2 best friends, 1 rotation spot: Thompson, Liberatore compete

FORT MYERS, Fla. -- It’s 3 a.m. on June 23 in London, and rookie left-hander Matthew Liberatore is wide awake. But it isn’t a wild night out or even the excitement of traveling with the Cardinals for the London Series 2023 that’s kept him up.

More than 4,000 miles and several time zones to the West, fellow lefty Zack Thompson has just wrapped up a start for Triple-A Memphis on the road in Iowa. Thanks to hotel wifi and a trusty laptop, though, Liberatore cheered his friend on from an ocean away.

“I care about him as a human, and I want him to have success,” Liberatore said Tuesday. “And so, yeah, I pay attention to everything he does, and vice versa.”

It’s always been like that, the pair concedes. They’ve passed each other many times along the way, sometimes with one on his way to St. Louis and the other heading back to Memphis. At times, they’ve been on the same roster. And as each works to find his place in the Majors, they’ve also forged a bond of brotherhood that only players who’ve shared time in the Minor League trenches can understand.

Liberatore knows there aren’t many people he can go to and hash out the finer points of his curveball, but Thompson’s repertoire is so similar that the pair can often work through things together. For his part, Thompson regularly tunes into the MLB app on his phone to track Liberatore.

“We’re definitely tight. We talk a lot,” Thompson said. “Obviously being lefties, we’ve come up together, they’ve pitted us against each other and we’ve kind of bonded over that. We’ve got the big curveball, we think very similarly [and] we’re very analytical, just the way we go about our day and some of the outside-of-the-box things we try.

“We just connect very well.”

This spring, though, the friends are competing for the last available spot in the rotation, which changes the dynamic a bunch.

Or does it?

“I think it’s kind of been a blessing in disguise,” said Liberatore, who’s got four Grapefruit League outings under his belt. “... To be quite honest, it’s made us closer than ever.

“I want the best for him, he wants the best for me, and we don’t feel like we’re competing at all.”

One day after Liberatore “felt like I competed my [butt] off” against the Red Sox, Thompson wowed in his fourth bid for the rotation as well, generating eight swings and misses and flashing a devastating curve on Wednesday during the Cardinals’ 1-1 tie against the Twins at Lee Health Sports Complex.

Thompson’s offspeed stuff was especially sharp early. He got leadoff hitter Carlos Santana swinging badly at a 72.3 mph curve for his first out of the game, used a fastball to induce a soft groundout on the next play and caught Carlos Correa looking at a slider to wrap a flawless first.

Another three strikeouts later, Thompson put a bow on his sharpest spring outing yet, a four-inning hitless affair during which the Twins hit just two balls out of the infield, both harmless flyouts.

“It's definitely fun when the pitches are working that well,” Thompson said. “It's fun to have a lot more options this year than just fastball-curveball, and if one of those is off, then I've still got three things to keep them off-balance with and keep them guessing.”

Through four spring outings, the remarkably similar southpaws have had remarkably similar results. Who ultimately wins the rotation bid is a decision manager Oliver Marmol said could take until St. Louis opens the regular season against the Dodgers in Los Angeles on March 28. The lefties are neck and neck for now, but if Sonny Gray, who has a right hamstring strain, is not ready for Opening Day, one will eventually earn the title of Cardinals’ starter; the other will assume a long-relief role out of the ’pen.

However it plays out though, Thompson said, the news will only affect life between the foul lines.

“Honestly, it'll probably be a sad moment for both of us,” he added. “We talk a lot about the only time that we've really seen each other in the last couple of years during the season is when we're passing each other. We haven't really been on the same team consistently.

“Honestly, I just hope we both find a role here, whatever it may be.”