Cardinals hoping to repeat last year's success with underrated reliever

The St. Louis Cardinals did next to nothing to address their pitching problems during the Winter Meetings. Outside of selecting Matt Pushard in the Rule 5 Draft on Wednesday, the Cardinals did more subtracting than adding when they dealt Sonny Gray and lost an additional four arms in both portions of the Rule 5.

To help address the rotation vacancy, the Cardinals will be slotting reliever Kyle Leahy into the starting rotation. The move comes after Leahy put up a stellar season, covering 88 innings over 62 games with a 3.07 ERA and an average 22% strikeout rate. The righty was a regular in the rotation for his professional career up until the 2023 season and now he will look to get back on a starter's offseason workload. His move to the rotation creates a need for a fireman reliever that the Cardinals look ready to fill from within.

Matt Svanson looks to take Kyle Leahy's role in the St. Louis bullpen.

With Leahy pitching every fifth day next season instead of what seemed to be every day last year, the Cardinals know his role was a valuable one that has to be filled. In a note in Derrick Goold's article about pitching roles, he mentioned that various arms are expected to undergo a change in their offseason plan, and one of those could be last year's surprise arm Matt Svanson. Acquired as a part of the 2023 deadline deal that sent Paul DeJong to the Blue Jays, Svanson settled into the closer role for Double-A Springfield and saved 27 games in 2024.

That performance put him on the radar for the big league club and he was added to the 40-man roster at the deadline last offseason. After a solid start to the season in Memphis, the Cardinals called up Svanson for his MLB debut in April, and the reliever rode the shuttle back and forth to Memphis multiple times throughout the summer. He eventually played his way into a full-time big league bullpen job and made the Cardinals look like geniuses. In 39 major league games, Svanson went 4-0 with a 1.94 ERA and struck out 10.1 batters per nine innings pitched. The peripherals back up his performance, and now the Cardinals see Svanson following a similar path that Leahy did before his eventual move to the rotation.

Unlike Leahy, Svanson has little starting experience as a pro but has worked in a multi-inning role at every stop in the minors. He has thrown over 500 innings in 262 games and 25 of his 39 appearances last season went past just one inning. In those outings Svanson had zero or one day of rest in 11 of them, happening 28% of the time. To compare to Leahy once more, 39% of his appearances came with little to no days off.

Of course, overusing any reliever is not a sustainable plan for any major league team, and it would be best for the Cardinals if they invested some resources into some additional bullpen help. Goold does note that Svanson is expected to cover multiple innings if he is not in the closer role, which could become a real possibility if the Cardinals are able to deal JoJo Romero to a contending team this winter.