of mine. What I saw out of him yesterday was real. What I assigned to him before yesterday from afar upon my couch, was a person who didn’t give one flip about the Cardinals as an organization. St. Louis was a means to an end for him.
Well, try as I might, I continue to have a perfect score of being a moron.
I dehumanized his level of depth and complexity and found that, albeit for different reasons, here was a person who shared the same goals for, and love of the St. Louis Cardinals that I do.
And thus here I am, on the precipice of the moment I’ve been waiting years for – Jack Flaherty to finally be gone – And I find myself just so, so sad that it might happen.