Two Debuts in Two Days: Cardinals Hand the Ball to Brycen Mautz on a Rainy Sunday in Cincinnati

UPDATE: Today’s game is in a weather delay. The Reds announced the delay shortly before the scheduled 1:40 p.m. ET first pitch. We’ll update with a revised first pitch when one is posted.

Twenty-four hours after Bryan Torres made his MLB debut in left field, signed and saved a home run ball for his mother, and turned a long-shot career into a curtain call on the road, the Cardinals are doing it again. Sort of.

From Indy Ball to The Show: Puerto Rico’s Bryan Torres Makes MLB Debut for Cardinals in Cincinnati

Brycen Mautz, a 24-year-old left-hander out of the University of San Diego, takes the ball for St. Louis on Sunday afternoon against the Reds. It will be his major league debut. It will also be the second straight day a Cardinal writes his name on a big league lineup card for the first time — a sequence that, regardless of how the rest of this weekend unfolds, says something about where a “rebuilding” team finds itself in late May.

How to watch

First pitch: Scheduled for 1:40 p.m. ET / 12:40 p.m. CT, currently in a weather delay
Venue: Great American Ball Park, Cincinnati
TV: Cardinals.TV (in-market St. Louis) / Reds.TV (in-market Cincinnati)
Radio: KMOX 1120 AM / 104.1 FM (St. Louis) · WLW 700 (Cincinnati)
Streaming: MLB.tv (blackout restrictions apply in-market)

The matchup

Mautz (0-0, no MLB innings) vs. Reds right-hander Brady Singer (2-4, 6.26 ERA). Singer has not pitched well to date, and he’s working in front of a Reds defense that has had to absorb a Suárez return at third base and ongoing catching turnover behind the plate. Mautz, for his part, comes up after nine starts at Triple-A Memphis: 2.90 ERA, 43 strikeouts in 40 1/3 innings, but a career-worst 13.5% walk rate. The strikeouts have followed him at every level since college. The walks are the question.

Who Mautz is

The Cardinals took Mautz in the second round of the 2022 draft out of San Diego, where he started as a junior after two years in the bullpen. He’s worked through the system one level a year — Single-A Palm Beach in 2023, High-A Peoria in 2024, Double-A Springfield in 2025, where he was a Texas League All-Star and the organization’s minor league pitcher of the year. He was added to the 40-man last November to protect him from the Rule 5 draft.

The arsenal is fastball-slider-led from a low three-quarters slot that gives the heater flat plane and the slider deception. MLB Pipeline grades the fastball at 50 and the slider at 55. There’s a curveball and a changeup in the bag too, though the changeup is the lightest of the four. Scouts have generally seen a back-end starter with a fastball-slider relief floor; the Cardinals have seen enough length to keep him in a rotation at every stop.

What’s behind him in the bullpen

This is the part that matters today. Saturday’s nightcap went 11 innings. Kyle Leahy started and gave up five, Bruihl gave up the lead, Graceffo and Fernandez bridged, Romero and O’Brien finished — and the Cardinals lost 7-6 when Blake Dunn reached on a fielder’s choice with the bases loaded.

To make room for Mautz on the active roster on Sunday morning, St. Louis optioned both Ryan Fernandez and Matt Svanson back to Memphis. Fernandez threw 24 pitches Saturday night. Romero threw 12. O’Brien threw 20 and took the loss. Justin Bruihl, whose ERA sits at 5.56, has now been involved in back-to-back losses. Whatever Mautz gives the Cardinals today, length is the most valuable version of it.

What’s around him in the lineup

The lineup card behind Mautz looks like this: Wetherholt, Herrera (DH), Burleson, Walker, Gorman, Winn, Torres in left, Pagés behind the plate, Victor Scott II in center. Jordan Walker hit his 15th homer Saturday afternoon and another three-run shot in the nightcap; he’s at 42 RBI and a .966 OPS, third in baseball. Wetherholt has reached base in 24 of his last 25 games. Torres, fresh off going 3-for-7 with a homer and a walk in his first two big league games, gets a third start in three days.

Behind Pagés on the depth chart, Yohel Pozo continues to split catching duty in a Herrera-DH structure that is becoming the every-fifth-day default. Down at Triple-A, Jimmy Crooks is hitting at the doorstep. The Cardinals are healthy enough at the top and stacked enough at the bottom that the next month of roster decisions in St. Louis is going to be more interesting than anyone projected in February.

The series, the standings, what comes next

The Cardinals enter Sunday at 29-22, in second place in the NL Central, two games behind Milwaukee. The Brewers come to Busch Stadium on Tuesday. A series win in Cincinnati would set up that series with a real edge; a series loss would put them on the road in a tougher division position than this team has been in all year. Either way, the man tasked with deciding the difference on Sunday afternoon, as the rain settles over the Ohio River, is a 24-year-old from San Diego who has never thrown a major league pitch.

Two debuts in two days. Yesterday, Bryan Torres saved a home run ball for his mother. Today, somebody else gets to find out what their first big league moment looks like.