Rotation in motion: Leahy spins from bullpen to Cardinals’ starting plans
There are two kinds of rotations that Kyle Leahy has found himself frequently asked about in recent days.
The first came from the pirouetting form of Olympic champion figure skater Alysa Liu, who tossed out a ceremonial first pitch before a game at Busch Stadium on May 8, 2025.
Leahy happened to be in line to catch the pitches that day, the day after tossing a scoreless eighth inning in a 5-0 victory. He didn’t remember it at all, he admitted, until video highlights started bouncing around at rapid speed in the midst of her Olympic triumph.
The second, and more pressing for the current St. Louis Cardinals, is the starting rotation, for which Leahy is being prepared after coming off a rock-solid season as a jack-of-all-trades, high-leverage reliever.
After posting a 3.07 ERA that was dead in line with his expected numbers over 88 innings, the Cardinals are eager to see him return to the roots he planted in 72 minor league starts sprinkled over six seasons.
“I know what it feels like,” Leahy said Sunday after his first game action of spring. “I’ve done it many times before. Hopefully I don’t feel like that tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll feel like it was only 35, 40 pitches, whatever it was. I don’t think I’ll feel like it was 100 yet, so my body should be in a good spot.”
It was, in fact, 29 pitches in game action, racking up three strikeouts over two innings that were blemished only by a solo home run against a badly placed fastball. That pitch was the one that stuck with Leahy in his postgame debrief, which is the sort of refinement and focus teams want to see from players as they take ownership over the advancement of their careers.
What’s difficult to determine, though, is how a team knows a player is ready to take that step. It can be difficult to know how the 100th inning is going to look or feel until it arrives. If Leahy looks like Leahy, the Cardinals seem certain to slide him into the rotation, because there would be very little reason not to.
“The opportunity,” answered manager Oli Marmol when asked how he would arbitrate the differences between Leahy’s potential roles. “When you look at our group several years ago, we had Lance Lynn and [Kyle Gibson] and [Adam Wainwright]. You can go down that list, right? But now there’s an opportunity, no different than the opportunity that was given to [Matthew Liberatore], to see if he’s capable of competing at the highest level.”
Liberatore as a model makes for a neat comparison and would also make for a top-tier outcome for the Cardinals as they work through the process with Leahy. Liberatore jumped from 86 innings pitched in 2024, the vast majority in the bullpen, to 151 2/3 in 2025 without injury and with the kind of reliability and stability that now has him in pole position to take this year’s opening day start.
Leahy’s innings count from last season would imply a jump up to perhaps 110 innings in the context of the industry’s expected safe standard of roughly 20 percent year over year.
With his background as a starter, just as Liberatore had, the Cardinals can allow themselves to be comfortable pushing past the outer limits of that projected innings total and building in a chance to approach 30 starts, assuming the results sustain themselves over a larger sample.
“The hitters do tell you a lot,” Leahy explained. “That is an evaluator. Are they putting good swings on it? How are they reacting to my misses? How are they reacting to when I execute stuff? Am I sequencing things in a way that gets defensive swings? There’s counts where if I’m behind in the count and I need to get back in the count with a fastball – that’s never ideal – are they putting a good swing on it, or is it defensive?”
The sequencing was shown off to the first Houston batter of the game on Sunday, shortstop Jeremy Peña, one of the only regulars in the Astros lineup. Leahy’s first pitch was a fastball landed on the lower edge of the strike zone away. The second was a sinker at the top of the zone that was fouled back. The third, a diving sweeper off the outside edge, drew an ugly swing.
Leahy called that sequence “the go-to righty sequence for me,” and the way hitters react on Feb. 22 is not the way they’ll necessarily react on June 22. But if the hitters tell whether things are working or not, and that was a go-to, then things were and are working well.
That is why the path was left open for Leahy after being laid out at the end of last season. He was tabbed to start the season finale at Wrigley Field so that he could remember the feel of a pre-start routine and experience the ordeal as a big leaguer before it settles into his norm.
There is little to suggest that it won’t be a regular sight in 2026, and even less to suggest that it shouldn’t be.
“I like to compete,” Leahy said, “and I expect a lot out of myself, even on day one, so I try to treat it as real as can be.”
If he keeps it up, the jumping and spinning might stay in the past. Starters almost never have to go out and squat for ceremonial first pitches, gold medal delivery or not.
