ATLANTA — You didn’t need to see the trajectory of the ball off Eli White’s bat to know the result.
The sound alone sufficed.
The St. Louis Cardinals had once again found themselves locked in a tight ballgame, clinging to a 1-1 tie with the Braves late in the series finale Wednesday afternoon. And the Cardinals again found themselves turning to a bullpen that has been shaky all season.
A story this team already knows far too well soon unfurled. An inconsistent JoJo Romero had put two runners in scoring position with one out. With a slew of righties due up and set-up man Phil Maton down for the day, manager Oli Marmol went to Ryan Fernandez, who had already served up a walk-off homer against the Mets earlier in the road trip and had squandered the lead on Sunday with a three-spot in the eighth inning.
It took just three pitches for a similar result.
Fernandez left a 1-1 slider over the heart of the plate and White delivered a gut punch — a no-doubt, go-ahead three-run homer to cement a 4-1 victory over St. Louis. The Cardinals fell to 10-15, while Fernandez saw his ERA balloon to 11.42. All signs indicate changes needing to be made with how Romero (who now has a 7.27 ERA in 11 appearances) and Fernandez are used. The problem? There doesn’t appear to be a viable solution.
1️⃣st homer of the season for Eli White
2️⃣nd-decker
3️⃣ runs score#BravesCountry pic.twitter.com/16VdlNb8pc— Atlanta Braves (@Braves) April 23, 2025
“This is who we got and we got to get them back on track,” Marmol said after the game. “There’s nothing coming from down below (in the minors) where it’s going to change. We have to get these guys better, and the only way is for them to pitch.
“It’s absolutely frustrating. But we’re going to keep going with them. We have to continue to encourage them and continue to get on the other side of this.”
The word frustrating barely covers it. After a strong rookie season as a Rule 5 selection, Fernandez has faltered out of the gate. He’s given up 15 hits and 11 earned runs in 8 2/3 innings. His slider has plagued him all season, and it’s clear he doesn’t have the command or the shape that he needs to repeat last season’s success. Normally, that would call for a return to Triple A, where he could work through his issues in a less demanding environment.
But the Cardinals don’t feel they can do that. The prerogative of this season is giving developing players an opportunity, and that extends to the bullpen as well. St. Louis crafted its bullpen with the premise that Fernandez and Romero, two reliable relievers last season, would take steps forward, not backward. While the organization wasn’t expecting either pitcher to be perfect, the hope was that if either struggled, they’d be able to adjust at the major-league level.
It’s the same process the club is taking with their position players. The difference is that when relievers struggle, it can cost the Cardinals the game.
“Put yourself in the players’ shoes,” Marmol said. “A reliever comes into the game, and it doesn’t go his way. He’s on an island. The game flips. The game is usually over. A position player goes 0-for-4 with three strikeouts, and you run him out there again the next day, and you give him the ability to get out of it. A reliever, you don’t feel like you have that luxury. It’s very reactive.”
“We usually fixate on the bullpen because the game flips,” he added. “If we were going to be that reactive to some of those bullpen arms, then why not send some of these position players out? We treat the bullpen arms very different than the position players, because whenever it doesn’t go their way, the game flips and it hurts. Speaking for myself, that’s the hardest area to be patient.”
The Cardinals have been patient with their young core of position players, including Nolan Gorman, who Marmol recently identified as someone who would see everyday playing time regardless of performance for the near future. Marmol has tried to do that with several relievers as well. In cases like Kyle Leahy (1.72 ERA and 16 strikeouts over 15 2/3 innings), it’s worked well. In cases like Fernandez, it has not. Marmol had hoped to use Fernandez in lower-leverage situations where the game isn’t on the line while the right-hander works through his slider command.
But low-leverage situations have been hard to come by. Sixteen of the Cardinals’ first 25 games have been decided by three runs or fewer. On their latest road trip, in which the Cardinals went 1-6, all six losses were decided by no more than three runs.
“You want to use (Fernandez) in a lower-leverage situation to get him right,” Marmol said. “You look at the style of play right now and the games that we’ve been in, there’s not a whole lot of low leverage. There are a lot of one-run ball games, tied ball games, so he has to pitch.”
Fernandez knows that it’s on him to make the adjustments regardless of when he’s pitching in a game. He has acknowledged the trouble with his slider dating back to the first week of the season and is becoming more confident that he’s making progress there.
“It really doesn’t matter if it’s high leverage, low leverage,” Fernandez said. “Whatever it is, it’s the same job I have to get done. By no means does it bother me at all to come into a high-leverage game and have to also figure my stuff out. What it comes down to right now is execution.”
St. Louis has toyed with its bullpen three times already, with right-handers Chris Roycroft, Roddery Muñoz and Matt Svanson all shuffling in from Memphis. The Cardinals could look to Riley O’Brien, who is at Triple A, as another internal option. But that raises the question of whether the club is solving a problem or simply changing the name on the back of the jersey. The pitching depth in Triple A remains thin, and the Cardinals clearly believe their best course of action is to continue trying to find lower-leverage spots for Fernandez and hoping he adapts.
But the more his results look like Wednesday’s, the more infuriating this early season becomes. That’s the price the Cardinals chose to pay when electing for a transition season and hoping their young players could keep them afloat, despite a razor-thin margin for error. The big issue is not that one of their key relievers is snowballing to start the season. It’s that they don’t have a viable solution that would have helped prevent this in the first place.
(Photo of Ryan Fernandez: Dale Zanine / Imagn Images)