Last week, I compared the Cardinals’ position-player strength to that of their primary NL Central obstacle, the Milwaukee Brewers. Today, I am going to tackle the pitching side. I was interested in doing this direct comparison because I think the Cardinals’ position relative to the Brewers will inform the decisions that Chaim Bloom makes this offseason and beyond. The gap, or perceived gap, in talent will need to be tightened for the Cardinals to move into the fun part of the competitive cycle.
On
the position-player side, the head-to-head comparison left me optimistic that the gap in talent is shrinking and that the Cardinals could challenge the Brewers as early as next season on overall production with a few key additions. Reasonable people could disagree with that assessment. My main goal is really just to provide a high-level, but comprehensive, snapshot of the teams’ respective talent levels.
Structuring the pitching comparison is going to be a bit more challenging than the position-player side because modern pitching staffs are fluid, and teams will use 30+ arms throughout a season. I will start by looking at the starting pitchers. Here are the aggregate statistics for both teams’ starters.
The Brewers ranked 4th in baseball in fWAR while the Cardinals checked in at a respectable 12th. The Brewers, of course, dominated on the strikeout side of things while the Cardinals induced more ground balls and suppressed home runs more effectively. The .275 BABIP from the Brewers’ staff might look lucky on the surface, but it is right in line with their six-year average.
Rotations Moving Forward
The Brewers will lose Brandon Woodruff, who contributed 1.2 WAR across nine excellent starts, and Dustin May (0.1 WAR in ten starts) from their rotation moving forward. You can, of course, subtract out Dustin May’s 2.6 WAR contribution from the Cardinals, but the rest of the staff remains under team control.
Here is my take on each team’s current depth chart moving forward with years of team control remaining in parentheses.
Misiorowski is the only undisputed ace on either team. No explanation needed there. It might be a bit generous to call Logan Henderson a No. 2 starter, but he has been phenomenal over his first 23 big-league starts with a 2.33 ERA. If he can limit the home run damage, he looks like he will be a true difference-maker. Sticking with the Brewers, Kyle Harrison is a tough one to slot in. I think of a No. 3 starter as someone you would be OK giving the ball to in a playoff series. Harrison had a horrible second half and pitched himself out of the Brewers’ current playoff rotation, but prior to his IL stint for forearm tightness in July, he was pitching like a No. 2 starter. For the Cardinals, I am totally bought in on Kyle Leahy and would feel comfortable with him as a third starter on a playoff team.
The Cardinals seem to have a bit more depth towards the back of the rotation even with Dobbins’ injury. You can look at the aggregate performance from the Cardinals’ rotation this year and feel they are just a tick behind, but their 2026 felt pretty close to a best-case scenario. Pallante and McGreevy had seasons that will be tough to top. Replicating Dustin May’s production will be no small task. Everything has to go perfectly to have an above-average rotation without any true studs, and that is what the Cardinals pulled off last season.
Things could get dicey for Milwaukee if Misiorowski misses time with injury or regresses from “best pitcher ever” to “normal ace” status. But you have to plan for him to be a mainstay in the rotation for a while. To catch up, the Cardinals will need to come up with a true ace of their own or two or three No. 2-quality starters. We will get to the prospect pipelines in a moment, but the Misiorowski/Henderson combo makes the Brewers a good bet to have a significantly better rotation for the next half-decade.
Bullpen
Here are the team statistics for each team’s bullpen.
The Brewers had one of the best bullpens in baseball thanks primarily to the three-headed monster of Trevor Megill, Abner Uribe, and Aaron Ashby. This group threw almost a third of the total bullpen innings while accounting for 5.5 of the 7.0 total bullpen WAR. You could remove all three top-30-in-MLB relievers from the Brewers, and they would still have had a better bullpen than the Cardinals.
The only positive about the bullpen situation is that volatility and good ol’ regression to the mean is going to work in the Cardinals’ favor. The Brewers’ 7-WAR bullpen was the 15th-highest total over the last six seasons across MLB. I looked at the five teams ranked directly above and below the Brewers and how they performed the following season. In the aggregate, the average bullpen WAR dropped from 7.0 to 5.4. Over that same timeframe, the Cardinals’ bullpen WAR of 0.9 ranked 156th out of 180 pens. Their ten closest comps averaged 3.1 WAR the following season.
