The Cardinals are officially engaging in a moderate short-term rebuild, trading Jordan Hicks to Toronto for pitching prospects Sem Robberse and Adam Kloffenstein, and Jordan Montgomery to Texas for righty Tekoah Roby, infielder Thomas Saggese, and reliever John King. Each of these players could suit up for the Cardinals in the big leagues within the next 12 months, especially King (already a big leaguer) and the two pitchers coming back from Toronto, who will likely be added to the 40-man roster after the season. Roby and Saggese have spent their 2023 seasons at Double-A Frisco and are within range of the majors even though they don’t have to be put on the 40-man until after the 2024 slate. You can see where each of the newly-acquired prospects falls on the Cardinals list over on The Board.

Let’s start by going over the Montgomery return, since the most significant prospect acquired by the Cardinals comes over in that deal. Roby, 21, moved onto the Top 100 prospects list when I updated the Rangers system a couple of weeks ago, and he would have been even higher if not for his current shoulder injury, which shelved him in early June. Before he was shut down, Roby was consistently working with four plus pitches. He was sitting 94–95 mph with riding life, bending in one of the nastier curveballs in the minors, tilting in a similarly shaped slider in the mid-80s, and turning over a tailing low-80s changeup, all of which were capable of missing bats. He looked like a contender’s four-pitch, mid-rotation starter, like a less physical Hunter Brown.

Roby’s delivery does have some violence, but he’s always thrown strikes in spite of this. He is slightly undersized (but well-built) at 6-foot-1 and has now had arm injuries in two of his three pro seasons, so there’s definitely relief risk here despite his strike-throwing track record. From a stuff and pitch execution standpoint, he is where Jack Leiter was expected to be when he was drafted. On upside, Roby is a huge get for the Cardinals and could be the big league club’s best starting pitcher within a year or two. Once healthy, he has a chance to kick down the door, though shoulder issues can be particularly scary and destabilizing to a young pitcher’s career. Read the rest of this entry »

2023 has been a rough year for the St. Louis Cardinals. They’re used to living in the NL Central penthouse, looking askance at whatever team happens to battle them for supremacy in a given season. Sometimes they lose those battles – the Cubs put together a nice run in the mid-2010s, the Reds had their time in the sun before that, and the Brewers have been a thorn in St. Louis’ side in recent years. But this kind of collapse – 47-60 and last place in the division – is unheard of.

The silver lining? The Cardinals had a ton of expiring contracts coming into the season, which means they have a ton of players to trade. With the deadline quickly approaching, they’re starting to turn those players into prospects. In two deals on Sunday, the Cardinals sent out Jordan Montgomery, Jordan Hicks, and Chris Stratton. Montgomery and Stratton are headed to the Rangers; meanwhile, better hope Hicks has a passport, because he’s now a Blue Jay. Eric Longenhagen is covering the prospects who are coming back to the Gateway City in a separate piece. Here, I’m just going to focus on how these three fit with their new teams, and the Cardinals’ general strategy from here on out.

Let’s start with the Rangers. This one is pretty straightforward: Montgomery slots into a hilariously deep Texas rotation. After acquiring Max Scherzer on Saturday, their playoff rotation looked solid. Now it looks even better. Scherzer and Nathan Eovaldi (health permitting) are an above-average top duo, Montgomery is overqualified as a third starter, and after him there’s a whole grab bag of guys I wouldn’t feel either great or terrible about as my last playoff starter. Dane Dunning, Jon Gray, Andrew Heaney, and Martín Pérez are all cromulent options, and the three who don’t draw a rotation assignment might play up out of the bullpen. Read the rest of this entry »

