Spiking bullpen ERAs leaving Cardinals’ skipper with few good options
Not much will make a manager look much smarter than an overachieving bullpen, and the reverse is certainly true of an underachieving bullpen.
Because the choice of what reliever enters the game and when is such a hands-on decision, it’s also the sort of decision that lends itself to immediate second guessing and criticism.
Sometimes, though, a manager looks out beyond the fence and realizes he’s out of good options. Sometimes, eventually, a pitcher has to step up and get someone out. Otherwise, a team can find itself swiftly sinking into the morass which is currently engulfing the St. Louis Cardinals.
Bullpens are well known to be wildly inconsistent year over year throughout the game. Some of that follows logically enough; a pitcher with the ability to put up reliable performances is bound to find himself stapled to the starting rotation, where those sorts of outings carry a great deal more value. Relievers, too, are generally considered fungible assets. For better or worse, one glaring effect of Big Data’s takeover of the game has been to identify relief results as something which can be generated in the aggregate, taking some individual credit out of the equation and encouraging teams to swap out parts.
This year’s Cardinals returned four of their six most commonly used relievers from last season to the bullpen. A fifth member of that group, Matthew Liberatore, is now in the starting rotation. The only fully departed full-time reliever is righty Andrew Kittredge, who suffered a knee injury during spring training with the Baltimore Orioles and is yet to pitch in the majors this season.
And yet despite that relative consistency – Kyle Leahy and Chris Roycroft were numbers seven and eight in relief appearances and both are back – the results could not be any more different. Part of that comes from sequencing. Kittredge, Ryan Helsley and JoJo Romero were nigh-unhittable for the first month of the season, setting a strong first impression that perhaps outstripped the rest of the year’s reality.
There certainly hasn’t been an issue with Helsley, who remains one of the game’s elite closers. While he had one major meltdown in Boston, his seven other appearances in the season’s early going have been near-flawless. Both of his allowed earned runs and four of his eight walks were in that single soggy blown save, and he has otherwise looked just like the pitcher who is the defending Trevor Hoffman Award winner as the best reliever in the National League.
Instead, the struggle has been in getting the game to Helsley at all.
Romero’s earned run average is north of seven, and John King’s has crested six, leaving the Cardinals without any effective relief on the left side on days in which Steven Matz has been unavailable. Phil Maton has been able and eager to take the ball and had his own scoreless streak before a rough outing in Atlanta, and Leahy has been a pleasant surprise in mirroring Kittredge’s early season results from last year.
The struggle has come in getting the game to the back end relievers at all. Ryan Fernandez, who far outstripped expectations as a Rule 5 pick in 2024, has struggled beyond any reasonable expectations. Fernandez’s ERA is north of 11, and he has just seven strikeouts to go with five walks and 15 hits allowed in his first 8 ⅔ innings pitched.
He’s been forthright about his struggles to locate his slider in quite the same fashion as he did a year ago, and its movement profile suggests a pitch that is now dipping and contains an ugly hump rather than the tight break of last season. Those same leaks appeared in Roycroft’s sinker, and he departed for Memphis on April 9 with an ERA of nearly 8 and an insurmountable walk rate.
Pitch data from Triple-A Memphis suggests Roycroft’s most dangerous pitch has resumed its previous form, and perhaps soon enough Fernandez will get the same opportunity. The same is not available to Romero, who has sported a dangerously low strikeout rate for most of the last two years even as he continues to bleed off velocity. King, heavily reliant on his own sinker for preferable contact, is always likely to be a victim of fortune to some degree. Without batted ball luck on his side, it’s difficult for him to generate the outs that are necessary to get him out of inevitable jams.
It’s telling that a team which is so committed to protecting its pitchers from overuse has twice in the last week turned to relievers (King, Leahy) on three consecutive days. Maton and Romero pitched in three games of four over the same stretch, and Romero was pushed to pitch in four of six. All the while, Matz has bounced from the bullpen to the rotation and back, available intermittently.
Matt Svanson, recalled from Memphis to replace Roddery Muñoz (who had in turn replaced Roycroft) was called on for only one low leverage outing in the past week, making it clear through the team’s actions the extent to which they believe he can be trusted.
There are times in which a manager is left with no good decisions to make. If pitchers must be protected in the season’s opening months, then their teammates have to get outs. If that doesn’t happen, and if the organization doesn’t believe there’s help coming from the minors, then it’s understandable to double down on a philosophy which puts stock in insisting that the pitchers currently on the roster will have to figure it out for the team to find success.
That’s almost certainly true, and it brings its own concern. The bullpen dice roll paid off handsomely for the Cardinals in 2024 and has been snake eyes thus far in 2025. That’s broadly the way it’s always likely to work, but it doesn’t make anyone feel any smarter for having said so.
This story was originally published April 25, 2025 at 4:00 AM.
