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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Milwaukee Brewers. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from our own (both Eric Longenhagen’s and Kiley McDaniel’s) observations. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this.

All of the numbered prospects here also appear on The Board, a new feature at the site that offers sortable scouting information for every organization. That can be found here.

Other Prospects of Note
Grouped by type and listed in order of preference within each category.Power-only Bats Low on the Defensive Spectrum
Jacob Nottingham, C
Weston Wilson, 1B/3B/OF
Jake Gatewood, 1B
Chad McClanahan, 1B
Branlyn Jaraba, 3B
David Fry, C/1B
Ernesto Martinez, 1B

Nottingham will turn 24 this offseason. He has plus power but needs to improve behind the plate in order to profile as a power-over-hit backup. Weston Wilson has above-average raw power and can play the corner outfield spots, first base, and some third. He could be a right-handed corner bench bat. Gatewood has plus-plus raw power and has moved from shortstop to third base to first base as a pro. He’s a R/R first baseman with huge power and strikeout issues. Fringe 40-man candidates like that sometimes bloom late, or at least get a shot at some point. McClanahan signed for $1 million as an 11th rounder in 2016. He’s a big-framed projection bat who is already seeing more reps at first than at third. He has premium makeup. Jaraba was a $1 million signee this year. He’s a R/R power bat who looked like a future first baseman this fall. David Fry was the club’s 7th rounder out of Northwestern State. He has above-average power and hasn’t caught all that much, in part because he had TJ in college. Ernesto Martinez is built like a Greek god and has 70 raw power but his swing has not progressed and it’s currently unusable.

The Tommy John Crew
Drew Rasmussen. RHP
Nathan Kirby, LHP
Quintin Torres-Costa, LHP
Nash Walters, RHP
Devin Williams
Josh Pennington, RHP

Rasmussen has had two TJs. He sits 93-96 with average secondary stuff and below average command when healthy. Kirby has had several injury issues and now has a 40 fastball, but his repertoire is deep and he has a 55 curveball. Torres-Costa is a situational lefty who likely would have been in the big leagues in 2018 if not for his injury. Walters was 92-94, touching 95 in the fall and struggled to throw strikes. Devin Williams is 92-93 with a plus curveball. Pennington retired when he needed his second TJ.

One Plus Pitch
Reese Olson, RHP
Justin Jarvis, RHP
Rodrigo Benoit, RHP

Olson signed for $400,000 and was 92-93, touching 94 with a plus curveball in the fall. Benoit has scattershot command of an average fastball and a plus breaking ball. Jarvis has an above-average changeup.

Weird Arm Slots
J.T. Hintzen, RHP
Scott Sunitsch, LHP

Sunitsch no-hit the University of Oregon in April. He’s a low-slot lefty with a good changeup. Hitzen strides way, way open, toward the first base side, and the ball appears to hitters out of where his stomach was when he came set. Both are release-point oddities who have performed so far.

Offseason Addition
Felix Valerio, 2B

Valerio, who turned 18 in December, was acquired as part of the package for Keon Broxton in January. He hit .319/.409/.433 in the DSL during his first pro season and is a skills-over-tools type of prospect who is more polished than most of his peers. He has promising feel for contact and is athletically viable at second base but, at 5-foot-7, 165, he’s less likely to grow into more impressive physical tools than someone with some length and room on their frame. Players like this either hit enough to play second base every day or they don’t, and they end up as org guys. Valerio walked more than he struck out last year, and those types of peripheral indicators are great evidence to support a case that a player will indeed hit that much, but not when we’re talking about DSL stats, so we’re hesitant give significant weight to Valerio’s early-career numbers.

System Overview
This system looks very weak now that several 45 FV or better prospects have either graduated or been traded, and the farm alone doesn’t project a clear picture of the youthful health of this franchise. The focus now shifts to the collective development of the large number of teenagers in the 40 and 35+ FV tiers. Another sizable wave of talent — position players this time — could arrive in Milwaukee in three to five years. The organization’s recent history of hitter development isn’t all that inspiring; most of Milwaukee’s big league position players came from outside the org, and Orlando Arcia hasn’t made the kind of offensive impact that was expected of him as a prospect. Grisham and Erceg have been frustrating and have gone backwards. Things may not bode well for several of the hitters in this system who clearly need improvement in some way to progress like Milwaukee’s pitching has. The Brewers love idiosyncratic pitchers whose stuff plays up because of one weird thing or another, and they’ve had success developing them.

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2019 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2014 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research, and was expanded for inclusion in The Cooperstown Casebook, published in 2017 by Thomas Dunne Books. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Unlike 2014 Hall of Fame honorees Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine or 2015 honoree Randy Johnson, Mike Mussina didn’t reach 300 wins in his career. Nor did he ever win a Cy Young award, in part because a teammate practically stole one out of his hands on the basis of superior run support. For as well as he pitched in October, his teams never won a World Series, because even the best relievers sometimes falter, to say nothing of what happens to the rest of them.