Génesis Cabrera changed feathers on Friday, as he was traded from St. Louis to Toronto for teenage catching prospect Sammy Hernandez a few days after Cabrera was designated for assignment. The hard-throwing 26-year-old southpaw had spent parts of five volatile seasons with the Cardinals. While he has enjoyed a significant bat-missing rebound in 2023 compared to last season (he’s back into the 26% K% area, up from 16.5% in 2022), Cabrera was in the midst of yet another rocky, homer-prone year before he was DFA’d. He introduced an upper-80s slider/cutter to his repertoire this year and has been using it a ton (36%), while his fastball velocity has slipped a bit. All of Cabrera’s non-fastball pitches generate above-average swinging strike rates, while his mid-90s heater tends to get shelled even though he and the Cardinals made changes to it this year. Perhaps a change of scenery and new outside intervention will lead to another tweak in this area:

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s tough not to pick on the Cardinals these days. Last season, they won 93 games and took the NL Central title with a team that combined strong offense, exceptional defense — long a St. Louis tradition — and good pitching; it was their 15th straight season above .500 and fourth in a row reaching the postseason. This year, however, they’ve spent time as the NL’s worst team, and while they’re now merely the third-worst, at 33-46 they’re going nowhere and impressing nobody.

A big and perhaps undersold part of the Cardinals’ problem is the collapse of their vaunted defense, which has often featured five players — first baseman Paul Goldschmidt, third baseman Nolan Arenado, outfielder Tyler O’Neill, and multiposition regulars Brendan Donovan and Tommy Edman — who won Gold Gloves in either 2021 or ’22. Manager Oli Marmol has been tasked with shoehorning hot-hitting youngsters Nolan Gorman and Jordan Walker into the lineup at comparatively unfamiliar positions, as both are blocked by Arenado at third base, their primary position in the minors, and between injuries and offensive issues, lately Edman has been patrolling center field instead of the middle infield. Backing a pitching staff that doesn’t miss enough bats — their 21.1% strikeout rate is the majors’ fifth-worst — it’s all collapsed into an unhappy mess.

Given that context it’s less than surprising that the Cardinals show up as one of the majors’ worst defensive teams using the methodology I rolled out on Thursday to illustrate the best. For that exercise, I sought to find a consensus from among several major defensive metrics, namely Defensive Runs Saved, Ultimate Zone Rating, and Statcast’s Runs Prevented (which I’m calling Runs Above Average because their site and ours use the abbreviation RAA) as well as our catcher framing metric (hereafter abbreviated as FRM, as on our stat pages), and Statcast’s catching metrics for framing, blocking, and throwing (which I’ve combine into the abbreviation CRAA). Each of those has different methodologies, and they produce varying spreads in runs from top to bottom that owe something to what they don’t measure as well as how much regression is built into their systems. Pitchers don’t have UZRs or RAAs, for example, and the catching numbers are set off in their own categories rather than included in UZR and RAA. I’ve accounted for the varying spreads, which range from 86 runs in DRS (from 42 to -44) to 25.6 runs in FRM (from 13.8 to -11.8), by using standard deviation scores (z-scores), which measure how many standard deviations each team is from the league average in each category. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s no longer early. Whether or not one considers the preseason prognostications about the Cardinals being contenders entering the 2023 season to be well or ill-conceived, they’re certainly not contenders now. Reassurances that it was still early in the season no longer work with baseball approaching the halfway point and the All-Star break. Wednesday night’s collapse in the eighth inning against the Astros dropped St. Louis to 33–46, giving the team a four-game cushion in the ignominious contest to be the worst in the NL Central. The only silver lining is a sad one: in a sea of humiliations, nobody notices another bucket being bailed into it. The Cardinals’ playoff chances haven’t actually evaporated completely, but they more reflect the bland mediocrity that covers the division rather than any great merit of the team. For the first time in a long while, “what’s next?” may not be simply “second verse, same as the first.”

To describe the Cardinals in recent decades, I’d personally call them the best of baseball’s conservative franchises. One of the shocking things about the team is just how unbelievably stable and consistent it is. I was in middle school the last time St. Louis lost 90 games in a season (1990); only five living people on the planet were around for the last time the team lost 100. Even just looking at starts rather than entire seasons, this is one of the worst-performing Cardinals squads that anyone alive has watched.

