It was difficult to watch Andre Pallante stand on the mound, heave pitches to Pittsburgh hitters, and then roll his neck to see where the latest base hit would land.
The whiplash was extreme as Pallante turned repeatedly to assess the latest piece of damage. During Tuesday’s ambush, 10 of the first 14 Pirates reached base, and two others plated a run on a sac fly and ground-ball out. The visitors went 8 for 16 against Pallante in his three innings – with four blows going for extra bases – and left the mound as a defeated and demoralized man.
In his last nine starts Pallante has been jolted for an 8.26 ERA, and the Cardinals lost eight of the righthander’s nine assignments.
These performances were not competitive. During the first three innings of his last nine starts, Pallante was buffeted for an 11.22 ERA and got battered by opponents for a .368 average, .438 on-base percentage and .553 OPS. And Pallante’s walk rate in those early innings – 10 percent – virtually matched his strikeout rate. If the hitters aren’t beating on Pallante, he’s beating himself.
Memphis, anyone?
Can Erick Fedde make a comeback? I ask because Atlanta just dumped him.
Sonny Gray starts for the Cardinals in Wednesday’s game, and at least he’ll get to work in moderately cool weather instead of liquifying in the STL heat and humidity.
The series concludes Thursday with Miles Mikolas making his latest start for the Cardinals, and at least this will move him closer to the finality of a three-year fade that had him getting bopped in major-league ballparks for a 5.07 ERA in 92 starts and just under 500 innings.
There is an aspect to the Cardinals’ 2025 starting rotation that’s especially horrendous … historically bad … and downright depressing.
And this concerns Pallante, Mikolas and Fedde. Though Fedde was cut loose after another brutal start on July 22, his ruins are still part of the rotation’s overall carnage.
Please let me distribute three facts as a warm-up to my primary finding.
1. In 71 combined starts for the Cardinals this season Pallante, Mikolas and Fedde worked a combined 366 innings only to be detonated for a 5.29 ERA.
Among the 102 MLB starting pitchers that have handled at least 100 innings this season, Mikolas (87th) and Fedde (89th) and Pallante each rank in the bottom 16.
Mikolas has a 5.17 ERA in 125 and ⅓ innings, Fedde had a 5.22 ERA in his 101 and ⅔ innings for the Cardinals, and Pallante’s ERA has festered to 5.22 in 139 innings.
2. This season when Pallante, Mikolas & Fedde have started a game for the Redbirds, the team’s record is a ruinous 26-45 that translates to a .366 winning percentage.
3. When all other pitchers start a game for the Cardinals this season, the ballclub has a peppy and happy 39-23 record for a winning percentage of .629.
I mean, wow.
This a great example of how a season can be wrecked by (a) horrible roster construction, (b) the inability to develop starting pitchers and (c) having three appallingly poor starting pitchers crammed into your five rotation spots.
In their 71 starts and 366 innings this season, Pallante + Mikolas + Fedde accrued 0.8 Wins Above Replacement between them. (FanGraphs version.)
Rookie Michael McGreevy has topped that – by himself – with 1.0 fWAR in 63 innings of work.
McGreevy was detained at Triple A Memphis until the Cardinals belatedly promoted him to the big club to stay on July 21.
The Cardinals are 10-3 over the last two seasons when McGreevy started the game so we can understand why it was smart to keep him in lockdown in Memphis. (Sarcasm alert.)
My curious brain was wondering about something on Tuesday night while watching Pallante serve batting practice.
How unusual is it for a St. Louis Cardinals’ team to have three starters in the rotation that possess bloated earned-run averages in excess of 5.0 runs per nine innings?
It’s rare.
The data was a little sketchy because some of the pitching splits weren’t easy to sort. Keep in mind that I limited the search to pitchers that contributed at least 100 innings in a season as a starter. No relievers or split-duty pitchers were considered.
I went all the way back to 1900, and discovered several instances of the Cardinals having two embedded starting pitchers with 5+ earned-run averages (and at least 100 IP) while in the same rotation during the same season.
But when you set the parameters to three starting pitchers with 5+ earned-run averages and 100+ innings in the same rotation in the same season … There are two. But I wanted to mention a couple of other interesting seasons that didn’t quite qualify.
The 1995 season: Ken Hill was slapped for a 5.09 ERA in 110 and ⅓ innings for the Cardinals after coming over in a trade from Cleveland. Lefty Allen Watson was clobbered for a 5.45 ERA in 104 innings. And lefty Danny Jackson got struck for a 5.90 ERA in 100 and ⅔ innings. The ‘95 Cardinals eventually finished 19 games under .500 and manager Joe Torre was fired after a 20-27 start. The rotation received solid work from Donovan Osborne (3.81), Mike Morgan (3.88) and Mark Petkovsek.
The 2025 season: the only other season that fits our parameters is the current one. It would be a stretch to think Mikolas (5.17) could pull his ERA below 5.00. Fedde is gone. Pallante’s ERA is 5.52 and beyond saving.
To this late point in the schedule, the 2025 rotation is on a path to become one of the worst for the Cardinals since the expansion era began in 1961. The current 4.82 starter ERA would rank 61st among the 65 rotations. The only rotations to do worse were 1995, 2007, 2023, and 1994.
