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DENVER — The seats his grandparents had at Coors Field with their season tickets were over there by the home dugout, right behind the camera well, and thinking back, it was often his grandmother who gave her ticket so young Kyle Leahy could see the Colorado Rockies.

Someone else was sitting there Tuesday night watching from that prime viewpoint as Leahy stabilized the Cardinals with a career outing. But he felt a presence.

His grandmother, Ruth Leahy, died earlier Tuesday at a care facility not too far from Denver, and after a morning with family, Kyle went to the ballpark, went ready to pitch from the mound he could see so clearly as a kid from her seat.

“I didn’t block it out; I just embraced it and knew that someone is there watching me,” Leahy said. “I had plenty of people watching me here in person. Obviously, someone else was somewhere else. She hadn’t eaten for the last 11 or 12 days I think, and it’s pretty obvious she was waiting for us to get here.”

The Cardinals’ multitasking reliever, Leahy pitched 3 2/3 innings through the middle of an 8-4 loss to the Rockies. The Cardinals trailed by six runs when starter Erick Fedde left the mound after the third inning. And what Leahy did for the next 11 outs not only bought time for a comeback that fell short but likely saved a peer from being optioned to Class AAA Memphis on Thursday for a fresh arm.

The final two outs Leahy got in the seventh inning made it possible for manager Oliver Marmol to maintain enough options for the series finale at altitude Wednesday.

Had Leahy just shouldered that assignment, it would have been essential, but he made it impressive with a career-high seven strikeouts. Three of them bracketed the lone run he allowed in the fifth inning.

“This is a guy who can give you length and give you short stints but also you can kind of project down the road that you can throw him in the rotation at some point to see what he’s capable of doing,” Marmol said. “He’s fulfilled the role that we’ve asked of him. But the growth has been actually really good.”

Leahy, 28, shaved his ERA down to 2.95 after his 40th appearance this season. One fellow reliever (at least) has urged the team to consider Leahy as a starter because of his array of pitches and sweeping slider. The Cardinals plan to explore that for 2026, if not earlier. The most common descriptions of the right-hander include his calm presence and steady pulse. Marmol referenced it as the “demeanor” of a starter. Catcher Pedro Pages brought it up late Tuesday night in the clubhouse, saying how he’d “never seen Kyle get too high, and I’ve never seen him get too low.”

He kept his grandmother’s death private Tuesday so that few teammates knew, and he did not discuss it until after the game.

Before the All-Star break, Leahy said his goodbye to his grandmother over FaceTime. Her condition worsened from there, he said. On Monday, Kyle went to his parents’ home just outside of Boulder, Colorado, and he planned to see his grandmother with family in the morning.

He did — shortly after she died.

“I have lots of memories of coming to games,” he said. “They always had a Rockies game on in their house all throughout the year. Grew up watching a lot of Rockies baseball.”

The grandson of a basketball coach and son of a basketball coach, Kyle’s family has deep roots in the courts and fields of Boulder Valley. His grandfather, Ruth’s husband Mike Leahy, coached basketball at Fairview High and Centaurus High in the Boulder area as part of four decades pacing the sidelines. Kyle’s father Tim coached at nearby Skyline High and then later Kyle’s alma mater, Erie High.

His grandmother was a vocal presence.

“She yelled at umpires,” Leahy said at his locker in the Cardinals clubhouse late Tuesday night. “And she yelled at referees playing basketball. Yelled at coaches. She was fiery like that but also nurturing and caring like most grandmothers are.”

Grandpa Mike would “pirate” videos from games, Kyle said, and stash them on his phone so that he could share Kyle’s innings with Ruth at the care facility. Kyle described how his grandmother “was barely awake these past couple of weeks,” but Mike would still show her clips of their grandson pitching.

Leahy took over for Fedde in the bottom of the fourth inning. He navigated around a double and a walk to keep the Rockies scoreless immediately after the Cardinals scored their first two runs.

In the fifth, Leahy struck out the first two batters.

A double and a single combined to produce the lone run against him before he spun four curveballs past Michael Toglia for the inning-ending strikeout. Leahy threw more curveballs than any other pitch and got six of his nine swings and misses on that pitch. But it was also just one of six pitches he challenged the Rockies with as a reliever.

After the game, he couldn’t shake being critical of two pitches — the two that produced the run.

“I’m kicking myself that I gave up a run,” he said. “I think I should have made another good pitch, and I think I should have struck another guy out. I just needed to make one good pitch out of two hitters, and I made two bad ones. I’m kicking myself over that. I’m not happy that we lost the game. Every win is important right now.”

What he did gave the Cardinals a better chance to win Wednesday and into the series against San Diego.

And he did it with his grandmother’s seat in sight and her in mind.

“It’s cliché,” Leahy said, “but this is where she would want me to be.”