CHICAGO — The Cardinals have reached the end.
Bring on the beginning.
Almost a year after the Cardinals pledged a “reset” season and promised to give young players plenty of “runway” to reveal their place in the club’s future, the Cardinals got a lot of what they designed, some of what they hoped, and none of what has been expected of them for more than 20 years. The Cardinals’ 134th season in the National League ended with a weekend sweep by the Cubs at Wrigley Field and another October without a gathering at Busch Stadium.
The Cubs completed the sweep with a 2-0 victory and a solo homer from Seiya Suzuki on Sunday afternoon, and they await the arrival of the San Diego Padres for the first round of the playoffs.
The Cardinals finish the year 78-84 for their second losing season in the past three years. The Cardinals have won one playoff series since 2013, and that was also their most recent National League pennant. They are about to beginning exploring trade talks for veteran third baseman Nolan Arenado, which will mean that during his time with Paul Goldschmidt as a teammate the Cardinals won exactly one playoff game. They’ve missed the postseason for a third consecutive year.
But this one comes with assured change.
Longtime Cardinals executive John Mozeliak attended the game at Wrigley on Sunday as his last leading the team’s baseball operations. Chaim Bloom, who was also at Wrigley all weekend, will be formally introduced as the new president of baseball operations Tuesday. Mozeliak’s departure is one of several the Cardinals expect as the roster changes, too.
How the Cardinals will look when next they take the field will be his to shape, and Sunday’s loss only offered a glimpse here or there of the directions he could go. One was starter Kyle Leahy. A reliever all summer, he got a cameo at starter Sunday to start looking at 2026 in the closing moments of 2025.
A peek at Leahy, the starter
With the lineups and the gravity of Sunday’s game unsure, what manager Oli Marmol definitely wanted Leahy to get from his first major-league start was the pregame prep.
In the visitors’ clubhouse hours before the game, Leahy huddled at his locker with lefty Matthew Liberatore. The lefty spent the entire season in the rotation, and it was his turn that Leahy was taking in the final weekend of the regular season. They were going over hitters and approaches and game plans, and Leahy was getting a sense of how the starter prep differs from a summer spent in the bullpen, where the most important prep is availability.
The Cardinals intend to have Leahy come to spring training to compete for a spot in the rotation. They grew increasingly intrigued by the right-hander this season as they got to know his competitiveness, his diligence, and that he sports a handful of pitches.
Some of them, the Cardinals noted, usually miss bats.
Leahy did not have a swing and miss in his start, but he sped through it like any of his relief appearances. The league-leader in four-out appearances this season, Leahy retired nine batters on 39 pitches. He allowed a single in the third inning but faced the minimum by promptly getting a double play.
Leahy’s menagerie of pitches
What he spent the season showing as a reliever, and there was on at-bat Sunday in the second inning when he got a chance to show it again – just earlier in the game.
Three innings before Suzuki’s solo homer, Leahy struck him out looking.
It took Leahy seven pitches to finish the strikeout, but those seven pitches also allowed him to show what he can do with them to give hitters a different look each time. Leahy started Suzuki out with a 95.8-mph fastball for a called strike. Suzuki ignored a 96.1-mph sinker before fouling off a 96.2-mph four-seam fastball. With two strikes, Leahy pivoted to his off-speed pitches and tried to get Suzuki to chase a 86.7-mph curveball.
Still in a good count, Leahy came back with the curve and kept it closer, perhaps more appetizing. Suzuki swung and fouled it off.
Leahy tried a 2-2 changeup at 90.4-mph that missed.
So he went to a slider – and that buzzed for a called strike 3 at 92.9 mph.
Suzuki saw five different pitches in the at-bat, and Leahy landed four of them.
Cubs take lead
Suzuki’s 32nd home run of the season led off the fifth inning and broke the scoreless tie on a sunny afternoon on the North Side. That would be the only run of the game for the first six innings, and with the way the Cubs pitchers breezed through the Cardinals’ alternate lineup it had the potential of being enough from the start.
The Cubs pieced together a pair of singles and a passed ball in the seventh inning to double their lead. Kevin Alcantara, a mid-game replacement for Ian Happ, opened the inning with a single off right-hander Ryan Fernandez. Alcantara advanced a base when a pitch got away from rookie catcher Jimmy Crooks. Moises Ballesteros took advantage with a two-out RBI single.
For No. 162, many rested
The same approach that led Marmol to agitate the crowd at Wrigley Field on Saturday led him to rewrite his lineup on Sunday without many regulars.
In the eighth inning of the Cardinals’ 7-3 loss on Saturday, Marmol intentionally walke Michael Busch and kept the Cubs’ leadoff hitter from taking a shot at a cycle. He was two homers deep into the game and a single shy of the cycle when Marmol put up four fingers and the crowd booed. Marmol’s explanation was succinct: Baseball.
He said he wasn’t there to “amuse” the fans but there to win a game, and by avoiding Busch the Cardinals got an out and brought the tying run to the plate.
After all, they were still playing for something.
They were effectively playing for the Padres.
The Cubs needed to win two of the three games against the Cardinals to secure home-field advantage in the first-round of the playoffs and host San Diego this week. The Cardinals, irritated in previous seasons with another team didn’t do the same, opted to play their regulars as much as possible, health permitting, while the games meant something to the standings. The Cubs clinched home-field advantage with the win Saturday, limiting the importance of Sunday’s game.
So, Marmol did not have Arenado, Alec Burleson, Lars Nootbaar, or Pedro Pages in the lineup. And he didn’t expect to use any of them off the bench.
That gave Yohel Pozo a start at first base.
That gave Thomas Sagges a swing at cleanup.
And that is how the final lineup of 2025 looked.
It will be different by 2026.
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Derrick Goold | Post-Dispatch
Lead baseball writer
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