The 1994 season: This campaign was famously and sadly cut short by a labor dispute … and the Cardinals had perhaps the worst starting rotation in modern franchise history. Watson (5.52) and Bob Tewksbury (5.38) each surpassed 100 innings. But the Redbirds had three ghastly ERAs from starters that all pitched fewer than 72 innings: Rick Sutcliffe (6.78), Omar Olivares (5.80) and lefty Tom Urbani (5.17).
Question: how the hell was Joe Torre supposed to win games? With this horrific rotation, Torre managed to lead the ‘94 Cards to a 53-61-1 record before the season got shut down. I wrote a lot about those 1994 and 1995 teams. My gosh, what terrible starting pitching – a 5.17 ERA over the two seasons. The STL starters had the second-worst Win Probability Added among MLB rotations over the two odious seasons.
Little did we know at the time, but Bill DeWitt Jr., Walt Jocketty, Tony La Russa and Dave Duncan were about to come to the rescue to lead the franchise to a sensational new era of success. Happy memories for this old sportswriter.
The 2006 season: this was an oddity, because the Cardinals won only 83 games during the regular season, got healthy right before the postseason, and rolled all the way to the World Series title. The 2006 Cardinals ranked 20th in the majors with a 4.79 rotation ERA during the regular season.
Cardinals Hall of Famer Chris Carpenter pitched very well, Jeff Suppan was good, and Jason Marquis turned in 33 starts. But there was a lot of shuffling around, with pitching coach Dave Duncan doing his best to cobble something together. Some details:
— Sidney Ponson had a 4.52 ERA in 13 starts, and the Cardinals weren’t fans of his work ethic, so he pitched his final game for the Cardinals in early July.
— Marquis gave the Cardinals valuable innings … and they really needed regular-season innings … but he got thumped for a 6.02 ERA and was excluded from the postseason roster.
— Mark Mulder made 17 starts, but lost effectiveness because of a shoulder injury that prematurely ended his career. I felt bad for Mulder. He tried. He really did. But the lefty had a 7.14 ERA in 93 innings before the Cardinals shut him down.
— Walt Jocketty traded for Jeff Weaver in July, and on the surface it didn’t look like much of a “get” for the Cardinals. Weaver had a 5.18 ERA in 15 starts for St. Louis, but Duncan got him throwing the sinker and Weaver improved late in the season with a 4.12 ERA during the final month. He then peaked at the perfect time. In five postseason starts, Weaver pounded that sinker for a 2.43 ERA, won a game in all three rounds, and put the Tigers away in World Series Game 5 by allowing one earned run in eight innings. And just like that, Weaver became the first St. Louis starting pitcher to win the World Series clincher since Joaquin Andujar in the seventh game of 1982.
— Anthony Reyes had a 5.06 ERA in 85 regular-season innings as a starter, then came through with one of the most clutch postseason starts in franchise history. With the Cardinals’ supply of starting pitching worn thin by an exhausting seven-game NLCS battle against the Mets, Reyes started Game 1 of the 2006 World Series, and out-pitched Detroit’s heralded rookie Justin Verlander. In a stunning 7-2 Game 1 victory, Reyes gave up just four hits and two earned runs in eight innings.
— Look at that group of starters. And let’s pause for a moment to remember that Dave Duncan was the best pitching coach in MLB history. Dunc played a remarkably important role in helping the Cards win it all with his successful pitcher-renovation projects that included Carpenter, Suppan, Weaver and Reyes. Incredible.
— The 2006 Cardinals had four starting pitchers with earned-run averages of 5.06 or worse … but of the four, only Marquis reached the 100+ innings standard. Reyes (85.1), Weaver (83.1) and Mulder (93.1) didn’t get to 100 IP. I think I’ll call this the Duncan’s Divine Miracle from now on. It was an amazing thing to witness in real time.
To recap:
There are only two teams in Cardinals history that had/have three starting pitchers in their rotation with 100+ innings and earned-run averages above 5.00.
* Jackson, Watson and Hill in 1995.
* Mikolas, Fedde and Pallante (so far) in 2025. But to put an exclamation point on this, the current STL starters – Gray, Matthew Liberatore, McGreevy, Pallante and Mikolas – have collectively spun a 6.23 ERA since the All-Star break.
Good luck, Mr. Chaim Bloom.
Thanks for reading …
–Bernie
Bernie was inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame in 2023. During a St. Louis sports-media career that goes back to 1985, he’s won multiple national awards for column writing and sports-talk hosting – and was the lead sports columnist at the Post-Dispatch from 1989 through 2015.
You can access his columns, videos and the podcast version of the videos here on STLSportsCentral, catch him weekdays on the “Gashouse Gang” or “Redbird Rush Hour” on KMOX, and Bernie does a weekly “Seeing Red” podcast on the Cardinals with his longtime pal Will Leitch. Bernie joins Katie Woo on the “Cardinal Territory” video-podcast at least once per week, and you can catch a weekly “reunion” segment here with Bernie’s appearance on the Randy Karraker Show every Friday morning at 10:30 am.