Dustin May Is Finally Having His Day

Dustin May’s 2026 season did not begin in auspicious fashion. He was chased in the fourth inning in each of his first two starts with the Cardinals, facing the Rays at home on March 29 and then the Tigers in Detroit on April 4. On the heels of his rough 2025 season, it was fair to wonder if St. Louis had grossly miscalculated by signing the 28-year-old righty to a one-year, $12.5 million deal. Since then, however, May has gone on a roll, putting together perhaps the best run of his injury-wracked career and placing himself among the game’s top starters during that span.

On Tuesday at Citi Field, May spun six scoreless innings against the Mets, holding them to four hits and one walk while striking out six. It was his first scoreless start since last August 12 while with the Red Sox, and with it, he collected his first win since April 21. Though he’d averaged a crisp six innings with a 3.86 ERA and a 3.03 FIP over his previous seven starts, the Cardinals had scored just 19 runs and posted a 2-5 record in those games.

Undoubtedly, the most frustrating of those strong outings was on May 27 in Milwaukee. May had held the Brewers hitless for seven innings, striking out nine and allowing only two baserunners; he hit Jake Bauers with a pitch in the second inning, and catcher Pedro Pagés interfered with Sal Frelick in the fourth. May had thrown just 72 pitches to that point, giving him a real shot at finishing the job without too much concern about pitch count. Alas, Garrett Mitchell led off the eighth with a double just over the head of left fielder Bryan Torres as he raced into the left-center gap, and then Luis Rengifo bunted for a base hit before manager Oliver Marmol called for the bullpen. The Brewers, who trailed 1-0 at the time, plated both runs against reliever JoJo Romero, and held on to win 2-1.

On Tuesday, the Cardinals built a 6-0 lead as May set a season high with 101 pitches; it was just the fourth time in his career he’d broken the century mark. “We got a big lead, so I just went out and tried to attack the zone and get ahead early,” he told reporters afterwards. He called his pitch execution “pretty good, I wouldn’t say it was great on a lot of things. Sinker was good, four-seam was good, cutter was very iffy, curveball [and] slider weren’t super crazy.”

May wasn’t terribly happy with his sweeper, which last year was the one pitch that worked well for him. “The sweeper kind of feels like a redheaded stepchild right now,” said one of the game’s most foremost redheads — a comment that drew some laughs. “It doesn’t really feel that great, to be honest.”

Marmol praised May’s mental approach, saying, “He’s just been on the attack with all his stuff, and he’s just landing all his pitches at a much higher rate. When I say he’s got a purpose behind every pitch, I just like the mentality that he’s bringing to every inning. It’s been really good.”

Overall, May has a 4.21 ERA and a 3.21 FIP in 72 2/3 innings, already the second-highest total of his career. That’s a big step forward from last year, when he was cuffed for a 4.96 ERA and a 4.88 FIP in a season notable mainly for his workload — he threw 132 1/3 innings, that after totaling just 101 innings in the majors from 2021-24 due to injuries — and for his change of address. “There was always the one inning last year where it was a blow-up,” said May on Tuesday. He hasn’t allowed three runs in an inning since those first two starts, during which he did so four times, and only one other time has he allowed four runs in a start, on May 21 against the Pirates. By comparison, he surrendered three or more runs in an inning seven times last year, and allowed four or more runs in a start nine time in 23 turns.

With so many Dodgers starters on the IL last year, May spent the first four months of the season grinding away and eating innings. He ranked second on the team in starts and innings by the time he was traded to the Red Sox for outfield prospects James Tibbs III and Zach Ehrhard on July 31; the Dodgers needed to make room for the healthy Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow within their rotation. Even while being shut down for most of September due to neuritis in his elbow, May set a career high in innings and avoided the operating table. During that 2021–24 span, he underwent a pair of Tommy John surgeries on May 12, 2021 and July 18, 2023, the latter while undergoing a repair of a torn flexor tendon. While rehabbing from that second procedure, he required yet another surgery; he suffered an esophageal tear in July 2024 when a piece of salad got lodged in his throat, briefly threatening his life and nipping his comeback in the bud.

May reportedly lost 40 pounds in his first three weeks after that third surgery, bulked up from 185 pounds to 205 during the 2025 season, then added another 15 pounds before being signed by the Cardinals, with a target goal of 225 pounds. Sources still list the 6-foot-6 righty at 180 pounds, but he’s definitely bulkier than he was in his Dodger days, and by his own account, he’s stronger.

Excluding his pair of rocky starts at the outset of this season, May has put up a 2.89 ERA and a 2.86 FIP in 65 1/3 innings. Over that span, from April 5 onward, he’s ninth in the majors in FIP, tied for 12th in WAR (1.8) and 16th in ERA. Overall, his strikeout rate has improved incrementally from 2025 (19.5%) to ’26 (21.9%), but he’s made bigger gains by cutting his walk rate (from 9.8% to 6.6%) and home run rate (from 1.59 per nine to 0.62). He’s getting more groundballs (45.4%, up from 42.2%) and finding fewer barrels (from 9.2% to 6.7%). That won’t win him a Cy Young, but if he continues to pitch like this, he’ll be a top trade candidate in late July if the Cardinals — who have a $20 million mutual option on him for 2027, with a $500,000 buyout — become sellers, and he should fare much better in free agency a second time around. Of course, considering they currently hold the top Wild Card spot and are just 3 1/2 games out of first place in the NL Central, the Cardinals might not want to trade away their top starter. Mutual options are almost never picked up, but as Matt Martell noted a few weeks ago in a mailbag column, the two sides could be interested in working out an extension before the end of the season.

