3 STL Cardinals trade targets that would be immediate team stat leaders

Zach Greinke would have the best strikeout-to-walk ratio

Admittedly, I was considering cheating a bit here and making the stat for Greinke career wins. He has 224. Of Cardinals starters, Wainwright is closest with 198, but even his 18-year career falls short in the win column to Greinke. Granted, Greinke has 20 seasons under his belt now, but it’s still impressive.

Nonetheless, I decided to keep it to the rules and go just for stats of just this year. Greinke’s strikeout-to-walk ratio is 4.92, which would best everyone on the Cardinals staff, starter or reliever. Now, this is slightly misleading, considering it can be ballooned simply by facing more batters, which isn’t always a good thing. But Greinke has seen an average of 4.2 batters per inning pitched, not too shabby at all.

Greinke would be a notable name to add to the starting rotation and one my colleague Scott Rogust tossed out in this article. As Scott notes, Greinke’s 20-year career has yet to have the most important thing added to it: A World Series victory. Sure, Greinke has won a Cy Young, multiple Gold Gloves, and impressively has received Silver Slugger awards as well, but the World Series escapes him.

Now, getting that done with the Cardinals looks like a long shot, but if the Cardinals are making a trade like this, it’s because they still believe they can cobble together some sort of a deep postseason campaign. Maybe Greinke is an add that completely changes the tune in the second half.

Greinke and Wainwright pitching together deep in a postseason? Now that would be awesome, and perhaps a cool way for both to go out into the horizon.