Joe Buck wasn’t impressed with the way the Cardinals handled Michael McGreevy on Monday night, and he made that clear after St. Louis pulled the right-hander in the middle of a game that had already started to tilt in the wrong direction.
“Don’t you want your starting pitcher to say “this is my game”. Yes team game but MY game.
Gave up 2 run hr. Ok.
Back to work. Instead - go sit down.
We have 28 more guys to finish. This is the time to see.
Ok. Off my lawn!!
Then wonder why guys can’t go deep. Got it.”
Buck, a Hall of Fame announcer and the son of Cardinal great Jack Buck, fired off the criticism after watching Oliver Marmol turn to the bullpen once McGreevy hit trouble against the Yankees.
The Cardinals had already given fans an emotional stretch of the day, with Lars Nootbaar’s tear-filled goodbye and well wishes sent to Dustin May and JoJo Romero for their future endeavors. But once the game started, St. Louis actually jumped out front and handed McGreevy a six-run cushion heading into the middle innings.
For a while, it looked like the rookie could cruise. He was rolling through the first four innings with a big lead behind him before the fifth got messy.
McGreevy opened the inning with his pitch count in the high 70s, putting him on track to work at least five and possibly into the sixth. He allowed a leadoff single, struck out the next batter, then gave up a two-run homer to the struggling Austin Wells.
At that point, McGreevy was at 91 pitches, left-handed hitters were due, and Marmol decided that was enough. Justin Bruihl entered and immediately gave up a homer to left-handed Trent Grisham, trimming the lead to 6-3. Bruihl did finish the fifth and sixth without any more damage, but the Cardinals’ bullpen was never going to make anyone relax.
Sure enough, the game turned again in the seventh. Four runs crossed against not traded Ryne Stanek and George Soriano, and the Cardinals were suddenly leaning on Alec Burleson’s three-homer night to survive the mess. That explosion helped bury the early hook on McGreevy and, for a moment, made the whole sequence easier to shrug off.
Still, Buck’s gripe lands because this is exactly the kind of season the Cardinals are in. October isn’t the destination now, development is.
The rotation has been thinned out enough that Andre Pallante is the longest-tenured Cardinal in the group, while Kyle Leahy is the oldest of the bunch. That lack of experience may make Marmol wary when games start to wobble, but the bigger point is obvious: this is the time to see what the starters can handle.
The current thinking around the league says to get starters out before they have to face the order a third time, especially when danger is lurking. But with the postseason fading further away each day, the Cardinals’ biggest question isn’t just how many wins they can squeeze out right now. It’s which arms can be part of what comes next.
If the starters can’t work through a little turbulence in the middle innings, that says plenty about how far this pitching staff still has to go. And with the bullpen unlikely to receive much help over the final 50-plus games, asking the starters to go deeper would serve both the present and the future.
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For a Cardinals fan base that has watched the organization lean on player development and selective free-agent spending while searching for a clearer rebuild path, Lynns comments hit a nerve because they speak to the bigger question hanging over the roster. St. Louis is still trying to define what comes next, and the idea of chasing a frontline arm like Skubal only adds another layer to the discussion about how bold this front office is willing to be when the opportunity finally arrives. [Read more 🡒]