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ST. LOUIS -- Staging a come-from-behind rally against the reigning AL Cy Young Award winner is no easy task, and Oliver Marmol knew that.
So when the St. Louis Cardinals did it against Tarik Skubal on Tuesday night at Busch Stadium, the Cardinals manager craved to see his team finish the job.
But after scratching across three runs against Skubal and another off the Detroit Tigers bullpen to tie the score at 4-4, the Cardinals ran out of steam and fell 5-4 in a game that saw Kyle Leahy surrender his first run to an opponent in more than a month.
To come so close but ultimately fall short against one of the game’s best pitchers was a sensation that Marmol knew would eat at him for the rest of the evening.
“This one’s going to wear on me, to be quite honest with you,” Marmol said at the podium in the Cardinals press room after Tuesday’s loss. “I’ll get two hours of sleep tonight and be ready for tomorrow. That’s what this one looks like—there were a lot of moving parts.”
To lose a game that felt winnable against a high-quality opponent never feels good, but this game in particular stuck with Marmol because of just how many times his influence was required. Several key fulcrum points swung on Marmol’s decision making, giving the game a real postseason feel in the middle of May.
One key spot in the bottom of the sixth saw Marmol stick with Pedro Pagés to bat with the bases loaded and two outs in a game that the Cardinals trailed 4-3. With a right-hander on the mound, Marmol could have deployed Alec Burleson—who has been red hot despite limited recent opportunities—to go for a crooked number and put the Cardinals in the driver’s seat of the contest.
But given how early in the game it was, and how consistent the team’s offensive approach had been throughout the night, Marmol felt like the key moment in the sixth wouldn’t be the Cardinals’ last crack at getting runs on the Detroit pitching staff.
“You felt good about being able to do something later,” Marmol said. “I didn’t think that was going to be our only shot. Which, ended up, it not being. But we couldn’t come through.”
He stuck with Pagés, who was obviously capable of providing a key swing with RISP despite Burleson being the better matchup on paper, primarily because of the influence he trusted Pagés would have over the rest of the game from a defensive perspective.
“Not hitting (for Pagés) in that situation… You definitely can," Marmol acknowledged. "Pagés just does a really nice job of keeping the damn score. You want him behind the plate. That’s who gives you a really good chance to keep them from adding on, so you weigh that into the equation.”
Iván Herrera was in the lineup as the designated hitter Tuesday, but the presence of Yohel Pozo on the bench would have created a lane to sacrifice Pagés in that spot without having to pull your DH. Marmol’s call to ride it out with Pagés is yet another gleaming bat signal detailing just how much this team believes in this particular player. The actions continue to tell the story.
Pagés didn’t come through in that spot, grounding out to third base to end the threat, but a Victor Scott II leadoff double in the following inning led to the Cardinals tying the score on a Masyn Winn sacrifice fly. So Marmol was right, in a sense—the sixth inning wasn’t the Cards’ last chance to put runs on the board. But to win the game and ensure the comeback wasn’t for naught, they would still need to find another run somewhere along the way.
The eighth inning presented a chance to do so, and this time, Marmol did deploy Burleson in a pinch-hitting role for Jordan Walker. Right-hander Will Vest was on the mound for the Tigers, which would seem like a spot to go to a left-handed bat. It should be noted, though, that Vest carries dastardly reverse splits in 2025, holding lefties to 3-for-29 (.103) against him. But he had also surrendered a handful of walks to lefties this season.
Burleson, who has been recently targeting plate discipline as an area for improvement in his game offensively, laid off some tough pitches to draw the walk. But that kicked the can down the road once again to Pagés.
With lefty Nolan Gorman still available off the bench—whose plate discipline is not nearly as strong as Burleson’s—Marmol doubled down with Pagés, perhaps considering Vest’s reverse splits in the process. Or perhaps it wasn’t even a decision point in the manager’s mind, considering his trust in Pagés, who is arguably a better bat-to-ball hitter than Gorman at this juncture of their respective careers, anyway.