The franchise has had worst starts, but most of those were in the days of very much yonder. Outside of a possible handful of 105-year-old St. Louis residents, we really only have two Cardinals teams in recent memory that got off to worse starts.

If you’re looking beyond 2023, the Cardinals are in a bit of a pickle. It’s been a long time since they either tore the roster down to its foundations or went whole hog in offseason investment, and they might find themselves in that awkward zone where they’re neither good enough to win now or later. Ken Rosenthal over at The Athletic wrote about this dangerous trap in which they’ve been ensnared, and it’s one of the reasons I’m writing this piece. To quote Ken: Read the rest of this entry »

Say this for Jordan Walker: He knows how to put together a hitting streak. The 21-year-old rookie has only played in 39 major league games, and in that brief amount of time has recorded two streaks — a career-opening 12-gamer and now a 15-gamer — that together account for more than two-thirds of that run. His bat has suddenly become a bright spot in an otherwise frustrating season for the Cardinals.

Indeed, the reigning NL Central champions remain a hot mess despite winning five of their last seven games and salvaging a split in the London Series against the Cubs after being spanked 9–1 in the opener. The Cardinals have nonetheless been worse in June (7–13) than May (15–13), producing their lowest monthly rate of scoring runs (4.05 per game) along with their highest rate of runs allowed (4.88 per game), and falling from five games out of first place to 8.5 back. That’s hardly been Walker’s fault, though.

Recall that Walker, who ranked 12th on our 2023 Top 100 Prospects list, hit his way onto the roster in spring training, bypassing Triple-A Memphis, and opened the season as the regular right fielder, a situation that was somewhat surprising given the team’s apparent outfield depth. The move guaranteed that Tyler O’Neill, Dylan Carlson, and Lars Nootbaar would all get less playing time than expected — not the worst thing in the world given the subpar performances of the first two last year. The presence of fellow rookie Alec Burleson only added to the crunch. Yet Walker turned heads by collecting hits in each of his first 12 games, batting .319/.360/.489.

Once the hitting streak ended, however, Walker didn’t get a very long leash as the league adjusted. He went just 5-for-26 over his next eight games, four of which featured multiple strikeouts. Meanwhile, his poor jumps and bad throwing decisions served to remind that he was still a work in progress on defense as well; a converted third baseman, he had just 51 previous professional games in the outfield, including in last year’s Arizona Fall League. Still, it felt odd when, on April 26, the Cardinals optioned him to Memphis, with club president John Mozeliak deciding that the outfield of the 9–15 team was suddenly too crowded. “[G]uys just aren’t getting into rhythm, [with their] expected playing time,” he told reporters, adding that he and manager Oli Marmol envisioned less playing time for the rookie in the near future and figured it made little sense for him to idle on the bench. More understandable was the team’s desire for Walker to work on his approach and hit the ball in the air more often to take advantage of his 70-grade raw power. Read the rest of this entry »

Games are shorter this season due to the pitch clock, which means that starting pitchers are usually throwing an outing’s worth of offerings in less time than they typically did in previous years. Whereas a quality start of seven innings and 100 pitches might have taken two hours and 15 minutes in the past — this before a call to the bullpen — it can take as little as an hour and 45 minutes in 2023. Those times will obviously vary, with the effectiveness of the opposing pitcher playing a major role, but the fact remains that such an outing now regularly takes place within a more condensed time frame.

How different is this for starting pitchers? Moreover, is throwing that number of innings and pitches in a narrower time frame harder, or is it actually easier? I’ve asked those questions to several pitchers since the start of the season, with their answers sometimes extending to other aspects of the new pitch clock. Here is what they’ve had to say.

