By Rob Rains
SPRINGFIELD, Mo. – Kate Doyle was in her office at her family’s home in Derry, New Hampshire when she heard the sound of shattering glass coming from another room. She soon discovered that her son Liam had accidentally thrown a baseball through the living room window.
He was eight years old.
Years later, Kate Doyle still remembers the shocked look on her son’s face as he came to grips with what had happened.
Unfortunately for the Doyle family, it was one of many windows which had to be replaced over the years, usually as the result of an accident that somehow involved their son and sports. They now realize it was the price they had to pay for their son’s future athletic success.
“We are not joking,” Kate Doyle said. “Our back basement windows are all plexiglass because he (Liam) would break them all so often. It was just Wiffleballs whipping off a window.”
It wasn’t just windows that were broken in the family home, where Liam’s fiery intensity and competitiveness was born.
“There were pieces of furniture,” Kate Doyle said, “’Ok that broke.’ It’s fun. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.”
Anthony Desalvo, who has been one of Doyle’s best friends since they were seven years old, picks up the story.
“There were times when we would break couches,” Desalvo said. “We played football with this big bean bag and would tackle each other and break a couch once in a while.”
At the time, Steve and Kate Doyle didn’t know that their only son was destined to play professional baseball, selected by the Cardinals as the fifth overall pick in last year’s amateur draft after a standout junior season at Tennessee.
Looking back on it now, however, they can trace Liam’s success to that intense competitiveness which was always on display almost from the day he began playing sports.
“His personality came out really young in terms of sports,” Kate Doyle said, “how he competed. He was always pretty intense. It just seemed there was a happiness that came from it.
“He loved the competition. The minute he thought he could beat somebody, he was all in.”
Desalvo and others in their close group of childhood friends saw that from the time they were very young.
“Playing Wiffleball, it was always competitive,” Desalvo said. “There were no easy wins in anything, pickup basketball. Everybody was always trying to beat someone up, playing like it was game seven.”
“He was feeding off everybody else’s energy”
Kate and Steve Doyle remember a no-hitter that Doyle threw for his AAU team when he was in the seventh grade. It was the first time they remember seeing and hearing him yell when he came off the mound.
“The other team was a little chirpy and they got on him,” Steve Doyle said.
His wife added, “I remember him coming off the field and he was feeding off everybody else’s energy. He was so hyped up. I think it’s probably really his big way to exhale. I feel he is all in for his team, not just for himself.”
Doyle started a game as a freshman in high school for Pinkerton Academy against Londonderry, their town’s biggest rival, a matchup Steve Doyle described as “hate week” and included an intense build up before the game.
As a senior in high school, Doyle pitched Pinkerton Academy to its first state title in 38 years with a win over Londonderry. He yelled again that day.
“It’s part of competing and who I am out there,” Doyle said. “As a starting pitcher I am on the field really only for a couple of hours a week so I am going to go out there and compete as hard as I can. And I have a good time while I’m doing it.”
Doyle grew up as a Boston sports fan, and in those years the Patriots were winning multiple Super Bowls. The Red Sox won four World Series in a 14-year span. The Celtics won the NBA championship in 2011, three years after the Bruins won the Stanley Cup.
“He grew up in winning times,” Steve Doyle said. “I don’t think I saw a championship until I was like 50 years old. He was always surrounded by the competitiveness of sports.
“He was born the year the Red Sox broke the curse (2004) and I literally had to get him out of his crib at like 1 in the morning to see it; not that he remembers it.”
Both of Doyle’s parents grew up in families that loved sports, and loved competing, so they said it was only natural their son grew up in that same environment.
Steve Doyle played soccer in college.
“I hate losing more than I like winning,” he said. “I know Kate’s family is kind of the same way. Checkers, card games, Wiffleball in the yard – we’re out there to win.
“He always had that intensity, whether it was verbalized or not. Even as an 8-year-old, he wasn’t the kid in the outfield looking at the airplane.”
Some of the kids who are like that when they are very young will say years later they knew even then that they were destined to play professional sports. Doyle said he never thought that until he was older.
“I wasn’t one of those kids,” he said. “Maybe it was being from New Hampshire; that’s not really a thing like it is in California or Texas. My senior year in high school I got a lot of college looks, but I didn’t look past it at that point.”
“He looked like a different animal”
The trajectory of Doyle’s career path began to change when he was a freshman at Coastal Carolina. He got the start in a first-round NCAA regional game against Rider and threw six no-hit innings with nine strikeouts. Rider scored nine runs in the seventh after Doyle came out of the game.
