SAN FRANCISCO — The season is over. The work must begin.

With a rookie-record outing from Michael McGreevy, the St. Louis Cardinals completed the 2024 regular season with a 6-1 victory Sunday afternoon against the Giants at Oracle Park. The finality of the season was a formality that brings them to one of the more significant junctures under current ownership.

Changes are coming after consecutive years without a playoff appearance and 11 years without a National League pennant. During a news conference scheduled to be held Monday afternoon at Busch Stadium, Chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. will take questions following a season of shrinking attendance and disappointing results, and he will begin revealing the team’s answers.

A few of them on the field contributed Sunday.

Brendan Donovan returned to the leadoff role he previously had and homered to start the Cardinals scoring and reached base four times in the game. Alec Burleson, who emerged earlier in the season as the Cardinals’ leading source of RBIs, played both left field and first base — as he could in 2025 — and contributed three RBIs, as the Cardinals may need him to do if the middle of the order is among the things targeted for change.

McGreevy has thrown his way into two conversations with how he’s finished the year during a cameo in the rotation. The right-hander who developed a cutter through the course of the season that has made him more effective against left-handed batters is held up as an example of what’s possible when it comes to pitcher development and pitch-crafting. His real-time performance in the majors also positions him to compete for a role in the spring, unless changes are made ahead of him in the rotation to make room for him or a prospect like him.

McGreevy (3-0) set a Cardinals rookie record at Oracle Park with eight innings. That surpasses the seven-inning starts at San Francisco’s bayside ballpark by rookies Luke Weaver (2017) and Alex Reyes (2016).

McGreevy had a shutout going through six innings and finished his start with one run allowed on five hits. He did not walk a batter.

He struck out six.

The Cardinals finished the season 83-79 — an uptick from last year’s 70-91 and last-place finish but far short of where they advertised and expected they would be in 2024. The Cardinals have not appeared in the playoffs since 2022, and they've won only one playoff series since 2014, when the Giants eliminated them from the National League Championship Series.

Sunday’s win took a brisk two hours, 29 minutes to play.

They quickly reached a winter that’s already longer than they wanted.

Donovan leads off, leads team

A year removed now from his season ending because of elbow surgery, Donovan followed a three-hit day Saturday with a return to the leadoff spot and even more times on base Sunday.

Donovan reached base safely in his first four plate appearances, and — true to the leadoff role he once owned — was in the midst of all each of the Cardinals’ scoring bursts.

He was one on his own.

Donovan started the Cardinals scoring with a solo home run in the third inning. Giants starter Hayden Birdsong struck out the other three Cardinals he faced in the inning and was on his way to 11 strikeouts in the game. But Donovan connected for a home run that cleared the right field wall and reached Levi’s Landing — the parapet between the playing field and splash down in McCovey Cove.

(Quick aside: The Cardinals who have plopped a home run in the kayak-crazy waterway beyond the right field wall? Matt Carpenter was the most recent, in 2018, and before him, Hall of Famer Larry Walker did, in 2005. Coincidentally, the “splash hits” each came on July 8.)

A pair of walks in the fifth inning brought the lineup back around to Donovan, and he hit a grounder with such spin on it that it bounded by, off and over the first baseman for another RBI. In the three-run sixth inning, Donovan worked a walk that loaded the bases for Burleson’s two-out, two-run single.

Burleson leads Cardinals in RBIs

With three RBIs on Sunday, Burleson maintained the team lead he had most of the season but also assured that the Cardinals’ RBI leader would have one of the lowest totals in generations.

Burleson’s 78 RBIs are the fewest to lead the team since 1986.

That summer, Tommy Herr and Andy Van Slyke tied atop the team with 61 RBIs. Burleson entered Sunday with 75 RBIs, and if his season total had stalled, there he would have had one of the lowest totals in the expansion era. George Hendrick had 69 RBIs to lead the 1984 team, and Ted Simmons led the 1976 Cardinals with 75 RBIs.

Burleson surpassed that total with his RBI single in the fifth inning. In the sixth, he found a seam created by Jordan Walker’s jump from first base and slipped a two-run grounder past the Giants’ moving defense.

That gave him 78 to match Curt Flood’s total in 1966 to lead Cardinals.

Carpenter's farewell?

Matt Carpenter's first start at first base came in the final game of the season, and it wasn't long before he turned it over to Burleson.

Carpenter lashed a single to left field in his first at-bat.

Manager Oliver Marmol decided to remove Carpenter from the game so his season ends with a single. That was better, the manager said after the game, than an ejection for arguing about the strike zone with the umpire.

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