Please don’t take this regression optimism as me saying that the Cardinals don’t need to take action. They absolutely should look for outside help to address their issues and/or start moving starters to the pen. But even if they do nothing, they will almost certainly get better next season with the minor leaguers headed for STL.
Still… even if the Cardinals pick up a few wins here, the Brewers have a massive advantage with three difference-making relievers to the Cardinals’ zero.
Pitching Pipeline
I am comparing the respective pitching pipelines independent of the major league bullpen and rotation units because we all know There Is No Such Thing as a Pitching Prospect, and there is no telling where any of these guys will fit into the long-term plans of either team.
The good news is that the Cardinals’ pipeline is significantly stronger than the Brewers’. No matter which prospect ranking outlet you look at, the Cardinals have a large advantage both in upside and depth. Baseball America gives the Cardinals 11 of the top 13 pitcher grades between the two teams. FanGraphs has 37 Cardinals pitchers ranked as FV 35+ compared to 20 for the Brewers. MLB Pipeline, which is more generous in its grading scale than the other two outlets, has 12 Cardinals pitchers ranked 45 FV or better compared to five Brewers prospects.
Here is every pitcher who is graded as a 40 or higher by Baseball America or 45 or higher by Pipeline or FanGraphs, broken out by highest level achieved.
This is the deepest group of pitching prospects that the Cardinals have had since I started following the minors around 2004. It might not have the star power of the 2012 group that included Shelby Miller, Carlos Martinez, Michael Wacha, and Trevor Rosenthal, but they have never had this many names to follow. You could realistically see any of the 11 pitchers who have already made it to Double-A factoring into the 2027 season at some point.
I was only vaguely aware of the Brewers’ top pitching prospects, so I did a little digging to learn more. Hardin is a late-round pick from the 2024 draft. He converted to starting as a professional and climbed to Triple-A in his second full season. He is seen as a control-first pitcher, but his stuff has ticked up a bit and he has started to land on some top-100 prospect lists. He seems to broadly fit in the same tier as Jurrangelo Cijntje. Bishop Letson has a plus fastball and pitched over 90 Double-A innings as a 21-year-old. His profile reminds me of Tink Hence from a couple of years ago. He is a very good prospect but probably a notch below Doyle and Franklin. Josh Knoth sits in the same tier as Letson. He was the 33rd overall pick in the 2023 draft, missed 2025 with Tommy John, and pitched reasonably well across High-A and Double-A in his return this year. He will be entering his age-21 season and has big upside. JD Thompson is a 2025 second-round draft pick who made it to Double-A in his first full season. He struggled to throw strikes and did not distinguish himself in any meaningful way, but has back-of-the-rotation upside. Julian Garcia was the Brewers’ fourth-round pick this summer as an overslot high schooler. He has yet to debut and is obviously a long way off.
This is really where the rubber meets the road for the rebuild. More than half of these pitchers have been brought into the organization since Bloom was announced as the heir-apparent POBO before the 2025 season. I am confident that we will get multiple good major league starters out of this group, but producing a top-of-the-rotation arm is far from a guarantee. Ben Clemens did researcha few years ago that broke down outcomes by prospect FV tier. In the data he analyzed, 55-grade pitching prospects turned into 2.5-4.0 WAR pitchers 27% of the time. For 50 FV prospects, it was 20%; for 45+, 13%; and for 45, 5%. Let’s assume a 55 grade for Doyle, 50 grades for Cijntje and Franklin, 45+ grades for Clarke and Fajardo, and 45 grades for the other nine prospects. Using Clemens’ calculated probabilities, you would expect 1.38 prospects to develop into 2.5-4.0 WAR pitchers. There would be a 22% chance of getting zero.
Maybe the Cardinals’ pitching prospects are underrated or their development system is going to help them outperform these benchmarks, but it sure seems like it will take some good breaks to catch the Brewers without getting outside help.
Conclusion
The Misiorowski/Henderson combination in the rotation, along with the disgustingly talented bullpen arms, gives the Brewers a decisive edge. Realistically, we are stuck putting our hope in multiple pitching prospects quickly jumping to the top of the Cardinals’ rotation or back of the bullpen. The simplest way to think about it is that the Cardinals need two top-of-the-rotation arms and three star relievers to eclipse the talent that the Brewers have amassed. It is possible that level of talent will emerge internally, but not likely.