Though lacking in those marquee accomplishments, Mussina nonetheless strung together an exceptional 18 year career spent entirely in the crucible of the American League East, with its high-offense ballparks and high-pressure atmosphere. A cerebral pitcher with an expansive arsenal that featured a 93-mph fastball and a signature knuckle-curve — and at times as many as five other pitches — he not only missed bats with regularity but also had pinpoint control.

Mike Mussina, Wicked 85mph Knuckle Curve. ? pic.twitter.com/9aiYm9tVIE

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) November 15, 2018

In a prime that coincided with those of the aforementioned pitchers — as well as 2015 inductees Pedro Martinez and John Smoltz and ballotmates Roger Clemens, Roy Halladay, and Curt Schilling — “Moose” never led the AL in either strikeouts or ERA, but he ranked in the league’s top five six times in the former category and seven times in the latter. He earned All-Star honors five times and received Cy Young votes in eight separate seasons across a 10-year span, at one point finishing in the top five four times in five years. He even did a better job of preventing runs in the postseason than he did in the regular season, though it wasn’t enough to put his teams over the top.

Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2019 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2013 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research, and was expanded for inclusion in The Cooperstown Casebook, published in 2017 by Thomas Dunne Books. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

All Edgar Martinez did was hit — the statement is almost entirely true in both the literal and figurative sense. Even after adjusting for his high-scoring surroundings, Martinez could flat-out rake. A high-average, high-on-base percentage hitting machine with plenty of power, his numbers place him among the top 30 or 40 hitters of all time even after adjusting for the high-offense era. Martinez played a key role in putting the Mariners on the map as an AL West powerhouse, emerging as a folk hero to a fan base that watched Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson, and Alex Rodriguez lead the franchise’s charge to relevancy, then skip town for more lucrative deals. But while Griffey and Rodriguez were two-way stars at key up-the-middle positions and Johnson a flamethrowing ace, Martinez spent the bulk of his career as a designated hitter. In that capacity, he merely put a claim on being the best one in baseball history.

More than 40 years after it was introduced — in the most significant rule change since the AL adopted the foul strike rule in 1903 — the DH continues to rankle purists who would rather watch pitchers risk injury as they ineptly flail away (Bartolo Colon excepted). In 2004, Paul Molitor became the first player elected to the Hall after spending the plurality of his career (44% of his plate appearances) as a DH, while a decade later, Frank Thomas became the first elected after spending the majority of his career (57% of his PA) there. By comparison, Martinez took 72% of his plate appearances as a DH, while David Ortiz — whose 2016 victory lap spurred plenty of Hall of Fame discussion — took 88%.

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One year ago, Josh Donaldson was coming off of a very good season, hitting 50% better than league average on his way to 5.1 WAR despite missing six weeks early in the year with a right calf injury. If Donaldson had hit free agency then, he would have been the best position player on the market and likely would have bested J.D. Martinez’s contract despite being a couple of years older. But he didn’t, and after an injury-riddled 2018, the soon-to-be-33 year-old surveyed the market, and opted for a one-year, $23 million deal with the Atlanta Braves, per Ken Rosenthal.

Donaldson faced a difficult decision this winter. He could have tried to cash in on his previous success and get the highest guarantee possible. In our review of the Top 50 Free Agents, both the crowd and Kiley McDaniel assumed that route, and predicted three year deals with an average annual value between $18 and $20 million. It’s possible that Donaldson preferred the Braves for personal reasons, having grown up in Alabama. Holding out for a better deal would have included some risk for Donaldson if this year’s market proves to be slow like last year’s did. The middle ground with a player opt-out after one season might have made the most sense, but that also might have taken more time to develop and lessened the guarantee in the first year. The deal Donaldson did strike with the Braves is not devoid of risk, however. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from our own (both Eric Longenhagen’s and Kiley McDaniel’s) observations. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this.

All of the numbered prospects here also appear on The Board, a new feature at the site that offers sortable scouting information for every organization. That can be found here.

Other Prospects of Note

Grouped by type and listed in order of preference within each category.

Teenage Outfielders
Daniel Rivero, CF
Angel Basabe, RF
Sergio Campana, LF
Jack Herman, RF

Rivero has advanced contact skills and stands this group’s best chance of staying in center. Basabe signed for $450,000 in 2017 and had a solid first year in pro ball. His tools all hover around average right now and he only has modest physical projection, but he has one of the prettier left-handed swings from his signing class and has natural feel for lifting the ball. Once his lower half gets more involved in his swing, he could start hitting for big in-game power. Campana was a $500,000 signee in 2018. He has a strong, Derek Dietrich-ish frame, average offensive tools, and might need to move to left due to arm strength. A 30th round high schooler from New Jersey who signed for $50,000, Herman hit .340/.435/.489 in the GCL, and had nearly as many walks as strikeouts. He’s just 6-foot tall but has a broad-shouldered frame with some room for more mass and there’s already some pop here. His arm is plus.

