Opening night: Jack Flaherty keeps rolling, Cards vow to back Black Lives Matter

June 04, 2024

ST. LOUIS — Jack Flaherty was not happy with his final tuneup before the regular season. Facing his teammates in an intrasquad game last weekend, Flaherty saw Cardinals hitters barrel too many of his pitches for his liking, including one that Matt Carpenter hit into the bullpen for a home run.

Asked a few days later to assess the Cardinals’ offense, viewed as a possible weak spot this season, Flaherty shot back: “Did you see that last game? They kind of hit my shit around.”

Flaherty seemed like a different man Friday night in the Cardinals’ 5-4 win over the Pittsburgh Pirates that began this short, strange 2020 season. As the Cardinals have seen for several years now, most emphatically during a historic second-half run last season, Flaherty rarely fails to learn from his bad experiences.

“I felt in summer camp I was trying too hard,” Flaherty said. “It’s not that I was trying to take a step back and do less, but mentally, I did a little thinking. If you look at that lineup, they don’t strike out a whole lot, so to try to come out and strike everyone out would have been stupid. Just take the outs when you get them.”

Jack Flaherty😍😍😍😍 pic.twitter.com/7IrI9vReXc

— Jared Carrabis (@Jared_Carrabis) July 25, 2020

Flaherty pitched to weak contact and absolutely cruised the first two times he faced Pittsburgh’s order. He managed to get through seven strong innings, no mean feat for a pitcher coming off a preseason camp roughly half as long as a typical spring training. It wasn’t his most dominant line score — two runs on six hits with six strikeouts — but it was another example of a burgeoning young ace who can design a game plan as easily as he can shape a breaking ball. Speaking of those, his rapidly improving curveball is beginning to make him a double threat with a wipeout slider that already got the league’s attention last season.

The Cardinals, for obvious reasons, expected no less from a pitcher many of them expect to contend for a Cy Young Award this season. They were well acquainted with him from last season.

“He’s a bulldog,” Tyler O’Neill said. “He’s going to give us every chance to win when he’s out there.”

After a key strikeout, Flaherty found himself marveling at the strange stadium environment, devoid of fans but using piped-in crowd noise to make the TV viewing experience more lifelike. But rarely does he dwell on something that could cause his focus to waver.

Flaherty was as efficient as a pile driver most of Friday. He got through the first five innings in a crisp 53 pitches and didn’t ease up when he had to face the Pirates the third time through their order. That can prove dicey, and even Flaherty, who finished fourth in Cy Young balloting last season, feels it. Opponents batted .258 off him the third time up. Contrast that with the hapless .128 batters hit when they were seeing him in their first at-bat.

In the sixth, with hitters digging in for their third looks at him, Flaherty got a quick groundout and then set up Kevin Newman with a 96 mph fastball before striking him out on a 78 mph curveball. Bryan Reynolds, another good young Pirates hitter, didn’t fare much better. Flaherty set him up with another mid-90s fastball, and a few pitches later, Reynolds swung at a 78 mph curveball and topped it on a couple of hops down to Paul Goldschmidt at first base for an easy out. Last year, people raved about Flaherty’s slider as he buzzed his way through the Cardinals’ second half with a 0.91 ERA. It would appear his curveball rapidly is catching up.

“The confidence is there,” Flaherty said. “I threw them in a bunch of different counts today. It’s just a pitch that has come a long way.”

Flaherty threw no more than 12 pitches in any of his first six innings.

The turbulence finally arrived in the seventh, when Josh Bell sprinted down the line to earn an infield hit and Colin Moran dumped a single into center field before José Osuna ripped an infield single off third baseman Tommy Edman’s glove. For the first time all night, Flaherty had to dig a little deeper. To that point, he had not had an inning that required more than 12 pitches.

Flaherty finally started to sweat on a humid night. His pitch count crept over the 85 the Cardinals set as a guideline for how far they would extend him on his first start of the season after a short summer camp. But he dug deep. He dotted a fastball at the bottom of the strike zone to strike out Guillermo Heredia. Jacob Stallings did some nice hitting to shoot a single through the right side and drive in two runs, but Flaherty kept the lead by getting Jarrod Dyson to chop one right back to Flaherty.

The Cardinals survived a shaky ninth inning by rookie closer Kwang-Hyun Kim to prevail.

