What's up with the pitching staff vis-a-vis BB and K?
Without really diving into a lot of underlying metrics, it's perplexing to me that in a season where we were told the organization was going to focus on more high-octane pitchers and pitching results, we're instead seeing a staff doing the exact opposite. The K/9 has dropped from an already-low 7.6 last year to an abysmal 6.2 this year, and BB/9 has increased from 2.9 to 4.0. This is the exact opposite of what I expected to see from the "retool" season--I figured more hittable, sure, but also improving on Ks without sacrificing control--and I'm not sure now if I believe this will be a quick retool as opposed to a longer 4+ year rebuild, if they can't identify and develop strikeout pitchers when that's their explicit goal.
The only two pitchers, 24 games into the season, with a better K rate than last year are Stanek and O'Brien (Fernandez may have also just joined the group with his 2-K inning today). Most everybody else has dropped pretty significantly, headlined by Libby dropping from 7.2 to 5.3, Graceffo from 8.4 to 5.1, Romero from 8.1 to 4.5, and Svanson from 10.1 to 7.5. Where last year's staff had 20 pitchers in double-digit innings and just 2 with a walks-per-nine of 5.0 or above, this year it's 6 of 12. Admittedly we're still early, barely 1/7 of the way through the season, but the trend is pretty rough and didn't show up early last year either.
I didn't expect Blake to unlock a pitching staff full of fireballers suddenly, but I certainly didn't think we'd be seeing this kind of regression from his staff on those two key figures.
Now, as a caveat, last year's season-long WPA from all StL pitchers was -0.3, and so far this year as a group they're at 0.8. They don't look notably worse from the perspective of hard-hit percentage, line drive rate, exit velo, HR%, OPS against.....maybe a little luckier this year on BAbip, but otherwise the metrics don't look that drastically different. Contact rate is up from 27% to 30%, and first-pitch strikes down from 64% to 57%, so basically they aren't getting ahead in counts, which means when they do throw strikes the hitters are ready for it and put the ball in play.
So are the K and BB numbers at this point in the season misleading? Do the underlying metrics look okay and we should get some positive regression if they can start getting ahead in more early counts? Or is this going to be a season of watching Cardinals pitchers not fooling hitters, and remaining near the bottom of MLB for strikeouts, walks, hits, and runs, with a big ol' question mark in the offseason regarding who's worth including in their rebuild plans (Dusty Blake included)?