Lefty-neutralizing reliever has been at center of Cardinals’ resurgence
For a vibrant demonstration of how difficult it is to hit in the major leagues, look no further than Bryce Harper’s at bat against Kyle Leahy with the game on the line on Monday night.
Nursing a one-run lead as his St. Louis Cardinals worked toward their ninth consecutive win, Leahy toed the rubber against Harper having already thrown 17 pitches and having faced three hitters. The first inflection point was being given the opportunity to handle the Phillies’ cornerstone player at all, but Leahy has fully neutralized lefties to date this season (now 2-for-31 against him following Monday’s action), and the Cardinals wanted to push JoJo Romero’s appearance to a newly created lane of lefty bats which emerged from the bench at the bottom of the Philadelphia order.
Leahy’s first two pitches to Harper were in chase locations out of the zone, by design. The first was a fastball up and away at 97 miles per hour. It was a ball out of his hand, but making sure Harper sees the pitch is part of setting up the rest of the at bat – and crucially, it was in a zone where Cardinals couldn’t be hurt, and Leahy had the command to put it there.
Next came a changeup, again wasted below the zone, plummeting toward Harper’s feet at 92 MPH. Having seen those pitches in those spots, Harper was set up to guess.
Pitch three was a slider curling back from the same spot as the fastball to hit the corner of the zone through the back door for strike one. Harper, anticipating a repeat of the in-and-out sequence of the first two pitches, geared up for the slider down, only to be met with a changeup that broke the direct opposite direction, out of his bat path.
By the time Leahy threw a tighter slider to the bottom corner of the zone for a called strike three, it was all over but the head scratching.
“We have good information on them and I have good pitches to combat that,” Leahy said following a 3-2 victory in which his 2 ⅓ innings of relief earned him his first win of the season. “I just pick my spots and know where my pitches play best and try to execute them.”
Execution has not been a problem in the early going, as Leahy has allowed just three earned runs in his first 24 ⅔ innings pitched, his earned run average creeping toward falling below one. He hasn’t allowed an earned run in his last nine appearances, recording either a hold or a victory in each of his last six.
All of this has come from a pitcher whose first season in the big leagues saw him post an ERA north of 21 and clear waivers for removal from the 40-player roster at the conclusion of the season. When the Cardinals spent the winter screaming about runway and opportunity for players, Leahy may not have been the first name which came to mind, but he is arguably the player who has most aggressively seized that opportunity.
“It’s super tough,” shortstop Masyn Winn said of handling relievers like Leahy with his expansive arsenal. “A lot of relievers really only have two pitches. It’s really the starters who have the whole kitchen sink. If you’ve got a reliever coming in with a bunch of different pitches, it’s hard, man. Guys don’t know what to do with it.”
Indeed, while Leahy’s four-seam fastball and slider account for more than 50% of his pitches to date this season, he’s shown a sweeper, changeup and curve more than 10% of the time as well, in addition to a rare sinker. A six-pitch arsenal is a deadly weapon in the hands of a pitcher who can locate those pitches, and Leahy’s early results are a perfect demonstration of why the Cardinals flirted with giving him a run as a starter candidate early in spring training.
It helps, too, when the pitches are elite – his fastball run value, according to Baseball Savant, is in the 70th percentile, which would be tough enough without the 100th percentile breaking ball to pair with it. If the results have been good, the data under the hood has been somehow better.
“He’s a guy that can handle that workload and takes pride in being able to do that,” manager Oli Marmol said of Leahy’s extended outing. “Him being able to get a taste of that today, in that environment, it’s good to build off of that.”
Monday’s environment was intense, with the Cardinals dangling what is now MLB’s longest win streak for any team this season in front of a hungry crowd of more than 42,000 who packed the park on an early weeknight. It was undoubtedly the most playoff-like atmosphere of any game the Cardinals have played this season, including a raucous weekend in New York which saw them battered around the ballpark over a four-game stretch.
Not quite a month later, it’s impossible not to see significant progress in a team which has professed a desire to make individual strides which they hope will build into collective success. At the center of that storm was Leahy, who calmed everything down by dashing a future Hall of Famer on the rocks with a perfectly executed sequence.
“When I first came up to the big leagues, I saw how much matchups are important,” Leahy said. “I told myself that offseason, I want to be a guy that can get both sides out. I don’t want to pigeonhole myself to being a righty specialist and only being able to come in in a certain situation in a certain game, so I try to just be as versatile as I can.”
It helps to be nasty, too.