Standing in solidarity

Along with the other major-league teams, the Cardinals have thrown their weight behind the Black Lives Matter movement. Cardinals players wore the social movement’s T-shirts for warmups before Friday’s game, and Flaherty still was wearing it 20 minutes before first pitch. He said he likely will wear the Black Lives Matter T-shirt, which was distributed to players by Major League Baseball, while he’s getting loose before every game this season.

The initials “BLM” were burnished into the mound where Flaherty and the rest of Friday’s pitchers worked.

Flaherty, an outspoken supporter of Black Lives Matter, said last week that players around baseball might choose to kneel for the national anthem, a gesture of protest over racial injustice and police brutality popularized by former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick. The Cardinals instead collectively decided to stand for the national anthem. Dyson was the lone player to kneel for “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

We are united in the fight to end systemic racism. #STLCards pic.twitter.com/55G2XzqSHj

— St. Louis Cardinals (@Cardinals) July 25, 2020

The business cost to the Cardinals of supporting the movement could be more impactful than it will be to teams in other parts of the country. Some fans on social media and elsewhere have said they will boycott Cardinals baseball because of its affiliation with the movement. The Black Lives Matter movement was hatched just 14 miles from Busch Stadium after a Ferguson police officer killed unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown in 2014.

The 2010 census indicated the St. Louis region is among the most segregated metropolitan areas in the United States. In 2016, 56.4 percent of Missouri voters voted for Donald Trump, while 37.9 percent cast a ballot for Hillary Clinton. The numbers in neighboring states, from which the Cardinals draw many of their fans, were similar. For example, 60.7 percent of Arkansas voters went for Trump. Trump has routinely condemned Black Lives Matter and called for a heavy-handed police crackdown on people protesting the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers.

Cardinals president of baseball operations John Mozeliak said he has received plenty of angry emails about the team’s embrace of Black Lives Matter, calling the negative reactions those of the “vocal minority.” He said he has taken the time to respond to many of them. Cardinals owner Bill DeWitt Jr. told KMOX radio, the team’s flagship station, earlier this week that BLM is a “positive force for social justice.”

“I’m sure there’s risk, but what you’re ultimately hoping to do is recognize all your fans,” Mozeliak said. “The way I finished all my emails was, ‘My sincere hope is we’re able to have a healthy season and a successful season, and Go Cards!’ but I recognize we are a company that has to be open-minded to where the world is today.”

The Cardinals’ form of protest was planned at a team meeting in which Flaherty, coach Willie McGee and outfielder Dexter Fowler, all of whom are Black, spoke. Fowler asked the leader of the pitching staff, Adam Wainwright, and others to join them in wearing the T-shirts to show team solidarity.

Wainwright, who in the past has identified himself as a conservative Christian, said he wore the T-shirt with a clean conscience.

“I’m getting lots and lots and lots of questions on that on social media,” Wainwright said. “It’s very simple to me, and I’ll tell you this as a Christian man: My job first and foremost is to love my neighbor, to love my teammates and love my friends and family the best way I know how.”

Carlson’s status

Not surprisingly, the Cardinals aren’t framing top prospect Dylan Carlson’s demotion to satellite camp Thursday as an issue of controlling his service time. Rather, they frame it as part of an effort to get older outfielders Tyler O’Neill, Harrison Bader and Lane Thomas the first crack at playing time. Mozeliak pointed out that those outfielders also posted strong numbers at Triple A, where Carlson had a 1.098 OPS in 18 games at the end of 2019.

Because of the shortened season, the Cardinals figure to make personnel decisions more quickly than in a normal season, so the outfielders will be under a microscope virtually every night while Carlson works out in Springfield. O’Neill went 1-for-3 with a home run Friday; Bader went 0-for-3 with two strikeouts.

If the Cardinals wait at least six days to promote Carlson, they will gain an entire future season of club control. If they wait an additional 15 days or so after that, they could keep Carlson from reaching arbitration after less than three seasons, potentially saving millions of dollars.

“They have struggled at times at the big-league level, whereas Dylan hasn’t had that opportunity, so the assumption is he won’t, I guess,” Mozeliak said. “You’re asking the question, but that’s what I’m assuming, and I don’t know that that’s the fairest way to look at it. These guys have all done well at the Triple-A level, and the strategy all offseason was to give O’Neill and Thomas that opportunity, and that’s what we’ve done.”

(Photo of Flaherty: Jeff Curry / USA Today)

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