Former Cardinals Hurler Axed From Rotation By New Team; What Went Wrong?

A former St. Louis Cardinals hurler has run into some trouble with his new club.

The San Francisco Giants are excelling this year, but they haven’t been happy with starting pitcher Jordan Hicks.

Hicks, previously a reliever, was converted into a starter to begin the 2024 season and excelled, but 2025 hasn’t been as kind, as he’s gone 1-5 with a 6.60 ERA in 10 starts.

As a result, the Giants are making a change concerning Hicks.

MLB Network’s Greg Amsinger broke the news about Hicks during a Tuesday night airing of MLB Tonight.

“Jordan Hicks got over $40 million as a free agent to go to the San Francisco Giants,” Amsinger said.

“Hicks flourished last year, had moments of brilliance as a starter. But this new front office decided that the experiment is over, and Jordan Hicks is going to the bullpen.”

“Hayden Birdsong, a 25-year-old right-hander, is going to replace him in the rotation.”

Amsinger then posed a question to his analysts on the show, Dan Plesac and Harold Reynolds.

“Is this a long-term fix, in your estimation, and why do you think Jordan Hicks went from succeeding last year as as starter to having issues now this year?” Amsinger asked.

Hicks’s main issue, as noted by Plesac, is the diminishing effectiveness of his sinker.

In the 2022 and 2023 seasons, respectively, opponents hit .182 and .261 against Hicks’s sinker. That average has skyrocketed up to .342 (2024) and .337 (2025) in the past two seasons.

The velocity is down on the sinker as compared with a couple of years ago, but even more problematic for Hicks is that the pitch isn’t moving vertically at all.

“His bread and butter was always that sinker,” Plesac noted.

“But (now) he’s not getting a lot of vertical drop. Everything is sweeping across. It’s not changing planes.”

With Hicks’s sinker not dropping like it used to, the pitch is staying up in the zone for hitters to demolish, particularly lefties.

San Francisco is hoping Hicks will be more effective out of the bullpen. The Giants were 29-20 on the season entering Wednesday.