How did the Cardinals get such great pitchers?

I come to you today to talk of the St. Louis Cardinals. I understand if you are sick of talking about them. Familiarity, after all, breeds contempt. And given that they've finished above .500 in 14 of the last 15 seasons, made the playoffs 11 times in that run, and won four pennants and two World Series, I would say that we're all pretty familiar with the Cardinals.

That said, there's something that we aren't talking about, but definitely should. That something is this: The 2015 Cardinals, as a team, currently have a 154 ERA+. Take a moment with that information. Ponder it. What does that mean, exactly? It means that relative to the league ERA, and accounting for their ballpark, the Cardinals have an ERA roughly 54 percent better than the league average. That, friends would be a record if the season ended today.

No other team in the last 100 years has finished with an ERA+ of higher than 139. Pedro Martinez's career ERA+ is 154, and Jacob deGrom currently has an ERA+ of 156. So, as a collective, the Cardinals' ERA makes them a bunch of Jacob deGroms or Pedro Martinezes. No one who has pitched more than 15 innings has an ERA above 3.68.

Ok, it's not that simple. St. Louis's underlying numbers are not quite that impressive. Yes, they're allowing well under three runs per game, but the relative lack of strikeouts and the team FIP of 3.23 means that their defense is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting through the first two months of the season to support this ridiculous start. Still, taken together, we could be looking at one of the great run prevention teams of all time.

"This is great, Mike," you're saying. "But so what?"

I'm super glad you asked that, imaginary reader in my brain. The so what is that, here we are, on the day of baseball's amateur draft, and I'm telling you that the Cardinals have done this amazing thing almost exclusively through their drafting and amateur free agent signings over the past decade and a half. Cardinals pitchers have thrown 513 innings through the club's first 57 games. Of those, only 63.2 have been thrown by pitchers not either drafted by the Cardinals or traded for using players drafted by the Cardinals. Consider the following chart:

Look, no commodity in Major League Baseball is more overpriced than free agent pitching. The Cardinals know this and, through some incredible drafting, one amateur free agent, and four very minor regular free agents, have managed to cobble together a staff that has a chance to go down as one of the best in baseball history. It's what we all hope for when our favorite teams are choosing their next generation of talent. May we all be so lucky.

Happy draft day, everybody.