Power-hitters with Rough Defensive Profiles
Mason Martin, 1B
Jonah Davis, LF
Edison Lantigua, RF

A 17th rounder in 2017, Martin’s incredible foray into pro ball — .307/.457/.630 — forced re-evaluation. He has powerful, explosive hands and big raw power, but also has a maxed-out, 6-foot frame, only profiles at first base, and posted a 33% strikeout rate in 2018. He doesn’t turn 20 until next June and has a chance to be a three-true-outcome first baseman but there’s no margin for error on the bat because he’s at the bottom of the defensive spectrum. Davis has easy plus raw power from the left side but is a LF/DH-only defender and he struck out a ton in college. Lantigua has a well-rounded, vanilla toolset and has performed up through the NYPL.

Bat-first Catchers
Deon Stafford, C
Samuel Inoa, C

Stafford has big, strength-driven power but hasn’t improved enough behind the plate. He does have plus makeup and is a good athlete for his size, so perhaps that defensive will still come. Inoa is a strong, early-career performer with a strong hit tool, but he might not catch.

New Middle Infielders
Connor Kaiser, SS
Luis Tejada, SS
Juan Jerez, 2B
Orlando Chivilli, SS
Alexander Mojica, 3B

Kaiser (3rd round in 2018 from Vanderbilt) has similarities to Pirates 2008 3rd rounder Jordy Mercer as a bigger college shortstop without big offensive impact; Kaiser was scorching hot in the college postseason but needs to dial in his swing and approach. Tejada ($500,000) is built like Jeter Downs, and has above-average hands and some pull-side pop. He has the best combination of physicality and defensive ability of this group. It’s possible Jerez ($380,000) grows into enough arm strength to play the left side of the infield, but for now he has a 40 arm and fits better at second base. He’s currently very small but has a square, long-limbed frame (like a scaled-down Jed Lowrie) that has room for plenty of mass, and he can already swing it fairly well for a 135-pound kid. Chivilli ($350,000) is similar but has less room on the frame. Mojica ($350,000) is a thicker, 3B-only prospect with present pop.

Late-bloomer Pitching Candidates
Elvis Escobar, LHP
Oliver Mateo, RHP
Angel German, RHP
Jose Maldonado, RHP
Lizardy Dicent, RHP

Escobar is a converted outfielder who has only been pitching for a few months. He’s been up to 95 mph from the left side and shown great changeup feel right away. His breaking ball is fringy but plays up a bit against lefties because he hides the ball well. Mateo and German throw in the upper-90s but each is quite wild. Maldonado is a strong-bodied 19-year-old who sits 91-95 and has average secondaries. Dicent sits 91-93, touches 96, and has an average slider.

Recently Acquired Projection Arms
Dante Mendoza, RHP
Wilkin Ramos, RHP

19-year-old Dante Mendoza was a 12th round high school draftee in 2017 who spent 2018 in the AZL, with Cleveland. Pittsburgh acquired him in the Erik Gonzalez/Jordan Luplow deal. At 6-foot-5, Mendoza joins a system full of huge-framed pitching prospects. He has been up to 93 but sits 87-90 with the fastball and has an advanced changeup and breaking ball. There’s a strong possibility that Mendoza’s stuff ticks up as his body matures and he turns into a good big league pitcher of some kind, realistically in the back of a rotation. Ramos has less present stuff — he was 87-90 and touching 92 in the fall, which is actually down a bit from the previous fall — but more physical projection as he’s an ultra-wiry 6-foot-5. He has some feel for a slow, loopy curveball and began using a slider/cutter in the upper-70s last year. He turned 18 on Halloween 2018 and is a long-term developmental project.

System Overview

After the Chris Archer trade, the Pirates appear as if they’re ready to compete for the next few seasons, so getting pieces from the farm system who will play for the league minimum will help create an increased margin for error in the team’s payroll. Pittsburgh has mostly spent in the middle bonus tier (under $1 million) of the international market and has gotten solid early results on their most recent signings. In the draft, they have a type with respect to pitchers, leaning heavily toward big players with projectable velocity (extension is a big part of that) and breaking ball spin rate. They’re a little harder to pin down when it comes to hitters, and their approach to the international market and amateur pitching is where a progressive leaning is particularly evident.