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Shane Bieber, Cleveland Guardians: “Good question. To give you a real response on the impact… we’ll probably see at the end of the year after a great big body of work. Right? The number of quality starts, or whatever you want to call them. But for me, personally, I’m not finding much of a difference. I work pretty quick, especially without runners on. Last year, I think I was the second fastest without runners on base. Maybe the first. Wade Miley works extremely fast, as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Across a career in baseball that spanned over 40 years, Roger Craig was at various points a hotshot rookie who helped the Dodgers win their only championship in Brooklyn, the first and best pitcher on an historically awful Mets team, the answer to a trivia question linking the Dodgers and Mets, a well-traveled pitching coach who shaped a championship-winning Tigers staff, and a culture-changing, pennant-winning manager of the Giants. He was particularly beloved within the Giants family for his positive demeanor and the way he shook the franchise out of the doldrums, though it was via his role as a teacher and evangelist of the split-fingered fastball — the pitch of the 1980s, as Sports Illustrated and others often called it — that he left his greatest mark on the game.

Craig didn’t invent the splitter, which owed its lineage to the forkball, a pitch that was popular in the 1940s and ’50s, but he proved exceptionally adept at teaching it to anyone eager to learn, regardless of team. For the pitch, a pitcher splits his index and middle fingers parallel to the seams, as in a forkball grip, but holds the ball further away from the palm, and throws with the arm action of a fastball. The resulting pitch “drops down in front of the batter so fast he don’t know where it’s goin’,” Craig told Playboy in 1988. “To put it in layman’s terms, it’s a fastball that’s also got the extra spin of a curveball.”

Given its sudden drop, the pitch was often mistaken for a spitball, so much so that it was sometimes referred to as “a dry spitter.” It baffled hitters and helped turn journeymen into stars, and stars into superstars. After pioneering reliever Bruce Sutter rode the pitch to the NL Cy Young Award in 1979, pitchers such as Mike Scott, Mark Davis, Orel Hershiser, and Bob Welch either learned the pitch directly from Craig, or from someone Craig taught, and themselves took home Cy Youngs in the 1980s. Jack Morris, Ron Darling, and Dave Stewart won championships with the pitch, as did Hershiser. Years later, the likes of Roger Clemens, David Cone, Curt Schilling, and John Smoltz would find similar success with the pitch, though it eventually fell out of vogue due to a belief that it caused arm problems, an allegation that Craig hotly refuted.

Not that Craig was a hothead. Indeed, he was even-keeled, revered within the game for his positivity. Such traits were reflected in the tributes paid to him after he died on Sunday at the age of 93, after what his family said was a short illness. “We have lost a legendary member of our Giants family.” Giants CEO Larry Baer said in a statement. “Roger was beloved by players, coaches, front-office staff and fans. He was a father figure to many and his optimism and wisdom resulted in some of the most memorable seasons in our history.” Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the St. Louis Cardinals. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the third year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Lars Nootbaar aspires to drive more balls in the air, and understandably so. The 25-year-old St. Louis Cardinals outfielder has a 120 wRC+ this season — his career mark is one point lower — but he also has a 55.7% groundball rate, which ranks sixth highest among qualified hitters. Not coincidentally, his slash line is an OBP-heavy .267/.390/.382.

Nootbaar does possess the ability to make hard contact. His average exit velocity was in the 90th percentile a year ago, although he has admittedly backslid this season to the less impressive 53rd percentile. And again, he’s killing too many worms. Moreover, not only has his groundball rate risen — last year’s mark was 43.8% — the percentage of balls he’s hit pull side has dropped from 42.4% to 32.3%. While his plus plate discipline has remained as good as ever, Nootbar needs to find a way to up his power production in order to do meaningful damage.

Nootbaar discussed his still-in-progress identity as a hitter, and his efforts to develop more pop, when the Cardinals visited Fenway Park earlier this month.

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David Laurila: How would you describe yourself as a hitter? In other words, what is your identity at the plate?

Lars Nootbaar: “I don’t really know. I guess I’m still kind of searching to figure out what kind of hitter I am. In the meantime, I’m just trying to do the best I can to compete up here. So yeah, right now I guess I’m not exactly sure.” Read the rest of this entry »