By doting a ‘gnat’s (butt),’ Liberatore is finding his stride in Cardinals’ rotation
If an entrepreneur wanted to open a stationery shop, they could do a lot worse than to pick a location which gets them as close to the St. Louis Cardinals’ pitching staff as possible.
The ubiquitous notebooks which litter the clubhouse each have their own purpose to their owners, and Matthew Liberatore takes a particular task to his after each start.
Liberatore will record the results of each pitch he delivers in 0-0 and 1-1 counts in what he calls his “execution journal,” forcing himself through repetition and reinforcement to note the simple benefits of staying in the strike zone. While he’s not keeping a running tally in the midst of an outing, he’s tracking trends – and thus far, he likes where things are headed.
“Oh-ohs and one-ones,” Liberatore emphasized. “Two opportunities to get ahead of guys or fall behind them. Those are kind of like make-or-break counts.”
It’s hardly a cutting edge notion for a pitcher to surmise that throwing more strikes will put him in a position to have more success, but knowing that in the abstract and being willing and able to execute it are two separate checkpoints along the same path.
In Liberatore’s case, it’s advice he’s been hearing since he was a rising prospect and rookie under former pitching coach Mike Maddux, and it’s a through line that’s continued with his work under Dusty Blake. And the journaling, if nothing else, has been remarkably accurate when compared to his career numbers.
For his career, when Liberatore starts an at bat in an 0-1 count, hitters are posting a .260 on base percentage and .340 slugging percentage against him. Flip that start to 1-0, and the numbers soar to a .424 on base percentage and .533 slugging percentage.
The difference is just as drastic with his 1-1 deliveries. In 1-2 counts, batters have posted just a .233 on base percentage and .286 slugging percentage. When the count reaches 2-1, those numbers jump to .429 and .459.
Some of that is simple arithmetic; a count with more balls will necessarily eventuate in more frequent walks, juicing the on-base percentage. But a great deal of it, to hear Liberatore explain his process in exacting detail, comes from his ability to deliver his pitches where he wants to deliver them without fear of a count getting out of his control.
It’s easier to pitch with confidence when you’re less concerned that the next pitch could be the one which spirals out of control.
“I definitely think it’s a virtuous cycle in a lot of ways, not just for myself but for the hitters also,” Liberatore said. “They come up and they feel like hey, I can’t take a pitch off or see a pitch because I’m gonna be 0-2 if I take one. Guys swing earlier, which means I can mix it up more early in counts and get some weak contact and get some first pitch outs.
“I can also strike guys out without having to throw seven or eight pitches to get one. There’s a lot of avenues you can go down for reasons it’s beneficial.”
Attacking the strike zone has put Liberatore into some rarified air in the season’s early going. There are only three pitchers in Major League Baseball who have made at least three starts without walking more than 2% of batters faced – Liberatore, Baltimore’s Zach Eflin and Colorado’s Kyle Freeland.
Both Eflin and Liberatore have walked only one hitter on the young season, and by virtue of Liberatore having recorded one more out than Eflin on the season, it gives him the league lead in walk percentage, albeit by decimal shavings.
That number will inevitably grow with his innings count. For his career, Liberatore has walked 8.3% of hitters who have faced him, dead on MLB average. But there are other career numbers which validate the work in which he’s currently engaged.
Of his first 27 career starts, only five saw him complete at least six innings. Two of those games were in 2023, notched on June 12 against San Francisco and in a memorable performance against the team that drafted him, August 10 in Tampa Bay, when he went a career-high eight innings.
The other three are the first three starts of this season. They represent the first time he’s lasted at least six innings in three consecutive appearances since a stretch of four such games for Triple-A Memphis which stretched from August 10 to September 1, 2021.
“You can’t do that if you’re super inefficient,” he said. “Last [start], I threw [57] pitches in the first three innings, and then I was able to go out and start filling it up again and get myself through another three on only half the pitches I took to get through the first three.”
When pitchers make a leap in effectiveness year over year, it’s often due to some big change in their repertoire. Liberatore in 2025 is throwing more or less an identical arsenal to the one he deployed from the bullpen in 2024, both in percentage of usage and the movement characteristics of the pitches themselves. The simple difference – starting in the zone and working out, rather than starting out and being forced back in.
It’s offense as opposed to defense, aggression as opposed to response. It starts on paper, and it ends up on the dirt.
“I think it’s just mindset, honestly,” Liberatore said. “If you can throw your breaking ball for a chase, you can throw it for a strike. Same thing with the fastball. If you can throw it above the zone for a chase, you can throw it in the zone.
“I think a lot of it is just figuring out, OK, where are my misses? Where do I need to aim to give me the greatest opportunity to be in the zone? And then you can start thinking about expanding, or painting a corner, or trying to dot a gnat’s ass or something.”
Write that one down.
