Cardinals pitching staff working through baseball’s highest team ERA
In a baseball landscape increasingly defined by the collection of data, there are still some things that don’t require a representative sample size in order to take action.
For those standing on the mound for the St. Louis Cardinals, there are times when the ball simply doesn’t feel right on its way out of the hand. In the season’s early going, it may not seem like there’s a lot to be learned from 50 or so pitches, but pitchers and catchers can sometimes detect a problem after only one.
“Kind of right away, in a sense,” said catcher Pedro Pagés when asked how quickly he can tell a pitcher is working with something out of the ordinary. “Catching these guys a lot, you see what they like to do, how their stuff likes to move. So yeah, you can tell right away if something’s not working the right way.”
In the season’s opening weeks, not much is working the right way for the Cardinals pitching staff as a whole.
Through their first 10 games, St. Louis posted a team earned run average of 6.28, the worst in the majors by three-tenths of a run. There is a degree of unfortunate luck involved; the team’s batting average against on balls in play is .305, which would have been fourth highest in MLB in 2024. FanGraphs calculates their fielding independent pitching mark as 3.96, dead in the middle of the pack.
Some things should level out over a larger sample, but whatever the data limitations, there are things that look wrong, and that feel off to those responsible for making pitches.
Relievers Ryan Fernandez and Chris Roycroft both received assignments over the weekend in Boston which stood out in their unusual usage – Fernandez pitching with the team trailing on Friday, Roycroft returning to the mound rather than a position player for the eighth inning in Sunday’s nightcap. Those were both requested by the pitchers in order to iron out mechanical flaws which they felt could only be fixed at game speed.
Fernandez described letting his line of sight drift away from the catcher’s glove, which has caused his arm to drag and his slider to therefore pop up out of his hand. That both makes it more visible to a batter and imbues the pitch with a less appealing movement profile.
“Just being a pitcher, you have to be able to do stuff on the fly,” Fernandez said. “Even when you’re not feeling good, you kind of have to just figure it out. That’s how it’s always been.”
He described a desire to return his slider to the “zero zero” plane, dialing in sharp horizontal movement without a vertical bounce.
MLB’s Baseball Savant, which tracks pitch data, shows Fernandez’s slider moving toward the seven o’clock area on an imagined clock face; last season, when it bit hard and befuddled batters, the majority landed at eight o’clock. That subtle difference also changes the bite on his cutter, decreasing its effectiveness as well.
Roycroft was somewhat less forthcoming about the fix he’s seeking for his sinker, but the data also demonstrates his struggles there. In 2024, that pitch bit downward, on average, 5.7 inches more than other right-handers. In 2025, it’s 2.3 inches less than average – a change in movement profile of three quarters of a foot.
Hitters put up an expected slugging percentage of .335 against Roycroft’s sinker in 2024. This season, that number is a preposterous .913. Roycroft has thrown only 52 sinkers to date in game action in 2025, so that number, like the others, is likely to trend back to average. It will have to, or Roycroft will find himself drifting in the direction of Memphis.
“It’s one of those things where sometimes you get a kick in the mouth and you get punched in the face,” Roycroft said after Sunday night’s drubbing by the Red Sox. “It’s so easy to sit back and try to work on things, but sometimes you’ve just got to get thrown back in the fire and see what you’re made of.”
Less than 24 hours after that assessment, Roycroft was on the mound in Pittsburgh, where he allowed three earned runs in a relief outing which saw him record only two outs. Four of his six appearances to date have been scoreless, but he’s allowed five earned while recording a combined five outs in the other two.
That, in part, describes why pitching can be maddening. What clearly works one day turns into batting practice the next, and even with a full spring training’s worth of data points from which to work, it can be a real challenge to know what to trust. Consistency and repeatability are watchwords for modern pitchers just the same as they were half a century ago, even if the tools of measurement are different.
It’s a competitive game and people are trying to win. There’s not always time for the law of averages to do its work.
“Once you see they’re not really on, I think you can be able to realize that quick,” Pagés said. “You have to find a way of helping them get it back.”
