PITTSBURGH -- After striking out a season-high seven batters through five scoreless innings in St. Louis' 11-7 win on Tuesday night at PNC Park, Cardinals starter Kyle Leahy looked ready for a test that he hadn’t yet faced across his first five starts of the season.
The sixth inning.
Though Leahy's stuff was arguably as sharp as it's been all season, it didn’t spare the converted reliever from falling victim to a familiar wall.
Leahy recorded an out in the sixth inning for his first time as a big league starter, but it’s the only one he got in the frame before handing the ball off to Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol to end his night.
“I mean, it’s progress,” Leahy said of reaching his new high-water mark by pitching into the sixth. “A step in the right direction. But I still left the game not using my full pitch count. That’s not really how you want to end it.”
Leahy wasn’t thrilled that a promising start ended with the manager grabbing the ball from him, but Marmol viewed that moment through the lens of the bigger picture.
Ultimately, the name of the game is realistic progress -- which Marmol felt Leahy demonstrated in Tuesday’s win.
“You can look at the pitch count and go, ‘He's going into this inning at 70 pitches, he’s got plenty to work with.' But ... he hasn't started in a while,” Marmol said. “So it's the ups, too, of getting back out there in that sixth, right? It’s the combo of those two things.
“So for him to go back out there, we knew this could be a troublesome inning, but he needs to feel that. And that's one of those where the score dictates him being OK going back out there -- and if he gives a couple, it's fine, but at least we're pushing that threshold a little bit.”
Leahy acknowledges the physical toll involved in going from pitching in shorter stints as a reliever to, now, needing to sustain his stuff across longer outings -- but he feels that, physically, he’s adjusting to the rigors in an appropriate way.
“The physical thing is coming around … It's getting better,” Leahy said. “The mental side of it is something that I just have to be better at.”
For Leahy, the mental hurdle of facing a lineup for the third time through the batting order -- which has seen opposing hitters collectively post a .480/.519/.880 slash line against the right-hander this season -- is the conundrum with which he’s still grappling every fifth day.
“Baseball's a hard game,” Leahy said in a moment of introspection. “How many times can you go back to the same well? Then, when do you need to switch it up is the hard thing to learn. Right now, it seems like, third time through, I'm picking the wrong thing. When I need to switch it up, I'm not. When I can just keep doing the same thing, I'm switching it up.
“So, I need to figure out how to read that better and make better decisions based on that.”
If the pair of sixth-inning home runs by the Pirates put a damper on Leahy’s evening, the Cardinals' bats endeavored to lift his spirits. The Cards piled up crooked numbers in four innings in their win over the Bucs, the relentless identity of the lineup picking up right where it left off in Monday’s four-run ninth inning.
Nolan Gorman hit his fourth home run of the season, while Victor Scott II slugged his first of the year, becoming the 53rd player throughout the history of PNC Park to see his home run ball find its way into the Allegheny River.
The Cardinals racked up five hits in a whopping 16 at-bats with runners in scoring position in the win. Gorman, Alec Burleson and Jordan Walker each produced three RBIs, contributing to a key top of the seventh inning that saw the Cardinals immediately wrestle back the three runs that Pittsburgh had tallied against Leahy in the sixth.
The win marked St. Louis’ 23rd 10-run game at PNC Park -- the most of any opponent there -- as everyone got in on the fun, with each hitter in the lineup tallying at least one hit.
“To be honest, I didn’t even know Pedro [Pagés] didn’t have a hit [until the ninth] until he said something after the game,” Gorman joked. “Yeah, you never want to be that guy that didn’t have a hit. But luckily, nobody did today.”