PITTSBURGH — With Nolan Gorman walking through the Pittsburgh airport and Matthew Liberatore set to fly there a day later, the No. 2 and No. 3 Cardinals prospects, respectively, and former boyhood baseball teammates shared a FaceTime call with not much verbal communication between them about their upcoming MLB debuts.
“Not a lot of words. A lot of, kind of, blank stares and giggles almost, if you will,” recalled Liberatore of a call that came just hours before the two of them made their Major League debuts Friday and Saturday. “It was more disbelief that it happened the way it did. You really couldn’t write it any better, so it’s pretty special to us.”
Fast forward to Saturday and the 6-foot-4, left-handed Liberatore was on the mound, and Gorman was eventually pressed into duty at second base, on a night he had originally planned to sit back and watch his former youth-ball and Triple-A and current St. Louis teammate make his MLB debut. Again, there wasn’t much communication between the two other than the knowing nods they gave each other throughout the game while playing before 24,644 fans at PNC Park.
“It was just encouragement, ‘Hey, you’ve got this,’ and normal small talk,” Liberatore said of his interactions with Gorman during the Cardinals’ 5-4 win over the Pirates. “I’m not a huge talker when I’m pitching besides with my catcher and the pitching coach, but Nolan knows when and where he needs to be.”
Liberatore and Gorman, natives…
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