With their first pick, Cardinals take left-handed strikeout artist
With the pull of a lottery ball giving them the chance to select a player who will define the next generation of St. Louis Cardinals baseball, they selected left-handed pitcher Liam Doyle from the University of Tennessee with the fifth overall pick in Sunday night’s MLB draft.
“I think that he has a tremendous engine, as they say in the scouting world,” said Randy Flores, assistant general manager and director of amateur scouting. “From all sides – our performance department, our analytical department, our scouts – it’s really fun when you can get things like that aligned.”
After transferring from the University of Mississippi, the 21-year-old Doyle struck out 164 hitters in just 95 ⅔ innings for the Volunteers this season. The Boston native and New Hampshire high school graduate has a fastball which can touch 100 miles per hour as his primary offering. With that sort of high octane velocity from the left side, and with the development and maturity that accompanies having played three college seasons, Doyle profiles as a front-line starter who could arrive quickly.
He also will have an opportunity to exceed the career of another prominent New Hampshire native – Chris Carpenter, who posted 35.2 wins above replacement in his career to top all pitchers born in the Granite State.
His placement at Tennessee also provided the Cardinals with an opportunity to gain an even deeper insight into his personality through his manager, Tony Vitello. A St. Louis native and alum of the University of Missouri, Vitello maintains strong connections through the local baseball scene, and strong relationships with the Cardinals directly.
“Sometimes you have to be careful,” Flores joked, “but Tony tends to shoot you straight.”
Doyle became the highest player selected in the draft by St. Louis since JD Drew was also picked fifth overall in 1998. Drew racked up more than 18 wins above replacement in six years in St. Louis, making his debut the same year he was drafted and the same night Mark McGwire broke Roger Maris’ single-season home run record. He would go on to be traded for a package including Adam Wainwright, creating a through line directly from that era of Cardinals baseball to the era about to unfold.
Alongside JJ Wetherholt, last year’s seventh overall pick, Doyle represents a major coup at the top of the draft for the Cardinals. Together, they will form twin pillars of a development system currently undergoing an overdue reset. Those advanced prospects are perhaps not the best test of that system, but the organization is nonetheless eager for them to be its initial crown jewels.
The evening began in chaos, the Washington Nationals dropped a major surprise by taking Oklahoma prep shortstop Eli Willits first overall in a gambit to preserve money in their signing pool for later picks. The Cardinals had long been connected to Willits, who was the youngest player eligible to be drafted.
That pick, followed by the Los Angeles Angels going off the board to select UC Santa Barbara RHP Tyler Bremner, shook up draft boards and predictions throughout the industry. The Bremner selection was the turning point at which there was a guarantee for the Cardinals that a talent would be available to them that was widely expected to be gone inside of the top four picks and therefore out of their reach.
“When we saw that he could be in play as that board unfolded,” Flores said, “everyone was excited.”
The long tail which accompanies results from the MLB Draft can make it hard to evaluate, but recent trends suggest expedited arrival times for pitchers who have advanced through high-profile college schedules, like Doyle’s in the SEC. And as that conference’s reigning pitcher of the year, he has already aced some challenges that could help him advance through the system.
“You never know with these things,” Flores said about the speed of Doyle’s path forward. “I think what we need to do is get him onboarded. He threw a lot of innings this year. We need to find out his physical capacity, what his goals are regarding whether he wants to throw this year or not, and then from that, figure out a work plan for him both this summer and in the offseason.”
“There’s risk,” Flores added, “but I think for upside, you have to swallow that risk. And acquiring swing and miss, acquiring 101 [MPH] with that unique fastball profile on the free agent market is very, very expensive, and certainly there is some risk.”
This story was originally published July 13, 2025 at 5:51 PM.
