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Shortly after he threw the final pitch of his 2024 season with the Cardinals, lefty Steven Matz jetted to Arizona to deliver the first pitch of his preparation for 2025, even though he, like several of his teammates, is unsure where this offseason will ultimately take him.

Matz bolted from the end of the regular season straight to a cutting-edge baseball training facility in Arizona for a two-day evaluation of his pitches, delivery, and biomechanics. While there he learned about a subtle, unexpected twist in his curveball he could address and picked up some drills to use this winter. Entering the final year of his contract with the Cardinals, Matz does not yet know if he’ll be a starter — or, for that matter, if a trade will relocate where he’ll start — in the coming season. But he does have a preference.

It’s the place he expected this journey to take him.

“I would love to be back in St. Louis and start,” Matz said during a recent conversation over the phone. “I just really want to have sustained success for one season. When you sign there, you’re just like, man, you want to prove it was worthwhile. And I feel like I’ve got one more year to show that. We’ve made a lot of progress in a lot of areas — really working with the training staff — and it feels like we’re pushing in the right direction. You want to finish strong.”

Matz, 33, missed the majority of this past season due to a lower back injury and an irritated disk that took longer to alleviate and a monthlong rehab assignment to return.

In Matz’s first three seasons of a four-year contract with the Cardinals, injuries interrupted each of them. He’s yet to make more than 25 appearances or more than 17 starts in any one summer. When he returned from the most recent absence, Matz made one start and then, with the rotation full, shifted to an elastic role in bullpen. The lefty is due $12 million for the coming season, and he’s one of the players the Cardinals will entertain trade talks as they look to reduce payroll. At his salary, there will be at least a few teams interested in him as a starter or reliever, two baseball officials not with the Cardinals said.

Away from the box scores and often behind the scenes, Matz and the Cardinals have been working toward improvements in his health and pitching that he would like to see come to fruition with the team of people who helped him. The lefty offered as an example how the Cardinals training and coaching staff gave him a targeted offseason program a year ago. It improved the efficiency of his delivery — and the result in spring was the swiftest strike he’d ever thrown, at 97 mph.

“To his credit, he’s a guy who has been continuing to pursue finding a better edge, finding ways to be a better pitcher,” Cardinals pitching coach Dusty Blake said this week. “There are four ways to do that — command, stuff and velocity, knowledge of the game, and knowledge of yourself. He’s into it. And he’s not afraid to go outside of his comfort zone to find it.”

That search took him to Driveline Baseball in Arizona this month.

“I went with an open mind,” Matz said.

A visit arranged by his agent and encouraged by the Cardinals came immediately after the season so that he was able to throw at full-strength, as close to game-ready as the situation would allow. Matz threw a scoreless inning in the Cardinals’ 6-1 season finale victory at San Francisco to finish an otherwise frustrating year of seven starts and a 5.08 ERA. After a few days of rest, his first day in Arizona was spent throwing a bullpen session of around 50 to 60 pitches.

“We were focused on grips and pitch movement and pitch design,” Matz said of the first day. “The curveball — I just wanted to be consistent with it. Something I can anchor on. We kind of discovered — and this is the big one — it’s really my grip. I do some things with my fingers on it as I’m throwing that I never knew.”

Matz once saw a still photo of him throwing a curveball in the majors and noticed that his index finger was bent and dug in — or spiked up. (“I was like, ‘What the heck?’ he said.) He does not intend to throw a spike curve, and yet the motion-capture technology at Driveline helped show how he gets into that grip.

He shifts into it during his delivery.

As his hand points back toward the second baseman, so does his middle finger — lifting off the ball while his index finger creeps up to gain its grip. That creates the spike. And all of that causes a shift in the seams that can contribute to his curve’s inconsistent traits. Not knowing what to expect from the pitch alters when and how he has felt confident using it.

“So, when I’m 2-1 (count) and have a great opportunity to throw a curveball, I just throw a changeup because I can trust it more,” Matz said. “And then the hitter can eliminate that pitch.”

For several years, the Cardinals, like other teams, have used high-tech, high-speed cameras to record pitch grips during bullpens and spot ways to improve pitch spin, consistency, and effectiveness. Such tools have helped pitchers like Andre Pallante develop a sinker or Miles Mikolas find a slider. Those cameras focus on the hand as it passes higher than the shoulder and onto the pitch’s release. Matz’s shift took place as he brought his arm back. It took the full-body spectrum of motion-capture — technology the Cardinals are looking at as they invest in new tools — to discern the subtle shift in Matz’s grip.

He showed the grip he started with — and saw where he ended.

He experimented with beginning the pitch with the raised knuckle of a spike grip.

“Sometimes it would go more sideways, sometimes it goes more up and down — which is what I want it to do,” Matz said. “When I preset (the spike grip), I got the shape of my curveball that I wanted to throw every time. It’s an indoor bullpen. I’m not wearing cleats. I’m not facing a hitter. So there are a lot of other variables there and more to do. But I got the movement I wanted every time.”

In that final inning of 2024, Matz threw one curveball. He did rev-up his sinker to 96.2 mph and averaged 95 mph on the 10 he threw. That was more than 1 mph faster than his average. He noted that when he appeared as a reliever the game was usually decided, and hitters weren’t spending a lot of time picking apart his tendencies as a long reliever. As a starter? Matz said that’s when hitters do their homework and “want to get to you.” The curve, minus the twist and plus the spike, gives him something else to get them.

Matz’s second day in Arizona was spent going over the data collected and discussing drills that would “clean up some” deficiencies in his delivery. Some reinforce things he was already working on with the Cardinals, including the orientation of shoulders to his hips and his left arm to his torso.

His offseason workouts began this week — giving him a month earlier start than a year ago. Matz described how after his visit to Arizona and seeing how he can “continue building on all we did last year is exciting stuff, and it’s a good time of year to be energized about next year.” That sentiment was how he concluded an interview, which he did while motoring from St. Louis to his offseason home near Nashville.

He hoped the road he was on leads back to where that drive started.

“You get a sense of what’s happening,” Matz said of the Cardinals. “I want to see it through. You go through injuries, and you learn each time, and you try to get better. You want it to feel like it’s coming to a head, that we put it all together. And you want that to be here with these people. We went through it. We learned. And here it is. Now we can put it into action.”