Cardinals bring relief woes into series opener vs. Brewers

After losing six times on a seven-game road trip, the St. Louis Cardinals will seek relief when they return home to face the Milwaukee Brewers on Friday night.

Cardinals relievers allowed 17 runs (16 earned) on 20 hits and five homers in 12 2/3 innings in those road losses. Improvement from within is on the agenda when they open their three-game series against the Brewers in St. Louis.

“This is who we’ve got, and we’ve got to get them back on track,” Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol said. “There’s nothing coming from down below where it’s going to change what is going on up here. We have to get these guys better, and the only way is for them to pitch. We’re going to keep going with them. We have to continue to get on the other side of this.”

The Cardinals are just 2-11 on the road this season, but 8-4 at home. They open the series with left-hander Matthew Liberatore (1-2, 3.60 ERA), who is trying to establish himself as a starting pitcher after shuttling back and forth from the bullpen earlier in his career.

In his last two starts, Liberatore allowed just two runs on nine hits in 12 2/3 innings. Liberatore has met the quality start metric in three of his four starts while trying to pitch more aggressively early in the pitch counts.

“I kind of went through last year and spent a lot of time trying to be perfect and execute perfect pitches, and when you do that you have to get back in the count somehow,” Liberatore told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “So I was throwing a lot of what I should be throwing 0-0 instead at 2-0 counts and 3-1 counts or 2-1 counts when guys are sold out to those exact pitches.”

Liberatore is 2-0 with a 1.02 ERA in nine career appearances against Milwaukee, including two starts.

The Cardinals could see the return of utility player Brendan Donovan, who owns a .356 batting average. He sat out the last two games with a minor rib injury.

The Brewers are in the middle of a 10-game road trip. They lost three times in a four-game series against the San Francisco Giants, capped by their 6-5 setback Thursday afternoon. A series of defensive miscues undermined the Brewers in that series.

“Probably just a blip,” Brewers outfielder Christian Yelich said. “We obviously we didn’t play well these four days. We didn’t play well in any aspect. Uncharacteristic of us.”

Those fielding breakdowns led to a closed-door postgame team meeting Thursday.

“It wasn’t anything crazy,” Yelich said. “We all know we’ve got to clean it up. In the big leagues, you have to do that. You can’t keep making mistakes. It’s all of us. Just get it corrected and don’t let it linger.”

Milwaukee will counter Liberatore with rookie Chad Patrick (1-1, 2.11 ERA), who allowed two runs or fewer in each of his four starts this season. But he got through the fifth inning in just one of them — a 3-1 loss to the Athletics on Saturday.

Patrick allowed two runs on seven hits in six innings in that outing. He struck out seven and walked none. This will be his first career appearance against the Cardinals.

The Brewers expect to get catcher William Contreras back in the lineup after a scheduled day off Thursday.

–Field Level Media