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NEW YORK — The book Andre Pallante always keeps handy and is often thumbing through on the days he starts — or even the days he doesn’t, reading and re-reading passages — focuses on the mental skills required for pitching, and it discusses the evolution of adjustments.

There are the routine adjustments between starts when there is time to marinate, scrutinize, and experiment, and there are the adjustments between innings that are quicker and demanded to survive in the big leagues.

Finally there are the adjustments between pitches that are necessary to thrive.

Stung for four runs by the New York Mets in the second inning and not feeling or seeing the same zip on his fastballs, Pallante made an adjustment between innings to find traction Thursday night and turned what could have been a crater for the Cardinals into a bridge forward for Pallante. Next up: adjusting between pitches.

“If I make the adjustments in between pitches, maybe I would have had a great day,� the right-hander said late Thursday night at Citi Field. “Make them within innings and helped the team.�

The Mets scored all of their runs in one inning for a 4-1 victory at the start of a four-game visit to Queens from the Cardinals. Pallante allowed seven hits, but just one of them came after the second inning. He retired 12 of the final 13 batters he faced to get the Cardinals through six innings and wait for an offensive revival that never happened against Mets’ right-hander Griffin Canning.

The Cardinals upshifted to a six-man rotation as a proactive move to avoid straining the rotation. The tradeoff is a limited bullpen, and one short start without a pair of long relievers available would have ripple effects for games and roster moves to come.

As the Mets sent a sixth hitter and a seventh hitter to the plate in the second, as they got their third and fourth run of the inning, as his pitch count climbed and his pitch effectiveness waned, leaving the bullpen a mess to shoulder was on Pallante’s mind.

“I can’t go four there,� he said, referring to innings. “I can’t.�

That left him to figure out, in media res, what he could do.

He could adjust.

He’d done it year to year and start to start and even inning to inning before, and he would have to again Thursday night.

Pallante reinvented himself almost a year ago, leaving the Cardinals’ bullpen for a demotion to Class AAA Memphis but with a request — that he would get a chance to start. Since that opportunity and a plan hatched by Pallante and pitching coach Dusty Blake, the right-hander has been on an accelerated learning curve with strong results to only hasten it. He was, by several measures, the Cardinals’ best starter in the second half of 2024. That earned him a spot in the rotation to open 2025, and with the Cardinals advertising a commitment to youth, the club’s stated goal was to see what Pallante did with a full year as a starter.

Let him learn the rest on the job.

That’s where he was after the second inning Thursday night at Citi Field, huddling with catcher Pedro Pages and Blake to plot a way to get deeper into the game — and not wait for between games to figure it out.

“That midgame doesn’t take place and he gives up more runs,� manager Oliver Marmol said. “That is what you want to see. That’s what the big leagues are about. Minor leagues — you don’t make adjustments till your next outing. Up here, guys are able to make adjustments in between innings, pitch to pitch, and not let it linger much longer than that. He was able to do it.�

The first 10 Mets to bat got six hits off Pallante. Leadoff hitter Francisco Lindor had two singles before Pallante (2-1) got his sixth out of the game. Mark Vientos’ solo homer to lead off the second started the rally and a poor decision on defense for the Cardinals ended it with the fourth run scoring. In between a bloop single led to another run. The whole time, Pallante was routinely falling behind in counts.

He started the game with three balls to Lindor, and Pallante was behind in the count to five of the seven batters he faced in the decisive second inning. Vientos tagged a 90.4-mph fastball, and the flair single was on a 90.7-mph fastball.

In the first two innings contact came on pitches all below his average velocity.

“Felt like my first two innings you could have pulled out of 2023 for me and been like, yep, that’s who he is,� Pallante said. “And the last half of that game was like, OK, this is what he’s been doing. It’s in there. If I had started off a little bit stronger, I could have had a really good day.�

What shifted began in that midgame conversation — and it yielded this midgame adjustment: He had to change the order and choice of his pitches.

The slider had to be a factor.

He needed to show the curveball.

He had to get ahead in the count.

The team needed him to get deeper in the game.

Pallante started utilizing his slider more to nudge the Mets away from hunting his sinker. More than half of his 95 pitches in six innings were the sinker, but as he got more swings and misses on the slider (four) the sinker defied hitters, too. He also loosened in the chill and his velocity climbed, touching 94.7 mph on his four-seam fastball and 95.3 mph on the sinker.

Pallante got 12 groundouts total — eight after he shifted his pitch use.

“I think I have so much sample size now that I have periods of really good success and seeing what I’m doing,� he said. “I have periods of failure and I see what I’m doing wrong. When you have stuff like that, you get to figure yourself out. When you first come up (to the majors), you don’t really know what is going to work and what isn’t going to work. Definitely a little wiser going through it.�

He meant the regularly scheduled role of starter.

But he also could have meant, well, Thursday.

He was wiser having gone through it.

Pallante allowed only a single to Lindor in his final four innings, and 11 of his final dozen outs came without reach of an infielder or the catcher. He saw the returns of his shift in pitch use after the second inning, and he left the ballpark thinking about that next step as a starter, the one right there in the pages of the book shelved in his locker: What if he made the shift during the second inning?

“Everything got sharper there at the end,� Pallante said. “You’ve got to come out like that. You can’t come out slow in the big leagues. It makes it pretty clear. You see that’s not where I need to be to have success at this level.