It’s too soon to judge Dusty Blake’s performance as pitching coach

Given the staff’s struggles, he’s a convenient scapegoat, but the largely “holdover” staff has probably limited his ability to make progress

While the Cardinals’ 2023 season is a sprawling mosaic of failure, with every possible grim outcome represented in full-throated authority, we can direct most of the blame toward the pitching staff. I don’t need to run down the specific numbers that lead one to such a conclusion, but the poor performance of the staff is undeniable and persists across every class of indicator. 

It’s both predictable and understandable that much of the blame has accrued to first-year pitching coach Dusty Blake. Even though most of us know better than to pick causation out of a police lineup that also includes correlation, it’s hard to deny the obvious reality that the cratering of the pitching staff coincided with Mike Maddux’s departure and Blake’s elevation after serving for two years as the club’s pitching strategist. That said, Blake’s larger mission in tandem with the lack of staff turnover since last season mean it’s simply too soon to know whether Blake was a wise choice as Maddux’s replacement. I get and occasionally indulge in the instinct to find a villain, but until further notice Blake is not it. 

Blake’s task, in addition to the usual pitching-coach role of shepherding the big-league staff through the season, is to improve the entire organization’s faculty for getting strikeouts and swings and misses. This, suffice it to say, is a sprawling assignment and not one accomplished in the span of a single spring and regular season. It’s even more difficult to detect progress when, as just noted, there’s been very little year-over-year churn among Cardinals pitchers at the highest level. One cannot simply will strikeouts into existence when the team ethos for so long has been to induce “field-able” contact off the bat. It takes personnel capable of executing the new vision, and the Cardinals – much to our ongoing chagrin – were content to trot out largely the same staff. 

On this point, some relevant numbers: