Andre Pallante's quirky path to becoming a rotation mainstay is the Cardinals' gain

It's been well documented at this point how badly things have gone for the St. Louis Cardinals when it comes to developing starting pitching for their major league rotation. It's only right then that their one success story of the 2020s so far lacked prospect pedigree and came close to never starting games for the big league club again.

Most Cardinals fans first met Andre Pallante during the 2022 season, as the then 23-year-old right-hander became a swiss-army knife for rookie manager Oli Marmol, starting 10 games while coming out of the bullpen in 37 other contests. Even in the bullpen, Pallante filled many roles, sometimes acting as the club's fireman with his groundball-inducing repertoire, and other times giving the club multiple innings to spell the rest of the bullpen. Oh, and did I mention that Pallante sported some significant reverse splits?

There are a lot of words to describe Pallante as a rookie for St. Louis, but considering how the rest of his career has gone, quirky would be a fitting term. And I actually mean that with the highest of compliments.

The Cardinals saw that value in Pallante, too. Coming into 2023, the club's rotation was full, and although he wasn't in line to make any starts, he was set up to fill a major role for them in the bullpen once again. Here's the problem though - his quirkiness looked more like weaknesses in those spots, and while Pallante appeared in 62 games that season, his 4.76 ERA and 4.59 FIP would tell you they were not impactful innings.

Beneath the hood, there weren't a ton of eye-popping metrics to tell you why he struggled so much compared to 2022. He saw a slight regression in walk and strikeout percentage, but his ground ball percentage actually rose by 12%. The biggest outliers you could point to were an almost 11% increase in his HR/FB rate and that he had lost effectiveness against left-handed hitters.

During the offseason, Pallante visited Tread Athletics in an attempt to revamp his repertoire. Specifically, he chased a new curveball nicknamed "death ball", something that former teammate Jordan Montgomery has found a ton of success with himself. The goal? To chase more strikeouts. No, he wasn't going to become Spencer Strider and ditch his groundball mentality, but any swing-and-miss you can add to your arsenal is vital in today's game.

The results early on in 2024 were, uh, less than ideal. Simply put, Pallante got beat around out of the bullpen once again to begin the season, prompting the Cardinals to demote him to Triple-A, but not without a crossroads moment. Upon his demotion, Pallante, Marmol, and the Cardinals brass agreed to allow the right-hander to work out of the rotation for Memphis, giving him a shot to try things out again as a starter, a role he excelled in for the Cardinals in 2022.

Practically speaking, working out of the rotation had the potential to help Pallanate negate some of the bad luck he experienced. Trust me, I'll get to some more of the bad in his game in 2023 and early 2024, but with Pallante's extreme groundball nature, coming in with runners on base can be a blessing or a curse to his effectiveness. Sure, he could induce a much-needed groundball, or, that ball could squeak past the outstretched glove of an infielder, resulting in runs on the board, even if Pallante got the "result" he was looking for.

So in theory, if you give Pallante the chance to start his own innings, he can work himself in and out of his own traffic, rather than trying to clean up the mess of a pitcher before him. It's an interesting theory, but it had to be backed up on the field for him to last as a starter.

As the Cardinals' fifth starter woes reached a fever pitch in late May, St. Louis recalled Pallante and placed him in their rotation. The early results? Quite the mixed bag!

In a story I wrote on June 16th titled "Andre Pallante's major flaw shows why the Cardinals need to trade for another starter" (one that I now regret I might add), I pointed out a very real and concerning flaw in Pallante's game. Not only was Pallante struggling against right-handed hitters like he had throughout his career, it had reached a level that I couldn't even believe myself.

In that story, I shared that right-handed hitters, up until that point during the season, had a slash line similar to that of Hall of Famer Ted Williams against Pallante. Yes, they slashed .396/.482/.563, good for a 1.045 OPS. That batting average allowed by Pallante to right-handed hitters was 55 points higher than the worst qualified starting pitcher in baseball at that point, and the on-base percentage was 86 points higher than the next worst starter.

I don't even need to explain to you how bad that is. I was ready to be done with the Pallante experience in the rotation. Sure, he had a couple of quality outings against the Reds and Rockies early on, but he was tormented by the Astros on June 4th, couldn't get out of the third inning against the Cubs on June 15th, and the Giants tagged him for five runs in the Rickwood Field game.

But then something changed. And now, Pallante is a surefire member of the Cardinals' starting rotation heading into the 2025 season.

Andre Pallante's quirks are what make him one of the more underrated starters in baseball today

No, I'm not about to tell you that Pallante is a dark horse Cy Young candidate or primed to become some kind of front-line starter, but the major steps forward we saw him take during the 2024 season are very real, and they should give the Cardinals confidence that he can be a very effective starter for them moving forward.

From June 28th through the rest of the season (15 starts), here is how Andre Pallante ranked among all 69 starting pitchers who qualified for those final three months:

3.25 ERA (23rd)
3.50 FIP (28th)
62.7 GB% (1st)
3.1 Barrel% (1st)
35.6 HardHit% (19th)
8.5 HR/FB% (12th)
.219 BAA (23rd)
89.2 IP (32nd)

Let me share multiple layers of additional numbers with you before I dive into how he pulled this off because I know some of you despise smaller sample sizes. Three months of baseball is significant, but it's not everything.

Site contributor and host of the "Birds on the Farm" prospect series over on the "Dealin' the Cards" podcast, Kareem Haq, shared on Twitter/X recently where Pallante ranks in some key areas among all starting pitchers who've thrown at least 250 innings since 2022.

.317 xwOBAcon (1st)
.335 wOBAcon (14th)
66.6% GB% (1st)
12.6% FB% (1st)
18.6% LD% (1st)

For those of you who aren't familiar with wOBAcon, it measures how productive hitters are when they make contact with a pitch and xwOBAcon measures the expected production from contact made with a baseball. In short, Hitters who make contact with pitches that Pallante has thrown since 2022 are expected to do the least amount of damage among anyone who has thrown 250 innings or more, and he's the very best at creating groundballs and limiting both flyballs and line drives.

One more stat for you. During the 2024 season, Pallante allowed the second-fewest total bases among qualified starting pitchers, with only Paul Skenes outranking him. Now, both pitchers made just 20 and 23 starts respectively, so while they would not have topped the leaderboards if they did, they would have ranked among the best still.

Let's recap. After settling into the rotation, Pallante posted a 3.50 FIP and 3.25 ERA while generating groundballs in a class of his own, not allowing hard contact, keeping the ball in the park, all while covering innings better than the average starter. Sign me up!

Now, I hope you are wondering how Pallante improved those results. I was too. Thanks to Baseball Savant and FanGraphs, we've got some answers.

How did Andre Pallante improve so much in 2024?

Remember that "death ball" from earlier? Pallante found it to be an extremely effective pitch, and it really helped him own left-handed hitters. Opposing hitters posted a .398 wOBA against his old curveball in 2023, and that dropped all the way down to a .177 wOBA against the death ball in 2024. Pallante's bread and butter has always been keeping left-handed hitters off balance, and he mostly deployed the death ball against lefties in two-strike counts. And boy did it help him add the whiffs he was chasing, as his new curveball had a 38.9% swing-and-miss rate against left-handed batters, by far the best of any pitch in his arsenal.

This also allowed him to cut down on his slider usage against left-handed hitters and use it as his secondary weapon against those pesky right-handed hitters. While the numbers still weren't great against right-handed hitters, the wOBA against his slider did drop almost a full 100 points from .420 wOBA by right-handed hitters in 2023 to a .327 wOBA in 2024. Producing swings and misses at a 29.1% rate against righties, Pallante was able to get enough swing-and-miss against righties to compliment his sinker.

That sinker and four-seam fastball is what Pallante's calling card is at the end of the day. But while his fastball has mostly remained steady throughout his big league career, it was his sinker that completely failed him in 2023. That season, Pallante allowed a .788 wOBA to opposing batters when throwing his sinker. Ouch. That caused him to throw the pitch only 30 times that season and completely ditch it from his arsenal.

But in 2024, it made a major comeback. Throwing the sinker almost exclusively to right-handed batters, Pallante saw that wOBA drop to .331 against righties, while his fastball allowed just a .263 wOBA to left-handed hitters.

In short, Pallante finally developed an effective strategy for each of his outings. He would completely shut down left-handed hitters with his four-seam fastball and new death ball combo and then limit damage to right-handed hitters with his improved sinker and intentional use of his slider. In doing so, Pallante went from a reliever lost for answers on the mound to the Cardinals' most dependable starting pitcher in 2024.

Now, that doesn't ensure sunshine and rainbows from Pallante in 2025. The league is going to try to adjust to him next year. Yes, he's always found a way to induce ground balls at an elite clip, but we've seen lineups get to him regardless if he isn't sharp (see 2023). How can Pallante replicate his success in 2024 or even build upon it for 2025?

I think the biggest key is growing in his comfortability with the death ball and finding a way to introduce it into his attack plan against right-handed hitters. He threw it just 12.6% of the time in 2024 (up to 17.3% when facing lefties), and while upping a pitch's usage does not mean it stays as impactful, it's clear that part of the reason he did not throw it often in 2024 was because he's still working out the kinks. If he adds it to his sinker and slider against right-handed hitters, the three-pitch attack strategy may keep those righties a bit more off-balanced at the plate.

The other key to improving in my opinion is refining that sinker that he brought back in 2024. Again, he threw it just 30 times in 2023 and it was hammered when he did so. Like the death ball, if he finds a greater comfort with it in 2025 and it grows in its effectiveness a bit, that can offset any regression we may see or even give him room to grow overall. Again, right-handed hitters are about 70% of the batters he'll see, so finding ways to incrementally improve against them is key for future success and growth.

It's fitting that Andre Pallante is the homegrown starter who the Cardinals can hang their hat on

While Quinn Mathews, Tink Hence, or other young starters may take that title away from Pallante in the near future, I find it fitting that he's the starter from the 2020s the Cardinals can actually trust in their rotation right now.

Without betting on himself during his April demotion and becoming a starter again, we may never have seen this kind of output from Pallante in a Cardinal uniform. I'm not expecting him to be an elite starting pitcher at any point in his career, but Pallante clearly has the tools to be a valuable member of the Cardinals' rotation in 2025 and the years to come. While developing a number three or four starter isn't flashy, it's so valuable, and the Cardinals have felt the absence of that kind of arm from their system for years now.

I'm looking forward to seeing if Pallante can keep that bulldog mentality in 2025 and continue to annoy opposing lineups as they drive the ball right into the ground time after time. I'm more than happy to admit I was wrong about Pallante's future as a starter, and I have a feeling he's ready to continue proving the doubters wrong.