With a runner in scoring position, the Cardinals didn’t need a home run from this spot—they needed a base hit to take the lead. Pagés stung a line drive to center field, but it held up long enough for Javier Baez to catch it and end another scoring threat.
That’s where the decision played out that Marmol would turn over in his mind for the rest of the night.
After Steven Matz recorded 2.2 innings of scoreless, hitless baseball, Marmol had called upon Kyle Leahy to finish the top of the eighth against Gleyber Torres, who has smoked left-handed pitching all season. On the surface, a sensible, aggressive move to ensure a favorable matchup for his team.
But by bringing Leahy into that spot, you hesitate to turn to Ryan Helsley for the ninth inning, essentially wasting one of your top relievers (Leahy) for a bit part in a game that could potentially extend beyond nine innings. Leahy has been as good as anyone in baseball going multiple innings this season, so Marmol looked to squeeze the ninth inning out of him, especially with two lefties coming up—Leahy has had great success against both lefties and righties, and it seemed like a matchup uniquely tailored to his abilities.
But two quick hits later, Leahy had given up what ultimately proved to be the game-winning run. Helsley never saw the field.
Marmol stewed over the decision long after the final out, but gave forthright insight into his thought process after the game.
“Hell, I can talk for an hour on, do you let Matz face Torres?” Marmol began, outlining the pitching decisions. “And if so, then you've got Helsley in the ninth, right? Like, that's who you want in the ninth. But Torres kills lefties. The last thing you want is, he clips him. And you don't have a shot at it at all, right? So you get off the field. But I'm not going to use Leahy there for one out. He’s done a helluva job against lefties, you roll him back out there.”
“I’ll beat myself up over it for a little bit,” Marmol continued. “Leahy’s been really good against lefties, he’s been really good no matter who's in the box. You take a gamble on having Helsley in the 10th with the runner on second, right?
“Any other matchup, you just go straight to Hels there and just roll the dice later. But as good as Leahy’s been, you almost feel like you’ve got two closers, right? And you just let him roll out there at Torres, who has an 1.100, small sample size, but an 1.100 OPS against lefties. When you get off the field there, you feel good about sending him back out. And then you have Helsley, if we don’t score, you have Helsley with a runner on second in the 10th.”
So this wasn’t a case of a manager being stubborn about using his closer in a non-save situation. It was the matchup that dictated the desire to ride with Leahy, with a downstream benefit of having the closer Helsley available for the hypothetical 10th inning.
No, it didn’t seem the hypothetical future inning was the driving force behind Marmol’s decision—it felt like an ancillary benefit to having Leahy, effectively a second closing pitcher whose numbers are actually superior to Helsley’s on the season, pitch the ninth.
Leahy entered the night with lefties hitting .114 against him on the season. Lo and behold, two straight lefties tagged him for hits, the second of which by Riley Greene found the gap and allowed Zach McKinstry to come around and become the first player to score a run against Leahy since April 18.
So, everything that Marmol laid out described the thought process and the logic behind the decision, but he still didn't seem convinced of whether he had made the right one. Frankly, all of it was good enough for me—that was a bona fide Kyle Leahy spot, for my money. The guy had a 1.00 ERA. Sometimes, you lose with a winning process, or at least, a defensible one.
But bottom line, losing the Skubal game when you had it there for the taking—and losing it without deploying your top relief arm—is a sting that Marmol took some time to shake off on Tuesday night.
“We gambled. And lost,” he concluded.
Certainly, there are no moral victories at the big-league level. But it would be hard to have watched those nine innings play out on Tuesday night—to witness the grit, resilience and determination that the Cardinals displayed after Erick Fedde had them down 4-0 amid a rocky early portion of his outing—and not count more encouraging signs than concerns about the state of this ball club as it continues to look and feel like a contending team in 2025.
“The guys competed their… That’s what you want,” Marmol said. “If you’re going to lose a game, that’s what it’s supposed to look like. I’ll take that loss.”