Cardinals have their starting pitching rotation for 2025. But which five will it be?
Even the St. Louis Cardinals, despite their silent winter and without any looming signs that they’re soon to start making noise, are able to cobble together a starting rotation in the last week of January.
The problem, at least from a roster construction perspective, is not that the Cardinals have too few starters, but that at the moment they have too many.
For a team advertising a reset and opportunities for young pitchers, the Cardinals entered the winter with five incumbent starting pitchers and evidently not much desire to forcibly open up spots on the roster. To make matters more complicated, four of the five – Erick Fedde, Sonny Gray, Steven Matz and Miles Mikolas – will start the season at a minimum of age 32. The fifth, Andre Pallante, could very well double his career total of 30 starts in 2025.
Despite that incumbency, manager Oli Marmol addressed the pending pitching opportunities with a sense of fatalistic realism.
“It’s always hard to say, because by the time you get to spring and you’re a week in, health always pops up,” Marmol said Monday on the last day of the team’s annual Winter Warm-Up. “If we stay healthy, then we have some tough decisions to make. But if not, we have some guys that can come in after and do a nice job that we’re looking forward to seeing.”
Gray, after all, suffered a hamstring strain in early March last season which derailed his first few turns through the rotation in the regular season. The year before, it was Adam Wainwright who was penciled into a role and came out banged up. In 2022, the team didn’t announce its fifth starter until Jordan Hicks was tabbed seemingly out of nowhere while the team worked out at Busch Stadium on the eve of opening day.
The uncertainty that’s built into pitching is, in this narrow way, working out in the Cardinals’ favor.
Among the young players for whom an opportunity will be built into the season is righty Michael McGreevy, the team’s first round pick in 2021. After seemingly falling off the prospect radar heading into last season, McGreevy worked on and executed a cutter, finding a weapon which helped him handle the lefties who had otherwise more than handled him in his earliest days as a minor leaguer.
“If I were to tell you I was going to make my debut [last] year, I would’ve told you you’re wrong,” said McGreevy. “For how the year started, how slow of a start I got off to in Memphis, it was just bad. But then being able to have great coaches down in Triple-A to help me flip the script a little bit, really start to catch fire and end the season the way it did, couldn’t ask for anything more.”
After the Cardinals shut down Gray with a forearm strain (he is fully recovered and has had a normal offseason), McGreevy was inserted into the rotation in the last week of September. Across three starts in the majors, including a spot start in July, he allowed just five earned runs in 20 innings, striking out 14 hitters and walking only two. Throw in three shutout relief innings, and despite only a brief audition, he showed more than enough to jump up the team’s list of pitchers in need of priority innings.
“McGreevy is going to be competing for a spot,” president of baseball operations John Mozeliak said. “You could argue some of those spots are already taken by veteran players, but historically, some of those players haven’t been able to go pole to pole and post.”
Matz, for one, has made only 34 starts in three seasons since signing with the Cardinals as a free agent, tossing only 44 ⅓ innings in 2024. Mikolas provided innings last season but not performance, barely missing becoming the first Cardinal since Kip Wells in 2007 to pitch at least 160 innings with an ERA of 5.50 or higher; a slight recovery over his last three starts left him at 5.35.
Pallante has never pitched a full season’s starter load in the big leagues, Gray ended last season on the injured list and has pitched more than 180 innings only once since 2015, and Fedde is coming off his best season in the big leagues after having to decamp to Korea following a release by the Washington Nationals.
There are a lot of players who should be available for starts, but none is a certainty.
Counting to five may be easy, but counting past that, to seven or eight, is almost impossible to do with confidence. It’s in that liminal space that opportunity lies for McGreevy, Zack Thompson, Gordon Graceffo, Matthew Liberatore, and a host of others who will come to spring training with enough stamina built into their throwing programs to be able to start if necessary.
“It’s much easier as a starter to come in stretched out and then be told you have one to two inning stints,” Marmol said. “If you needed to throw multiple you can, [rather] than do it the other way and have to ramp up.”
If five’s not enough, how many would be? How certain is the manager that the arms are there to get through the season?
“If you’re asking from a roster composition, having enough depth [perspective], I’ll leave that one to Mo,” Marmol said.
And so, as with all else this winter, they wait.
