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ST. LOUIS — Andre Pallante has been flirting with disaster in a number of his recent starts, but prior to Tuesday night at Busch Stadium, it’s mostly been just that: harmless flirtation en route to middling back-of-the-rotation style production.
But disaster finally found him in definitive fashion on Tuesday.
The St. Louis Cardinals fell to the Royals, 10-7, and it was Pallante’s undoing in the fifth inning that helped flip things back in favor of the visitors from the west. After the Cardinals had rallied for seven runs between the second and third innings, the Royals struck for a six-spot in the top of the fifth, with all of those earned runs getting pinned onto the St. Louis starter.
A common frustration for Pallante this season has been his tendency to put batters on base via walk, but that wasn’t his bugaboo on Tuesday—no Royals reached on free passes against the Cardinal starter.
How they did reach, though, wasn’t any better. The pitch-to-contact artist served up plenty of contact to Kansas City in the fifth as he permitted a Nick Loftin home run followed by four straight singles before Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol removed his starter from the proceedings.
In the inning, four of the six batted balls against Pallante registered with an exit velocity above 100 mph. The frame marked a sudden regression as Pallante had settled in for three scoreless innings after Bobby Witt Jr. opened the game with a two-run home run against the St. Louis right-hander.
“It definitely happened fast,” Pallante said. “Felt like I made decent pitches—not great pitches, not horrible pitches—to those batters all consecutively. They put good swings on them… Just unfortunate it all was in a row and cost the team the game. Got to learn from it.”
Witt was involved, too, in that key fifth-inning rally for the Royals, coming up with the swing that solidified that Kansas City was back in the game. Pallante was due to face the star shortstop with the bases loaded and one out, but the hard contact was mounting against him in the inning.
Steven Matz was the reliever warming for what seemed like an inevitable rescue mission, but Marmol didn’t turn to his bullpen for the Witt at-bat.
After a visit from pitching coach Dusty Blake, Pallante grappled with Witt for seven pitches before one of the most complete players in the sport took the eighth offering he saw and rifled a base hit past a diving Masyn Winn to further trim the deficit to 7-5. Matz couldn’t stop the bleeding when he entered the game for the subsequent hitter, and before you knew it, the Royals were ahead to stay.
Though the Cardinal manager saw things unraveling for his starter, he was straining to avoid beginning a lengthy stretch of games without an off-day by burning up his bullpen any more than he had to.
“You’re about to play 13 in a row,” Marmol said. “You want to empty out that early, day one of 13 in a row with a guy at 55, 60 pitches, you’re asking for it. So you’re hoping like hell that one of those are hit at somebody, because you’re about to play in a really long stretch of games. That’s kind of the way you think about that one.”
After entering play with a 4.23 ERA on the campaign, Pallante’s ERA ballooned to 4.91 by the virtue of this one bad night. The nature of the way it impacted Tuesday’s game for his team certainly strengthened the sting.
The Cardinal offense had responded favorably despite an early deficit, producing a 7-2 lead through three innings. Coming off a weekend in which the Cardinals scored only four combined runs in three games against the Rangers, the vibes were back booming with the way the St. Louis lineup tagged Royals starter Michael Lorenzen.
To squander that lead, under those circumstances, doesn’t feel great.
Pallante’s numbers are moving in the wrong direction, but the rigors of the upcoming schedule could dictate that the move isn’t necessarily to replace him in the rotation. What the club may opt to do is potentially supplement the group with another modified stint for a six-man rotation. The Cardinals have just one scheduled day off over the next calendar month.
Michael McGreevy pitched 4.1 innings of scoreless baseball for Triple-A Memphis on Tuesday night, but was cut off after only 75 pitches. If that number feels a little too on the nose, there’s a case to be made that his pitch count was limited so precisely for a reason.
With the strain of the team’s upcoming schedule clearly on the mind of the manager Tuesday night, it wouldn’t be surprising to see McGreevy parachute into the Cardinals rotation at some point over the course of the next week. But the notion of replacing Pallante in the rotation, a popular one on social media from the fan base after Tuesday’s troubles, won’t necessarily be the path forward just yet.
Tuesday’s start was definitively Pallante’s worst of the year. It was the first outing all season in which he allowed more than four runs. But Pallante was arguably the best starter in the Cardinals rotation in 2024 after joining the group in late May—his chance to work through some struggles seems aligned with the notion of ‘runway’ that permeates the club in 2025.
Eventually, though, the schedule will subside and days off will be reintroduced, at which point, the most recent data points between Pallante and McGreevy could conceivably be scrutinized more intensely against one another.