Marmol, Cardinals moving to six-man pitching rotation. Here’s why
As teams work to develop new methods to protect precious pitching assets as strongly as possible, rethinking schedules and workloads is perhaps the most obvious place to start.
The St. Louis Cardinals have opted to embrace that quest by shifting to a six-man pitching rotation as the season approaches the end of its first month.
Steven Matz took his first start of the season on Wednesday, and the Cardinals are working to mitigate dangerous early season impacts even as that work requires them to ask more of individual pitchers in individual bursts. That means being willing to turn to Matz, even while seeking to keep his pitch count below 70 as he builds up from a bullpen stint.
“When you look at safety in March and in April, that’s a big part of it,” Cardinals manager Oli Marmol said. “Being able to ramp up and keep our guys that are on this roster on this roster, we felt like inserting [Matz] on the 16th and staying on track made the most sense, so we’ll stick to that.”
Indeed, this precise date was advertised as far back as spring training, when the decision was made to keep Matthew Liberatore in the rotation and move Matz to the bullpen. Matz allowed three earned runs in 11 ⅔ innings pitched, spread over five relief appearances. Three of those outings, including a four-inning save on March 30, were in the vicinity of 50 pitches, and the other two were ten pitch bursts on back-to-back days last week in Pittsburgh.
“There’s a little bit of a different mindset,” Matz said of his time in the bullpen. “You want quality pitches right away. You’re not trying to establish anything. You take some more chances when you’re starting because you kind of control the pace of the game a little bit more. But when you come out of the bullpen, it’s the middle of the game, you want to just get out and be efficient.”
The Cardinals have only one scheduled day off between April 11 and May 8, on April 24. This version of the rotation is planned to stay intact for that period, after which they return to a more reasonable stretch and will re-evaluate their plans.
An extra starter, though, means more work for relievers. Part of that planning goes into bullpen usage decisions; righty Roddery Muñoz pitched on consecutive days and three of four before being optioned to Memphis following Tuesday’s game. The Cardinals, down only two in the ninth inning on Tuesday, still opted to use Muñoz, knowing full well the plan was to use his roster spot for a fresh arm.
Righty Matt Svanson, acquired for Paul DeJong at the 2023 trade deadline, earned his first recall to the majors as the corresponding move for Muñoz.
The ninth inning decision on Tuesday was not the only one which came with bullpen considerations in mind. Erick Fedde exited the fifth inning of the eventual 2-0 with a shutout intact, but he’d thrown 88 pitches and twice stranded the bases loaded. It would be entirely within the team’s standard operating procedure to remove him from the game at that point, rather than extending his pitch count.
Fedde was instead sent back to the mound for the top of the sixth, and while he allowed a run, he also secured three outs on only eight additional pitches.
“It’s always nice to have the extra day [of rest],” Fedde said. “Your body’s feeling good. Of course the goal is to be playing important games in August, September, October. That’s one where right now of course we want the ball as much as we can, but it’s really important that we get rest and be fresh for the end of the year.”
“[Fedde] got to that [pitch count] last time, so we were comfortable pushing him beyond it this time,” Marmol added. “You know what you have tomorrow in Matz, and then you use your bullpen appropriately knowing that you need some coverage.”
Svanson became part of that plan throughout last season and into spring when he demonstrated the ability to pitch multiple innings – “take two ups,” as the parlance goes – out of the bullpen. That is a separator which creates an opportunity for him, whereas the Cardinals see a high-spin hurler like Riley O’Brien as more effective one inning at a time.
There is, of course, randomness that is bound to intercede on all the team’s best laid plans. As he was laying out his reasons for why he would prefer to ask Ryan Fernandez to finish an inning and start a second but not schedule him to handle two whole innings, Marmol cracked that he would almost certainly be boxed into using Fernandez in precisely that way during Wednesday’s game.
Teams plan, baseball laughs. The act of pitching in the majors is bad for the body, and even as the sport writ large constantly seeks out new innovations to tamp down the rising injury rate, it’s impossible to eliminate risk. That leads to calculated gambles, and for now, leads to Matz taking a turn as one of six, rather than one of five.
“You do everything you can to keep guys healthy,” Marmol said. “Every organization is trying to do that. And then baseball happens, and you can’t control it, right? So it’s unfortunate, but you have to continue to get guys ready and plan for that – and not that.”