That helped him earn a chance to transfer to Ole Miss for his sophomore season, and playing in the SEC only fueled Doyle’s intensity even more. It was there, however, that his parents realized even more how different their son was when he was on the field competing compared to when he wasn’t playing baseball.
“One of his roommates’ dad’s came over to us and said how shy he thought Liam was for somebody who was that animated on the field,” Kate Doyle said. “But they got to know him and he started talking and then you couldn’t get him to be quiet.
“He wasn’t a loud, boisterous kid. He just didn’t want to talk over everybody else. He really takes his time to get to know people, understand his surroundings and what he is doing.
“He’s pretty quiet and thoughtful but it’s not that he’s not thinking. He thinks very seriously about things and thinks them through and he sets some goals for himself without sharing them with other people.”
Doyle pitched in 16 games that season, making 11 starts, and then made the decision to transfer again, this time to Tennessee, which had just won the national championship.
It was in Knoxville, in the fall of 2024, that he first met Cardinals’ scout TC Calhoun, whose first opinion was that Doyle might profile more as a reliever than as a starter.
“Meeting him in the fall I never would have expected what I saw in the spring,” Calhoun said. “He had a very calm demeanor, almost a quiet talker, and then he got out on the field.”
Calhoun had made the trip from his home in Virginia for Tennessee’s “tuneup week” game, just before the start of the college season in February of 2025. The first thing he noticed was how much weight Doyle had lost since he had seen him in the fall, about 20 pounds. Then Doyle stepped on the mound.
That was the first time Calhoun saw and heard Doyle yell – while pitching against his teammates during an intrasquad game.
“He looked like a different animal,” Calhoun said. “The switch turned on. It was go time. He could turn that switch on better than anybody I’ve seen in a long time. He could go from a guy sitting in the corner to ‘I’m ready to punch out 15 today and get a win.’
“You knew you were going to get a show every time you saw him. He was the guy who would flip over the table if you beat him in Checkers. He is just a natural competitor who wants to win. It was fun to watch the pure mound presence that he has.”
What Calhoun and other scouts saw was Doyle use his competitive spirit to make himself even better. When his junior season began, Doyle might have ranked as a fringe top 100 prospect in the country and certainly was not being projected as a top 10 pick in the draft – until he began to pitch.
“He started climbing the ranks very quickly and he has the personality to take that and run with it and even feed off it,” Calhoun said. “He knew he was good. It was fun to watch him do that.”
As the season progressed, Doyle’s status continued to rise. Relying on a fastball that hit triple digits, Doyle blazed his way to striking out 164 of the 385 batters he faced, averaging 15.5 strikeouts per nine innings.
Calhoun was not the only scout or official from the Cardinals who was impressed by that performance. When Doyle became the team’s top pick in the draft last July, he joined JJ Wetherholt, out of West Virginia in 2024, as back-to-back first round selections for Calhoun.
“Every hitter I spoke to, I would ask them who the toughest pitcher was that they had faced and a lot of them kept saying ‘Liam Doyle,’ just because of the fastball,” Calhoun said.
“I talked to a hitter this off-season and asked, ‘How tough was Doyle for you?’ This kid is big and strong with a lot of power and will go really well in the draft this year. He said, ‘Just when I thought I was on time with his fastball, I would look and it was already in the catcher’s mitt.’ Everybody talks about how explosive his fastball was. They all said it was just different.”
Given his level of success in the SEC, the expectations placed on Doyle at the beginning of his pro career were high, with most outlets immediately including him among the top 40 players in the minor leagues before he had thrown a pitch. What Doyle has found out quickly, however, is that it takes a lot more to be successful in the professional ranks than the ability to throw a 100-mph fastball.
“Maybe as an ignorant college kid, drafted in the first round, (you say), ‘How can it be so hard or difficult?’” Doyle said. “You’re just playing baseball.”
What Doyle has learned, however, is that it isn’t really the same game.
“It’s good to get punched in the teeth”
Doyle made only a couple of cameo appearances at the end of last season after throwing 95 innings in the spring at Tennessee. He was assigned this year to Double A Springfield to begin his first full pro season.
The coaches and instructors knew that Doyle could still rely on his fastball, and likely have a high degree of success at that level, but that wasn’t their goal for him. Their goal was, and is, to prepare Doyle for success at the major-league level, where he will have to be able to throw other pitches besides his fastball.
The results of working on those off-speed pitches has created some bumps in the road for Doyle to begin the season. In his first two starts, he worked a combined 3 2/3 innings, allowing 12 hits and nine runs.
Was Doyle upset? Yes. Did he want to do something about it? Yes. He knew what was happening, and why, but the competitive side of his personality does not enjoy those types of outings.
