Can Liberatore endure the grind as Cardinals aim for strong finish?
For long stretches this season, Matthew Liberatore has been the St. Louis Cardinals’ most predictable and reliable starting pitcher.
That’s no small feat, given that he came to spring training broadly considered a reliever, and that the team’s decision to add him to the rotation on the eve of the regular season was met with a fair degree of skepticism.
The year started as strongly as could be reasonably expected. The struggle now is in finding a way to finish.
With an eye on an increasing innings load and concerns backed up by some drifting data, the Cardinals skipped Liberatore’s turn in the rotation coming out of the All-Star break.
That left him with a 15-day break between appearances, designed to build rest and strength. Now he finds himself trying to re-establish his pitch count on the run, and the red flags are getting hard to ignore.
“Never really dealt with this much physical stuff before,” Liberatore acknowledged Tuesday following his fourth consecutive loss. “Just figuring out what my body needs and what the solutions are to what keeps happening. It’s been tough, but I enjoy that grind, I enjoy the process, and I’m committed to figuring this out.”
Liberatore finished at least six innings in eight of his first 10 starts of the season; the two exceptions were a game in Cincinnati in which he was forced from the mound by an extended rain delay, and a start in Philadelphia in which he allowed just two runs in 5 ⅓ innings.
Beginning with his final pre-break start against Atlanta, a stretch covering his five most recent appearances, Liberatore has failed to complete five innings, leaving the bullpen to scramble as his velocity begins to fade deeper into his starts.
“The workload of building back into that is appropriate,” manager Oli Marmol said. “He lost [velocity] at about pitch 40 last time. He was able to hold for an extra 25, 30 pitches this time, right around 70, so that’s actually a good thing.
“Obviously you want him to get through five, get through six innings. That’s kind of your barometer of if it went well or not. But it’s more so how many pitches can you go with holding it. We had a pretty good increase from 40 to 70 today, so we feel good about that.”
Liberatore’s last pitch of the third inning on Tuesday night was his 45th of the game, a 95.2 MPH four-seam fastball to Kyle Farmer. Pitch 66, to Warming Bernabel, ended the fourth inning; it was a sinker at 93.4 MPH, immediately preceded by a four-seamer at 92.1. His final fastball, pitch 79, registered at 91.7.
“There’s no precursor to it, which is kind of frustrating,” Liberatore said of his velocity drops. “Felt great, and then I go out for the fifth inning and turn around [to look at the radar gun] and it’s not the same that it was the rest of the game. So that part is definitely frustrating.”
It’s simple enough to draw a straight line from Liberatore’s attempts to deal with the physical challenges of a season to his reaching places in his workload that are foreign to him. His 117 innings pitches thus far represent the third-largest total of his professional career, though he’s pushing his previous ceiling with six weeks to go in the season.
In 2021, he tossed 124 ⅔ innings for Triple-A Memphis over 22 games (18 starts). In 2023, spread just about evenly between Memphis and St. Louis, he reached 126 ⅓ innings over 35 games (24 starts). His next start will be his 23rd this season, and he could have as many as nine more to go.
Whether the Cardinals allow him to reach that point is yet to be decided. Marmol committed Tuesday to Liberatore taking his next turn, but the team has been evaluating him as well as Andre Pallante as they consider long-term health. To their credit, with an eye on health preservation, St. Louis has used only seven starting pitchers this season, none of whom had to sub in due to injury.
The pitching plan has been precisely executed, and the team’s health-first approach is to be commended for that. One adjustment to that plan which is under discussion is a piggy back approach utilizing Kyle Leahy in tandem with one or both of Liberatore and Pallante. Marmol has said the club expects Leahy to go into the winter on a starter’s workout plan with eyes on establishing next spring whether he can do what Liberatore did this spring, and setting scripted appearances for him down the stretch which also relieve some workload can be a path to achieve that.
The rub, though, is that starters can’t simply be built to pitch into August. A championship team has to cover about two and a half months’ worth of innings from this point in the season, and it’s difficult to reach that point without a full complement of pitchers who know how it feels to hit and push through the wall.
“To a certain extent, yeah,” Marmol conceded when asked if there’s value in putting Liberatore through those paces. “There’s different ways of approaching it, where he stays in a routine, but you monitor it pretty closely.”
For Liberatore, there is no question of his goals – he wants to pitch, to start, and to finish the season. As long as his body cooperates, he’ll get every opportunity to do so. But that cooperation will require figuring out the physical challenges, and quickly.
“I don’t know if there’s anything I’ve ever wanted to do more than be a big league starter,” he said. “So I don’t know if I could possibly want that any more.”
