With outfielders Dexter Fowler, Stephen Piscotty and Jose Martinez all out of commission, the Cardinals called up 21-year-old Magneuris Sierra to play center for the time being. Sierra was off to a fine start in High-A this year, hitting .272/.337/.407 through 20 games. But of course, all of that came against pitching that was not one, not two, but three levels below the big leagues.

Sierra’s hitting has never been his calling card, however, as his prosoectdom is centered around his speed and defense. Lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen described him as having “Gold Glove-caliber tools in center field” last month and gave both his speed and defense future grades of 70 over the winter. Those tools have translated to on-field performance in the lower levels, as he swiped 31 bags in Low-A last year and clocked in above average in center according to both Clay Davenport’s and Baseball Prospectus’ defensive numbers. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the winter, the Cardinals talked a lot about upgrading their defense and getting more athletic in the outfield ,in particular. They let longtime Cardinal Matt Holliday go become a DH in the American League, preferring not to put his glove in left field any longer. After trying to trade for Adam Eaton, they eventually signed Dexter Fowler to play center field, allowing them to move last year’s center fielder (Randal Grichuk) back to left field.

Fowler’s not a great defender, but Grichuk is a better athlete than most left fielders, and Piscotty appears to be a decent right fielder, so this group looked like a solid-enough group of gloves. It’s not the Rays or the Red Sox, but the new Cardinals outfield looked capable of running down enough balls in the gap that outfield defense wouldn’t be a huge problem.

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Earlier this week, Jon Heyman reported that the Cardinals and Yadier Molina were “getting close” on a contract extension. With Molina, 34, years seem to be as much as an issue as the dollars involved. Heyman reports that Molina was initially seeking a four-year extension, while the club countered with a two-year deal. Can they find common ground on a three-year contract?

Molina is entering the final year of his current deal, which features a mutual option for next season. He’s given the club a deadline of Opening Day to reach an agreement, though if the club offered him Russell Martin-money in mid-April, I suspect he would consider it.

Molina told MLB.com on Tuesday that the clock on extension talks is “running.” Said Cardinals general manager John Mozeliak: “We understand there is a deadline. I think everyone is going to roll up their sleeves and continue to work at it.”

But is the clock running out on Molina?

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Previous editions: AL East / AL Central / NL East.

The World Baseball Classic is in its final stages, meaning that both the end of spring training and the start of the regular season are in sight. We’d better get through the remaining installments in this series quickly.

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It is perhaps important to maintain some perspective. Carlos Martinez is 25 years old. He was born in the Dominican Republic, and when he was 18, he spent his first year with a Cardinals affiliate. Last month, he agreed to a $51-million contract extension. Martinez is already a massive success story as a professional. Barring some unlikely series of catastrophic decisions, he and his family will never have to worry about money again. We should all be so blessed.

So the Martinez path is already something like four or five standard deviations better than the usual. But, you know, we’re bad at perspective. We tend to think of these people as baseball players first, and, say, just last week, we got to glimpse Martinez as a baseball player, pitching in a competitive environment for the first time since signing the multi-year guarantee. I want to show you two pitches I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

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As the person in charge of the FanGraphs Community blog, I read over every submission that isn’t curiously-worded spam about industrial milling machinery or picking up girls. This week, a post about Matt Carpenter was submitted and published, and here is a link. I’ve been meaning to review Carpenter’s 2016 for a while, and the Community post beat me to the punch. Go ahead and read that, and if you want, stop there. I’m just going to talk more about Carpenter in the following paragraphs. His most recent year, you see, was something extraordinary.

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Pitchers and catchers have been in camp for all of a day and a half, and the baseball gods may have already claimed the first pitcher to feed their insatiable hunger for elbow ligaments and heartbreak. Alex Reyes of the Cardinals, a top-five prospect in all of baseball — if not the best (keep an eye out for Eric Longenhagen’s final rankings) — is headed for an MRI after experiencing the dreaded elbow discomfort. According to Jeff Passan, there’s significant worry within the organization that Reyes will need Tommy John surgery.

That’s a massive blow to the Cardinals, who were almost surely counting on Reyes for major contributions in their rotation. The rest of the pitching staff is largely a patchwork of the old (Adam Wainwright), the ineffective (Mike Leake) and the recently repaired (Lance Lynn). Only Carlos Martinez stands out as a real candidate to turn in 190 or so genuinely good innings. Knowing the Cardinals, they’ll probably still get a few prospects to emerge out of thin air and provide value at the big-league level, but Reyes is Reyes.

His fastball is the sort of pitch that’s spoken of in hushed and reverent tones. The curveball isn’t far behind. He’s the prototypical über-prospect in the age of Noah Syndergaard. He’s what they look like. For a Cards team that’s projected to win just 84 games, he was going to be a vital cog. He may be gone for the whole season.

There are two major implications here: one for the status of the club this year and one for the status of Reyes and his career. The second is largely an unknown. Every elbow reacts differently. Reyes may not need Tommy John. He may need it, and then another one. The Cards are almost surely praying that he’ll just need rest and rehabilitation, and that the ligament is still somewhat intact. Ervin Santana and Masahiro Tanaka have been pitching with partial tears of their ulnar collateral ligaments. It can be done, but it would likely eat into Reyes’ titanic velocity. We don’t yet know what the damage is.

