As Spring Training rolls on, the St. Louis Cardinals roster is starting to come into focus, but there’s still no obvious choice for what the back of the rotation will look like. Who do you think should be the 5th starter? The same question could be asked about who the 4th starter will be, too.
It’s all but a foregone conclusion that the Cardinals will have Dustin May, Matthew Liberatore and Michael McGreevy as the first three starters. That leaves Richard Fitts, Andre Pallante and Kyle Leahy with one of them being the odd man out assuming the Cardinals go with a 5-man rotation and that’s no certainty either. For the sake of discussion, let’s say St. Louis starts the 2026 regular season with a 5-man rotation. Here are the stats of the bottom of the order candidates so far in Spring Training:
Andre Pallante
- Games: 3
- Innings Pitched: 9.0
- ERA: 3.00
- Strikeouts : 7
- WHIP: 0.78
Kyle Leahy
- Games: 3
- Innings Pitched: 8.2
- ERA: 5.19
- Strikeouts: 9
- WHIP: 0.92
Richard Fitts
- Games: 2
- Innings Pitched: 4.2
- ERA: 7.71
- Strikeouts: 4
- WHIP: 1.71
I’ve only seen a handful of Spring Training games, but I’ve seen impressive moments (and a few concerning ones) for all three of these players. The last game I saw Andre pitch, he was sharp. Kyle Leahy had a rough outing against Pittsburgh in his second Spring Training appearance, but his most recent game was solid. I saw many comments about Richard Fitts first game that said his fastball velocity was up. The second Fitts game was underwhelming. If the St. Louis Cardinals went with a conventional 5-man rotation, it would be a tough choice of which of these 3 would end up in the bullpen.
If I were forced to pick as of right now, I would have Pallante and Leahy as the 4th and 5th starters and have Fitts be the long reliever out of the bullpen, but I will admit I thought about Leahy having that role after the Pirates game. If you had to choose just 5 Cardinals starters, who would you go with and who goes to the pen? I know we’re only halfway through Spring Training, so the sample size is admittedly not large.
A few months ago, we explored the idea of the Cardinals going with a 6-man rotation and I’m starting to think that might be the right approach. If 2026 is the season where we find out who the future Cardinals core will be, what better way to figure out who the arms we can depend on will be than letting each of these pitchers get their chance at starting?