2020 ZiPS Projections: St. Louis Cardinals

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for eight years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the St. Louis Cardinals.

Batters

As I noted yesterday, the Twins look a lot like a classic Cardinals team in that there are no real superstars but very few real weaknesses, making the chances of an actually lousy season quite small. In fact, the Twins might be a better Cardinals team than the 2020 Cardinals, as there are holes here, starting in the outfield.

No doubt elbow issues played a role in his down season, but Tyler O’Neill’s 2018 Beast Mode was basically missing in 2019 and as a result, his projection drop-off is massive, to the extent that ZiPS is no longer confident he’ll be a league-average corner outfielder. O’Neill’s contact numbers have been absolutely abysmal in the majors, and his 58.6% career contact rate and 21.4% swinging strike rate would be uncomfortably worse than the entire 2019 leaderboards. For reference, the last-place qualifier in contact rate in 2019 was Franmil Reyes at 65.4%. That’s troubling; to get to his pedestrian .258/.307/.454 line in St. Louis so far, O’Neill has had to maintain a .376 BABIP. That isn’t sustainable.

ZiPS sees Tommy Edman, who will see significant time in the outfield, as above-average overall, though regressing a bit from a surprising rookie campaign. He’s not likely to add enough defense to be valuable in an outfield corner, however. ZiPS is over Dexter Fowler, but does see Harrison Bader having a better offensive season, though it still amounts to a worse projection than the one he received entering 2019.

The infield is in better shape. Paul Goldschmidt will likely have some kind of bounce back in 2020, while Paul DeJong and Kolten Wong are both predicted to be solidly above-average, with the former at near All-Star levels. The combination of Yadier Molina and Matt Wieters projects to cobble together another average season.

Overall, it’s hard to escape the impression that Cardinals would have received a real benefit from being more active in free agency. Once Marcell Ozuna is willing to sign a one-year contract, I’m not sure how the Cardinals justify not outbidding the Braves. If your roster looks like it will win 80-90 games, every win is crucial.

In a funny wrinkle, the infield gets two Doug Rader top comps, representing both Rader after his first Gold Glove and Rader at the very end of his career. Hopefully, Matt Carpenter won’t end up retiring as quickly as the Red Rooster did; after being released during spring training in 1977 coming off a .251/.348/.437 season, Rader abruptly retired.

Pitchers

The rotation is an iffier group than St. Louis has had in recent memory. If you were hoping that including ZiPS in the mix would raise the Cardinals’ starting pitchers from their current rank of 17th in our Depth Charts, I sadly have to pull out the rug. At the top, Jack Flaherty projects as elite and will enter the season as a Cy Young contender, but there are a lot of question marks after him.

ZiPS is confident that Miles Mikolas will remain a relatively dependable second or third starter, but it gets worse from there. Adam Wainwright will return, but Waino is 38 and his 2019 was his best season in years. Dakota Hudson does not have the track record to offer any kind of assurance that he can continue to beat his peripherals, a different situation than, say, Julio Teheran, a pitcher who ZiPS feels has a long enough history to be able to knock a half-run off his FIP. Kwang-Hyun Kim is interesting, but his performance in the majors is speculative at this point.

The Cardinals haven’t lost any great pitchers, but those numbers start adding up; Lance Lynn, Michael Wacha, Luke Weaver, and Mike Leake is a lot of arms to lose over the years. And that’s before even considering Carlos Martinez, whose future as a starting pitcher is cloudy at the moment. It’s hard to replace this many arms internally and the Cardinals haven’t quite done it yet. I’m disappointed this team didn’t add a starter in the winter.

The bullpen, on the other hand, looks solid, if mostly unspectacular. Even discounting a possible midseason return for Jordan Hicks, it’s a deep group that ZiPS is mostly optimistic about. After projecting Giovanny Gallegos to be a top reliever out of nowhere, the computer certainly isn’t going to abandon him after he actually became one. ZiPS still sees hope for Andrew Miller, which would be nice after two rough seasons.

Prospects

While there’s a lot of doom and gloom in the above sections, this is where the Cardinals could see some pleasant surprises. I’d be strongly tempted to stick Dylan Carlson in the outfield on Opening Day and reduce Fowler to fourth-outfielder status, but I doubt the team actually does that. Andrew Knizner profiles as a legitimate major league starter and I think the Cardinals are at the point where they have to consider what they’ll do if Yadi doesn’t retire after 2020. At some point, you either have to play Knizner or trade him for someone you will play. There’s no advantage for the team to have value they can’t use, and it certainly isn’t beneficial for Knizner to spend his prime hanging around in Triple-A.

The Alex Reyes projection is hardly exciting, but in truth, Reyes is a real “who knows?” at this point. The nice thing about that question is that you sometimes get a positive answer, and Reyes staying healthy and getting his career back on track could be the real bump that the rotation needs. It’s not probable, but he’s just 25 and extremely talented, so it’s not impossible, either. St. Louis may have holes, but they do have depth and Memphis ought to be stacked with a number of role players who wouldn’t fall on their faces as emergency options: I can see Austin Dean, Ramón Urías, Lane Thomas, Edmundo Sosa, and John Nogowski all having significant careers as non-starters.

Don’t be alarmed by the Nolan Gorman projection; ZiPS still sees him as a three-win player at his peak, which ain’t bad for a player who has yet to appear above A-ball and still has contact issues to work through. Gorman has a future, but if you stuck him in the majors in 2020, he’d probably struggle. No official projection for Matthew Liberatore yet, but he’s a great pickup for Jose Martinez and Randy Arozarena, both hard players for the Cardinals to use given their rosters and the lack of a full-time DH.

One pedantic note for 2020: for the WAR graphic, I’m using FanGraphs’ depth charts playing time, not the playing time ZiPS spits out, so there will be occasional differences in WAR totals.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here.

 

 

 

 

 

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned, players who will miss 2020 due to injury, and players who were released in 2019. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in June to form a ska-cowpunk Luxembourgian bubblegum pop-death metal band, he’s still listed here intentionally.

Both hitters and pitchers are ranked by projected zWAR — which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those which appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR.

ZiPS is agnostic about future playing time by design. For more information about ZiPS, please refer to this article.