ST. LOUIS – After seven seasons with the St. Louis Cardinals and nearly a decade in the organization, pitcher Jack Flaherty is reportedly on the move.
The Cardinals have reportedly agreed to a last-minute deadline-day deal that sends the 27-year-old Flaherty to the Baltimore Orioles. The deal came shortly before the 5 p.m. trade deadline.
The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal and ESPN’s Jeff Passan were among the first to report on the deal. FOX 2 is waiting to learn specifics of the return. President of Baseball Operations John Mozeliak is expected to speak to media around 5:45 p.m.
Flaherty is a pending free agent at the season’s end and had been building trade buzz in recent weeks.
Entering deadline day, Flaherty was seen as perhaps one of the more coveted pitchers after former MVP Justin Verlander in a thin market. The Los Angeles Dodgers and Miami Marlins were reportedly among the teams who had interest, but he ultimately ended up for an up-and-coming Baltimore squad seeking experienced starting pitching.
Flaherty, a 2014 first-round pick of the Cardinals, earned his major-league call in 2017. Two years later, he enjoyed one of the more prolific pitching seasons in recent Cardinals history. Aided by a dominant second half, Flaherty finished 11-8 with 231 strikeouts and an NL-leading 0.97 WHIP over nearly 200 innings, good for fourth place in NL Cy Young voting.
Flaherty started each of the next two Opening Days for the Cardinals, though missed significant time between the 2020-2022 campaigns with various injuries, only averaging around 11 starts each season. Pitch efficiency and walks have bitten him along with injuries in recent years.. However, as he has worked back to a larger workload, Flaherty has proven steady in recent weeks with at least five innings pitched in all but one of his last 10 starts.
Though Flaherty’s 4.43 ERA and 1.55 WHIP this season are not quite on par career norms, his strikeout and groundball rates are encouraging. Flaherty attributes much of this to pitch strategy and understanding when certain situations might call for changes in velocities.
During his time with the Cardinals, Flaherty has also been vocal about social injustice and advocated for the Black Lives Matter movement. “We have this opportunity to speak up,” said Flaherty via MLB.com in wake of George Floyd’s death in 2020.
Before deadline day, the Cardinals dove into the seller’s market by trading pitchers Jordan Montgomery, Chris Stratton and Jordan Hicks in two separate deals. All three, like Flaherty, are pending free agents. The Cardinals also traded Paul DeJong to the Blue Jays earlier Tuesday.
This is a developing story. FOX 2 will update as more information becomes available.