“It’s good to get punched in the teeth once in a while; it gives you a little reality check,” Doyle said. “It’s something you have to figure out, how to work through and work on. It’s the process.
“I’m trying to figure out how to pitch to professional guys instead of college guys. It’s a learning curve. I will get over it eventually and figure it out.”
The first signs of improvement came in Doyle’s third start, when he allowed only one run over four innings. He then gave up four runs in four innings before his most recent start, on Saturday night at Northwest Arkansas, which turned out to be the best of his five starts this season.
Over 4 1/3 innings, Doyle only allowed two hits and two walks, giving up one run, while striking out five. There were more signs of progress.
“We’re just talking about using all of his pitches in different counts, not just leaning on his hitter and splitter,” said Springfield pitching coach Eric Peterson. “As long as we are sticking to the process of what he needs to do, he will get better.
“He has an edge about him and likes to show his emotions, and we enjoy that. When the light goes on, he gets into the mindset.”
A few hours before his start on Saturday night, Doyle – who will turn 22 in early June – was on the phone talking with Desalvo, who is a senior in college.
“He was telling us to make sure we watched,” Desalvo said. “Back here we had game seven with the Celtics (against the 76ers) and the Kentucky Derby all going on when he was pitching, and he was like, ‘There is no more important sporting event other than the Springfield Cardinals game tonight.’”
Even on the phone, Desalvo wasn’t surprised to see that Doyle’s competitiveness was still on display. It’s something the Cardinals coaches and others in the organization have already noticed about him. What they also are happy to see is the progress, even if it isn’t always reflected by his pitching line in a box score.
“He has a special gift (his fastball) but we’re trying to continue to develop the off-speed stuff,” said Matt Pierpont, the organization’s director of pitching.
“The next step for him is to have the same type of confidence in his off-speed pitches as he has in his fastball; being able to use all of them in the strike zone when he needs to. It’s really just about rounding out his arsenal and giving him weapons.
“His fastball is so good that in college it was the pitch he threw the most so there are some reps that need to be given to the other pitches, just from a skill development standpoint. He has a growth mindset. He wants to be the best that he can possibly be and he’s competitive when it comes to that.”
Doyle’s fiery personality on the mound is still a big part of his game.
“It’s something we love about him,” Pierpont said. “He wants the baseball. He wants to compete. He’s somebody who wants the ball in the biggest moments. He pitches with a personality and we love that.”
Springfield manager Patrick Anderson has been impressed with what he has seen from Doyle as he begins his professional journey.
“He has shown me something from last year going into this year in that he’s trying to understand what being prepared is in professional baseball,” Anderson said. “He’s learning as he goes; attention to detail. He asks questions, he watches a lot.
“He’s invested in what he can gain every time he is in uniform. He’s forming some opinions and asking really good questions. It’s been a treat to be around him … There’s a lot of things to like about this young man. He’s going to be really special.”
Doyle knows he has a long way to go to get where he wants to be.
“There’s a million things I’ve got to continue to work on and make progress,” he said. “I have to stay healthy, and stay in the weight room and training room and make sure my arm is 100 percent. You can’t work on stuff when you are injured. That’s always been step one for me.
“I have to become a student of the game and focus on what is going to make me better on the field. I have as good of stuff as all of them (other pitchers) and I’m confident in my ability to go out there and pitch.”
Calhoun is confident about that as well.
“If there was anybody I was ever going to worry about Liam would not be that guy,” Calhoun said. “This is going to fuel him even more. He’s going to take his lumps like everybody else, but he will polish it up.”
“He does not want to lose”
It is sometimes hard for the Doyle family to realize how quickly all of this has happened. Four years ago, Doyle was relatively unknown, still pitching in high school.
“Sometimes Kate and I will look at each other on a Friday afternoon and wish we were at the high school ballfield still,” Steve Doyle said. “Some days it feels like we’ve been doing this forever and some days it feels like yesterday and he was still in high school.”
Added Kate Doyle, “We all feel so blessed we’re on this ride with him … I’ve often told him I’m a big attitude and energy person. Your attitude and energy can change anything.”
She can close her eyes and still remember a family game of Wiffleball in the back yard, not that many years ago, and know that her son is still the same today as he was then.
“My father was here, and he was probably close to 80 at the time,” Kate Doyle said. “Liam thought it was OK to whip the ball at Papa’s back to get him out because he was going to beat him. My father was like, ‘Wow, he’s just got a competitive gene.’ He does not want to lose.”
Follow Rob Rains on X @RobRains
Family photos courtesy of Kate and Steve Doyle
Springfield photos by PJ Maigi courtesy of Springfield Cardinals
Tennessee photos courtesy of Tennessee athletics
