After suffering through a miserable 2025 season that saw him go 1-12 over his final 12 starts, Andre Pallante has been the feel-good, bounce-back story of the season for the 2026 Cardinals. He won his eighth game on Tuesday by beating the Padres.
Cardinals’ slugger Jordan Walker has been one of the best stories in baseball this season with him shedding three years of trauma and head-scratching struggles and inexplicably becoming one of the game’s most productive five-tool superstars in 2026.
And Walker might not even have the best comeback story on his own team in 2026.
That distinction just might belong to Andre Pallante, who has put a horrific 2025 season in his rear-view mirror and has sped his way to becoming the Cardinals most surprising starting pitcher of 2026. No longer are games going sideways on him at the first sign of trouble and no longer is he pitching defensively and letting self-inflicted issues demolish his confidence.
"He's able to take a deep breath and step back and focus on executing the next pitch," Cardinals’ manager Oliver Marmol said of the 27-year-old right-hander. "In the past, he's thinking about what just happened and allowing that to impact his next pitch -- and it usually didn't go his way. We're seeing a different version of him now and it's one that's very steady."
Is Pallante ever steady? On the heels of a Tuesday outing where he was perfect for 4 1/3 innings and held the Padres to just four hits over a season-best seven innings of work, Pallante improved to 8-4 and lowered his ERA to 3.76 over 14 starts. To put that into perspective consider these lowlights from Pallante’s horrific 2025 season, one that had him fighting for his MLB life this spring before winning back his spot in the rotation:
· Over his final 16 starts of 2025, Pallante went just 1-12 to put his long-term future with the franchise in question.
· The right-hander didn’t win any of his final 10 starts of 2025, going 0-8 and pitching to a 7.15 ERA.
· Pallante’s strikeout percentage of 15.5 percent ranked in MLB’s bottom four percentile, while his chase rate (bottom 16 percentile) and whiff rate (bottom 25th percentile) didn’t offer much promise either.
Fast forward to 2026 and Pallante not only leads the Cardinals in victories, but he has as many wins as Milwaukee sensation Jacob Misorowski, Philadelphia ace Cristopher Sanchez, Boston veteran and former Cardinal Sonny Gray and rising Cincinnati star Chase Burns. Foes are hitting just .230 off him this season – down dramatically from the .270 they hit against him in that forgettable 2025 season.
“I think it all comes back to me being confident in my pitches," said Pallante, who struck out six and didn't walk a batter on Tuesday night. "I know that my stuff plays, especially when I'm attacking to my best spots. As long as I have confidence to keep doing that, I'll have success."
Pallante is surging in June with 3-0 mark
Pallante has had plenty of success of late, going 3-0 with a 2.41 ERA in three June starts. And over his last six starts – a stretch that includes one clunker against the rival Cubs – Pallante is 2-1 with a 2.88 ERA and 29 strikeouts compared to just six walks.
“When you talk about growth and being diligent with your work and seeing things through, Pallante has been awesome,” Marmol said. “When you think about a year or two ago and where he was at, the game would speed up on him. You take a game like (Tuesday night’s win) and there’s a different presence to him. His demeanor and overall confidence in how he is taking the mound is different. It’s been really good.”
Pallante has been so good that he has been able to stay in attack mode instead of nibbling at the corners and hoping he can land his secondary stuff consistently. On Tuesday, he landed a first-pitch strike to 18 of 24 hitters. The Padres didn’t have a hit off any of the 22 four-seam fastballs that he threw, and they had just one knock off his 36 sliders and one hit off his 19 sinkers.
The studious type who promised he would spend his offseason reevaluating his arsenal and working to change the shapes of some of his pitches, Pallante is throwing his four-seam fastball much more in 2026 (44 percent) than 2025 (30 percent). Opponents crushed that pitch to the tune of a .330 batting average and a .528 slugging percentage in 2025, but he has whittled that down to .284 and .469 in 2026. Holding foes to a .138 batting average with his slider, a .238 batting average on his sinker and just a .240 mark on his knuckle-curve has kept them off his fastball and it’s allowed him to boost his strikeout rate to 19.3 percent – up 25 percentile in MLB ranks over 2025.
“This is just a much better version of him when it comes to overall mindset,” Marmol said of Pallante.
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