If a number of people were surprised when the St. Louis Cardinals demoted Michael McGreevy to the minors on Monday after his game-saving performance in Sunday’s doubleheader nightcap, McGreevy himself was not among them.
The Cardinals, seizing on their schedule and highly encouraged by Gordon Graceffo’s lights out performance last week in Cincinnati, structured their promotions and demotions over the weekend to arrive at precisely this point.
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McGreevy will go to Memphis and start, ready to jump into the rotation in St. Louis at the first opportunity to do so. Graceffo will be used for short burst, high octane appearances out of the bullpen, perhaps getting opportunities to jump into higher leverage situations than might be typical for a pitcher of his experience.
This is the outcome the Cardinals have desired for the two young righties since no later than the first week of February, and they believe the time to execute the plan is now.
“I love McGreevy,” manager Oli Marmol said Monday from his office. “I absolutely love that kid for a lot of reasons. His personality, his demeanor, his poise. One of the best traits you can have as a young player is to not scare, and he does not scare.
“He knew this would be a short stint based on the need. At some point it won’t be a short stint, and I don’t think he’ll ever look back, and I’m looking forward to that day.”
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With driving rain a certainty in the forecast for the weekend, the Cardinals anticipated that Saturday’s game would likely be rained out. That informed roster moves for Friday, when Roddery Muñoz was recalled and then asked to provide two innings and 39 pitches of work.
Expecting to need innings protection for a soggy weekend – either in a doubleheader or in case Saturday’s game started and stopped and forced Erick Fedde into an early exit – McGreevy was pulled away from his scheduled start in Triple-A for a weekend in the majors that he knew would likely be just a weekend.
“He understands it,” Marmol said. “He understands that there’s a bigger picture to all of this, and there’s a business side to all of this. And then, hey, I’m coming up, I’m going to help, and I’m gonna go back down. And whenever you guys call me, my job’s to make it that much more difficult for you guys to do that.”
“Just have to go back to when I got recalled last year against Pittsburgh,” McGreevy said Sunday after delivering 5 ⅔ shutout innings to lock down a 5-4 Cardinals victory. “Like, hey, we’ve done this before. This is nothing new. Didn’t have a fresh inning like last time, but hey, you’ve got bases loaded, one out, just make a pitch, and one pitch at a time.”
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For Graceffo, whose fastball and slider sat last season at roughly 94 and 86 miles per hour respectively, last Wednesday’s extended outing in Cincinnati was the payoff from working through mechanical issues which both he and the team believes were solved in a way that allows him to play with a significantly more dangerous arsenal.
In his first inning of work against the Reds, his fastball touched 99 MPH and his slider whistled in at around 92. Those numbers flagged slightly as he worked deeper into the game, but they provided a tantalizing preview of what the righty could look like as a short burst reliever.
“We were hoping at some point this would be the case,” Marmol said. “To his credit, he’s done the work.”
“It was just continuing to fine tune my mechanics,” Graceffo explained. “I kind of identified something I was kind of- that I could improve on during the season, after my starts in Memphis. Just kind of worked on it during the week and pitched in Norfolk, felt really good, and then ended up getting called up for the doubleheader [in Cincinnati]. Just kept working on it, and it kind of worked out as things start to click.”
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He allowed one earned run in five innings, striking out five and walking none. That performance was celebrated at all levels of the organization, less as a revelation and more as an expected breakthrough.
Graceffo, as now-fellow reliever Chris Roycroft did before him, credited conversations with minor league director of pitching Matt Pierpont and assistant general manager Rob Cerfolio with giving him a structure that allowed him space to work through those issues and confidence that the process would be fruitful.
“The meetings I had with Pierpont and Cerfolio after getting optioned [in spring] was something I had never experienced before in pro ball period,” he said. “Just being able to sit down and talk to them for, like, a pretty good amount of time about what they were expecting of me, about what they thought I could improve on, what they thought my focuses needed to be was really, really helpful.”
Marmol said he envisioned slotting Graceffo into bullpen slots that have been largely the provenance of Kyle Leahy and Phil Maton in the season’s opening month, providing a little more rest to the two pitchers who, at one point, were tied for the league lead in appearances.
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Asked directly if Graceffo’s performance in Cincinnati led the Cardinals to rethink the ideal makeup of their present day bullpen, Marmol was succinct and direct: “Yes.”
That’s a demonstration of a great deal of faith in Graceffo, but also in the plan the Cardinals had sketched out as the ideal at the start of the season. Whether Graceffo’s long-term career path leads him back to the rotation or continues toward the back end of the bullpen will be determined by his performance and their need. For now, despite so many of their similarities, the club is viewing Graceffo and McGreevy in very different lights.
Both can help now. McGreevy will wait his turn for a rotation spot to open, with confidence from the team that he will not surrender that spot once he grabs a hold of it. Graceffo will be asked to turn up the gas, and follow that path wherever it may lead.