It will be a battle of southpaws on the mound at Busch Stadium in St. Louis on Saturday afternoon as Nick Lodolo and Matthew Liberatore earn the starts from the Cincinnati Reds and Cardinals, respectively, in Game Two of this three-game weekend series between the National League Central rivals.<\/p>\n
For Lodolo, the hope is that he has fully turned the corner from the blister issues that cost him all of April and left him weaponless in a pair of early starts after his return. Now that he\u2019s back to being able to throw all of his pitches with confidence that they aren\u2019t going to shred his fingers again, he\u2019s looked more like the guy who had his breakout campaign in 2025. Over his last trio of outings, he\u2019s fired 18.1 IP and yielded just 7 ER (3.44 ERA), though the 14\/9 K\/BB he\u2019s sported in that time still doesn\u2019t look like the precision maestro he is when he\u2019s at his best.<\/p>\n
Liberatore on the bump for St. Louis means that Terry Francona has leaned hard into a right-handed heavy lineup, something he\u2019s prone to do each and every time he faces a lefty.<\/p>\n
First pitch is set for a matinee 2:15 PM ET start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It will be a battle of southpaws on the mound at Busch Stadium in St. Louis on Saturday…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":638485,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2403],"tags":[5,160,80337,79233,4,673,67,4311,4310],"class_list":["post-718976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-louis-cardinals","tag-baseball","tag-cardinals","tag-cincinnati-reds-discussion","tag-cincinnati-reds-game-information","tag-mlb","tag-st-louis","tag-st-louis-cardinals","tag-stlouis","tag-stlouiscardinals"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116704130067674331","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=718976"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718976\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/638485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=718976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=718976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=718976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}