Game Preview 6/1/25: Cardinals vs Rangers

The Cardinals look to win another series on the road.

If the Cardinals wanted to put themselves in a better position to win this series, they probably should have won Game 1. Time will certainly tell whether getting shut down by Jack Leiter will look good or bad, but his pedigree suggests it may look better in the future. He certainly looked as good as he pitched, which usually doesn’t happen for bad pitchers. I mean bad pitchers have good starts, certainly, but they don’t usually look as good as Leiter looked on Friday.

So today will be a challenge. The Rangers don’t have a good offense and today is a good opportunity for Fedde to improve his numbers. I’ve lost faith that the Fedde that was present last year is ever going to be a thing though, so the pitching matchup is a very big mismatch. Jacob deGrom isn’t necessarily the Jacob deGrom of years past – he struck out nobody in his last start – but he still has a 2.42 ERA and 25 K% with very few walks. So he’s a tough pitcher.

Fair warning, this is a Roku start and most annoyingly, it’s a 12:05 PM start, which is annoying because it’s in the Central Time Zone. They really did everything possible to make sure nobody watches this game.

How to watch: Roku

How to listen: 1120 AM KMOX/104.1 FM

First pitch: 12:05 PM

Todays matchup:

Erick Fedde (3.90 ERA/4.43 FIP/4.94 xFIP)

vs.

Jacob deGrom (2.42 ERA/3.69 FIP/3.39 xFIP)

Players to Watch

STL: Ivan Herrera: I was kind of hoping to use batter pitcher matchups to provide me with a good excuse to find a player. Maybe find a player who hits deGrom well. It turns out almost nobody has actually faced deGrom on the current Cardinals roster. Nolan Arenado has the most experience and he’s been terrible against him. But it’s just three Cardinals who have taken a plate appearance. So he better to list as the player to watch than to see how Ivan Herrera responds to a pitcher like Jacob deGrom.

TEX: Corey Seager: On the flip side, quite a few Rangers have faced Fedde and none of them have had any success against him. So again, I’ll just list the best hitter on the Rangers. Seager is recently activated from the injured list and he hasn’t quite got his mojo back, but it’s only a matter of time. If he can wait at least one game, that would be great. Fedde versus Seager does not seem like a great matchup for Fedde to me.