This week, I set out on a quest to find a bullpen as bad or worse than the 2026 Cardinals bullpen. We all found it aggravating at times, with only a few bright spots if we were paying attention. The closer was an enigma with a lot of saves, and a lot of memorable blown saves. It certainly felt like. 8 was enough!
George Soriano also had 8 blown saves. etc
Let’s get in a time machine back to 2018. John Brebbia, Jordan Hicks, and Carlos Martinez were our only trustworthy bullpen arms… and Carlos Martinez only pitched 18 innings in relief, so he almost doesn’t count.
Guys with names like Mike Mayers, Tyson Ross, and Dominic Leone were at least a hair above replacement level. They were there, not doing too much harm, but also allowing damage.
Bud Norris, Dakota Hudson, Tyler Webb, and John Gant were also out there, not bad, not good, but there.
Sam Tuivailala showed some promise, but was not much of a factor, either. Greg Holland and his 7.92 ERA was also a member of this bullpen! Sigh. But Brett Cecil was the worst part of this horrible bullpen, with negative fWAR in over 30 IP.
The 2018 Cardinals bullpen ranked #25/30 teams. This team was a good team with a bad bullpen, going 88-74, which was not good enough for the playoffs that year, finishing 2.5 games out of wild card berth.
Oddly enough, the 2017 and 2019 bullpens were assets compared to the 2018 Cardinals’ bullpen. In 2019, Brebbia, Martinez, and Gant stepped it up a notch while Giovanny Gallegos emerged as the bullpen leader. Showing anything can happen, I suppose!
Fastforward to 2021 when the bullpen was an asset again thanks to peak Gallegos and Genesis Cabrera. This bullpen was good enough to make the playoffs, but fell victim to the one game playoff system in place at the time. This would end up Mike Shildt’s last chance in a Cardinal uniform. Ryan Helsley pitched 47 innings with a 4.56 ERA. Kodi Whitley was better than Helsley in only 25 IP.
The 2022 bullpen was lead by the talents of Ryan Helsley who emerged as a 1.25 ERA / 2.34 FIP dominant pitcher! Gallegos was also incredibly good that season, albeit not quite that astonishing at 2.88 FIP. That’s a nice duo to build a bullpen around…
The issue was that Jordan Hicks would have been a triple threat, but he had a rather unlucky 4.37 ERA, while his other rate stats were 2.39 xERA, 3.06 FIP, and 3.20 xFIP. That’s enough evidence for bad luck. Maybe he was tipping his pitches.
While 2022 relievers had some high end talent, the bullpen also included guys like Packy Naughton, Jake Woodford, Chris Stratton, and Zach Thompson. So even with the one-two of peak Helsley and a still really good Gallegos, this bullpen ended up in the middle of the pack.
The Cardinals bullpen remained mid in 2023 and 2024, but in 2025 the bullpen was actually an asset.
But… in 2026 it was an afterthought. sad, really.
So many lessons not learned by the organization. The bullpen is back to 2018 levels where it crippled the team for some reason, reasons unknown other than they though they thought they could get away with the bullpen as an afterthought. It is a fantasy that you do not need a reliable bullpen. I agree with all sabermetric finds outside of this one.
8 years later, the Cardinals have designed a bullpen almost to fail spectacularly with Gordon Graceffo the most valuable member by fWAR. That was not supposed to happen! O’Brien and Bruihl were both above replacement level. Yet, the Cardinals bullpen were #25/30 in WAR. They barely cracked the top 20 in ERA. Not real good, especially with a lackluster bullpen.
If there is some sort of decade cycle, we should not be worried about the bullpen. We had an offyear in 2018, which was surrounded by good bullpen years. There’s a good chance that the 2025 bullpen is closer to the 2027 than the 2026 one was. I think the Cardinals are overall bullpen savvy, so there should be some improvement during the next season. They don’t usually cough up a bad bullpen.
1999 Heavy Metal for Halloween!
- Today Is The Day – ‘In The Eyes of God’ two members of Mastodon before they went on to their more well-known band, and early alt metal noise rock stalwart Steve Austin, create a monster of a prog metal psychedelic art rock album of the highest order (live in St Louis 1999)
- External Suffering – ‘Drowning in Tragedy’ a good example of everything that was happening in heavy music in 1999. new find, but I think an instant classic!
- Melvins – ‘The Maggot’ one of the best Melvins albums of all! even has a cover song! Top tier.
- Botch – ‘We Are The Romans’ Converge opened the doors a year before, but Botch took it to the next level for the times! post punk metalcore noise rock whatever you want to call it this is influential af for 1999
- Neurosis – ‘Times of Grace’ heavy and haunting to this day, for me completes their first four cycle of album in grand fashion, haunting and hypnotic and heavy, but more noise rock maybe?
- Type O Negative – ‘World Coming Down’ the heaviest Type O Negative album, a band that is just as much doom metal as it is goth rock and epic industrial metal.
- The Dillinger Escape Plan – ‘Calculating Infinity’ reinvented the whole game
- Immolation – ‘Failures For Gods’ early death metal stalwart becomes legendary!
- Angelcorpse – ‘The Inexorable’ intricate, brutal tech death of the highest order from KC!
- Deeds of Flesh – ‘Path of the Weakening’ instant classic upon first listen!
- Breach – ‘Venom’ there was definitely a noise rock prog metal thing happening this year, and this was definitely a good part of it!
- Cave In – ‘Until Your Heart Stops’ legendary noise rock post metal album along with Both and Breach!
- Nootgrush – ‘Erode The Person’ the sludge metal legends get it started here!
- Monstrosity – ‘In Dark Purity’
- Deformity – ‘Murder Within Sin’
- Delorian – ‘When All The Laughter Has Gone’
- Cavity – ‘Supercollider’
- Vile – ‘Stench of the Deceased’
- Amorbital – ‘Invicta’
- Unruh – ‘Setting Fire To Sinking Ships’
Well there you have it, a heavy metal Halloween soundtrack time machine to the year 1999!
1999 Heavy Metal Underground Radio From George Matt Bowles
Happy Early Halloweeen VEB! I found a cat mask that looked like my cat, so I was a cat dad for Halloween at work. What are you going to be? I spent many years not being anything, which is just as good!