If he does require surgery, the prognosis isn’t excellent. Research by Jon Roegele suggests that, for pitchers who undergo a Tommy John procedure between ages 16 and 23 (Reyes is 22), the median figure for innings pitched after the surgery is just 221. Only 40% of pitchers in that age group reach the 500-inning threshold. That 221-inning mark is worrisome for someone of Reyes’ age. But again, we’re not yet certain if he’ll need surgery.

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If you haven’t heard the news, the St. Louis Cardinals received their punishment from Major League Baseball this week in response to the actions of former director of amateur scouting, Chris Correa. Correa hacked the database of the Houston Astros using some variation of the password Eckstein. As Jeff Sullivan explained, the Cardinals are expected both to pay the Astros $2 million and give them two draft picks, numbers 56 and 75. The consensus seems to be that the Cardinals got off light.

As Grant Brisbee noted, the second of the Cardinals’ picks has actually been given to them in the form of a competitive-balance pick, which provides convenient timing to discuss whether the Cardinals should even have that extra pick to begin with.

Per the recently established CBA, 14 teams will receive competitive-balance picks every year. Teams qualify for these picks by placing among the bottom 10 of major-league teams either by (a) revenue or (b) market size. According to Forbes, the Cardinals actually place among the top 10 of all clubs when it comes to revenue. They rank 24th, however, by market size. Therefore, they qualify for an extra pick.

While there seems to be much consternation about the Cardinals’ hacking penalty right now, wait 18 months. If the club loses Lance Lynn to free agency and then receives a better comp in addition to their own normal pick, they’ll possess three picks among the top-40 selections.

Question of the hacking scandal aside, there are questions about whether the Cards deserve any comp picks in the first place. By one definition, they certainly do: they meet the criteria agreed upon by the league.

There are plausible arguments against the characterization of the club as a “small-market” franchise, however. Most of them begin with a discussion of fanbase. Consider: here are the annual attendance averages per team over the last five years, with data collected from Baseball-Reference.

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The St. Louis Cardinals’ former director of amateur scouting, Chris Correa, is serving 46 months in jail for gaining unauthorized access to the Astros’ player information/evaluation database, codenamed Ground Control. A few days ago, MLB announced St. Louis’s penalty: they’d have to send $2 million and their top two draft picks to Houston.

From a network-security perspective, the case is interesting. It illustrates how difficult true network security really is, which raises the strong possibility that another team will attempt this in the future (if indeed one isn’t doing it right now).

Here’s a timeline of the incident up until it was made public:

• March 2013 – April 2014: Correa accesses Ground Control using passwords of various Astros staff. (Source: David Barron and Jake Kaplan of the Houston Chronicle.)
• June 2014: Deadspin posts leaked documents that were retrieved from Ground Control, mostly regarding trades or potential trades during the 2013 season. This action causes the Astros to contact MLB, who contacts the FBI to begin an investigation into the breach. (Source: Derrick Goold and Robert Partrick of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.)
• June 2015: Michael S. Schmidt of the New York Times reports that the Cardinals are the prime suspects in this investigation.

Why didn’t the Astros detect the unauthorized access themselves? I don’t know anything about how they ran their security team, so I can only speculate. But I do have several years of experience in the network-security industry. I’ll use those to provide a perspective.

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The St. Louis Cardinals lack stars. Sure, Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright are well known and remain solid even as they age. Sure, Matt Carpenter has developed into an important member of the club. In terms of big-time production, though, the Cardinals have few options upon which they can reasonably rely.

Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections for the Cardinals support this observation: per ZiPS, no position player on the St. Louis roster is likely to produce more than 3.1 WAR in 2017; only one pitcher is projected for more than 2.1 wins. That pitcher — and, incidentally, the only player on the Cardinals whom one might reasonably classify as a “star” — is Carlos Martinez.

Yesterday, the Cardinals very wisely locked that star up. Martinez and the club agreed to a five-year extension worth a guaranteed $51 million. The deal includes two options that could keep Martinez in St. Louis through 2023 and buy out four years of free agency, leading to a possible total value of $85.5 million.

A week ago, I suggested that the Wil Myers deal — for six years, $83 million guaranteed — indicated that extensions for players who possessed more than three and less than four years of service time might become a lot more expensive. This contract appears to provide evidence to the contrary.

In that post I noted that, among such position players, only five had recently reached contract extensions — and that those were either upside bets on riskier players like Michael Brantley and Josh Harrison or big-money contracts for big-time players like Freddie Freeman. The one contract in the middle involved Dee Gordon and his five-year deal for $50 million, an agreement that also includes an option. Martinez’s contract is like Gordon’s, except with an additional free-agent year surrendered by the player.

On the pitching side, meanwhile, there’s virtually no precedent for this type of deal.

Martinez’s deal breaks the record for biggest guarantee to a starting pitcher entering arbitration, a distinction which previously belonged to Corey Kluber after he was guaranteed $38.5 million heading into the 2015 season. That deal might also potentially last seven seasons. At the time, however, Kluber was a super-2 player. He was entering arbitration for the first time, but he was still four years from free agency, unlike Martinez’s three. He was also coming off a Cy Young Award and heading into his age-29 season, meaning he was four years older than Martinez is now. Kluber’s deal provided some guaranteed income, but also gave away all of his prime years: he won’t be a free agent until after his age-35 season.

That isn’t the case for Martinez, who enters just his age-25 season. Even if all of the options are exercised, Martinez will still head to free agency after his age-31 season, the same age as Zack Greinke when he signed his $206 million deal with the Arizona Diamondbacks.

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