Amid his injuries, May has rarely sustained anything close to this kind of run. Using Baseball Reference’s Span Finder, I pulled up the best 11-game stretches of his career, then excluded all of those that fell short of 55 innings, either because he was working with a very short leash or because he spent at least part of that time pitching out of the bullpen. Note the timespans to complete these runs:

Half of those spans took at least two years to complete, and two more of them fell just short. This current run is the only one that hasn’t spanned multiple seasons, and for what it’s worth, his FIP during this stretch is the lowest of any of them.

To pitch as well as he has, May has made several adjustments, chief among them finding ways to succeed without being able to dial fastballs to 99 mph with regularity. He has regained some of his lost velocity while increasing the usage of his four-seamer, sweeper, and changeup, and reintroducing a curveball into his repertoire. He’s also continued to adjust his arm angles.

First, the velocity. Circa 2020, May’s sinker averaged 97.7 mph, and went 99 or higher 6.4% of the time. By 2023, that average dropped to 96.6 mph, with 0.8% of those sinkers reaching 99 or higher. When he returned last year after his second elbow surgery, he was down to an average of 94.5 mph, and didn’t touch 99 once. This year, he’s back up to an average of 96.6 mph, though he’s dialed just one sinker up to 99. His four-seamer has followed a similar pattern, averaging 99.1 mph in 2020, falling to 97.3 mph by ’23, then to 95.4 mph last year. This year, he’s back up to 96.9 mph. His other pitches have shown similar gains.

Man cannot live on velocity alone, and for May, the shape of his four-seamer has generally been a problem throughout his career. After he failed to crack our Top 50 Free Agents list last November, Michael Baumann noted that the Dodgers had only partially succeeded in remaking May when he returned in 2025. Despite his velocity, his four-seamer didn’t generate many whiffs because of its dead zone-y nature (roughly 15 inches of induced vertical break, around league average) so he dropped his arm angle on the pitch, from 35 degrees in 2023 to 27 degrees in ’25, giving it less rise and more arm-side run while still distinguishing it from his sinker, which has averaged over 18 inches of arm-side movement. That created another problem, as Baumann explained:

The other thing the Dodgers did was turn May from a sinker-first pitcher into a sweeper-first pitcher. But the arm slot shift that got his fastball out of the dead zone also took it out of the same vertical plane as the sinker, reducing its effectiveness as a barrel-misser. It also wrecked the curveball-ish depth on May’s sweeper, though to be fair, the breaking ball was May’s best pitch in 2025. His only effective pitch in 2025, really.

May has raised his arm angle on the four-seamer back to 36 degrees, with its movement profile much closer to what it was in 2023 than last year, and he’s dialed up its usage from 16.6% to 25.6% while dropping his sinker usage from 33.5% to 17.5%. Meanwhile, he’s cut his sweeper usage almost in half while making more room for his cutter, changeup, and curveball, the last of which hasn’t been part of his repertoire since 2019.

I put all of this together in a big table and also included 2023 for reference.

Batters have been far less successful against his sinker, cutter, and changeup than in 2025, and have continued to be befuddled by his sweeper, for whatever May’s concerns about the pitch. Note those variations in arm angle on just about every pitch type as May tries to find ways to differentiate them. His average angle was at 30 degrees in 2023 but down to 21 last year, and is back up to 33 this year, with a wider range across his offerings — from 39 degrees for the curve to 28 for the sweeper — than in either of those previous seasons.

Those usage rates blur what has become a much more bifurcated approach depending upon handedness. May uses his cutter about twice as often against lefties as against righties, and he uses his changeup and curve almost exclusively against lefties.

The cutter, sinker, four-seamer, and (for lefties) the changeup all tunnel together before spreading all over the strike zone:

Generally, this is working well:

Even with opposing teams stacking more lefties against May, he’s lowered his wOBA allowed by trading in some of those extra-base hits for singles; that’s an ISO drop of 91 points, from .234 to .143, and a home rate more than cut in half. And as you can see, he’s made even more impressive gains against righties, particularly by avoiding walks and homers.

When the Cardinals signed May in December, the general assumption was that he’d serve as an innings-eater for a rebuilding team, and could be flipped at the deadline if he pitched well enough. Even within the past week, USA Today’s Bob Nightengale wrote, “The Cardinals, in fact, are expected to trade reliever JoJo Romero and starter Dustin May at the trade deadline, providing they slip further back in the wild-card race.” Yet the Cardinals have been one of the majors’ big surprises. Projected for 75 wins with an 8.5% chance of making the playoffs as of Opening Day, they currently have an 84-win projection and a 52.8% chance of making the playoffs. Perhaps they’ll regress over the next six weeks and trade May. But if he keeps pitching at this level, and they remain in contention, the redhead may well stick with the Redbirds.

Hat-tip to Matt Martell for his reporting from Citi Field.