There are a number of hitters, especially at the top of this list, who, as noted in their reports, are in the midst of a swing change. That introduces some variance to the profiles of prospects whose stat lines wouldn’t seem to suggest it, which is a good thing. Variance is typically read as risk when it comes to prospects, and so more of it is bad. That’s often true, but variance can also mean a wide range of outcomes, with Cole Tucker a classic example of a high floor prospect who also has a high ceiling if it all breaks right.

Hall of Fame debate season is upon us, and subjectivity is inherent in the process. For every no-brainer candidate there are always several for whom a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down is largely in the eye of the beholder. Pushing bias aside — not always an easy exercise — one must weigh a ton of factors. Think “The Scales of Justice,” but with WAR, win totals, and DRS taking the place of a blindfold, a balance, and a sword.

Cutting to the chase, Omar Vizquel — arguably the most-polarizing player on the current ballot — probably deserves to be enshrined in Cooperstown. Attempting to not clumsily put a thumb in my eye while stating his case, I hereby offer the following statistical facts:

Vizquel ranks 43rd all-time with 2,877 hits. Nine of the 10 players directly below him on that list — Brooks Robinson among them — are in the Hall of Fame. The one who is not is Harold Baines. Vizquel had more hits as a shortstop than did Cal Ripken.

Vizquel has 3,727 total bases. That is more than the career totals of Edgar Martinez (3,718), Andruw Jones (3,690), Lou Whitaker (3,651), Mark McGwire (3,639) and Scott Rolen (3,628). Read the rest of this entry »

Major league baseball teams closely guard their financial information. They have no problem talking about how much money players make, but they prefer to be more circumspect when disclosing the revenue teams take in or the scale of the profits owners make after those players have been paid and expenses accounted for. Because baseball’s ownership is a fairly insular group composed mostly of individuals and privately held businesses– and because there relatively few franchise sales to use as gauge–teams have been largely successful in preventing their financial information from going public. The Atlanta Braves present an exception.

Liberty Media, perhaps best known for its subsidiary SiriusXM Satellite Radio, purchased the Braves in 2007 for $400 million. Two years ago, they began offering stock in their separate divisions, which means the public can buy shares in the Braves as well as the real estate holdings around the stadium. It also means that, as a publicly traded company, the public is entitled to more information regarding the team’s finances than is typical. As I wrote in 2016, the club disclosed an $18 million loss in 2014 before depreciation and amortization. They were on the plus side in 2015 by about three million dollars before recording losses of about $20 million in 2016. During those three seasons, the team averaged 90 losses, with an average annual attendance of 2.1 million fans and a payroll just over $116 million per season. The financial losses in 2016 were largely attributable to a huge international signing class, most of the players from which were later declared free agents after MLB’s investigation into Atlanta’s signing methods.

But focusing exclusively on a team’s year-by-year profits obscures the financial reality of owning a baseball team because it doesn’t address the most profitable aspect of team ownership: the value of the franchise. Based on the calculations above, the Braves lost about $45 million from 2014 through the end of 2016. But Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei has admitted profits weren’t always the main consideration for the Braves, indicating that “historically, the measurement was we didn’t lose money.” Maffei’s remarks are consistent with statements from another team owner, Rogers Communications, which owns the Toronto Blue Jays, though the Blue Jays’ financials are harder to trace because Rogers owns a whole host of assets along with the baseball team. Per Forbes:

The media giant’s CFO, Tony Staffieri, said at a conference that Rogers wants to “surface value” from the Blue Jays, which he said is a “very valuable asset for us that we don’t get full credit for.”

For the Blue Jays, “surfacing value” would likely come in the form of realizing the profits from selling the team, as Rogers might not be getting “credit” if the team isn’t reaping huge profits. Then there’s the matter of Rogers also broadcasting Blue Jays games, which might further cloud the revenues from the baseball team. (The Braves used to benefit from some of that same confusion back when Ted Turner owned the club and TBS showed Braves games, but the financial model has shifted, and the Braves now have one of the worst local television contracts in baseball.) It is clear the calculus of franchise ownership is more complicated than mere gate sales. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s often a bit of weirdness on the fringes of the annual BBWAA Hall of Fame ballot, and 2019 entry, unveiled on Monday, was no exception. What transpires on those fringes rarely has any bearing on who will wind up on the podium in Cooperstown next July, joyously thanking families, teammates, and coaches. But with the news of the ballot’s arrival still fresh, and with the Very Serious Business of analyzing the top candidates a task best suited for after Thanksgiving, it’s worth considering the margins for a few moments.

Because the ballot’s release is a Big Deal to yours truly, writer of more words about the Hall of Fame on an annual basis than just about anybody with a claim to sanity, I had Monday’s article, “The Big Questions About the 2019 BBWAA Hall of Fame Ballot,” ready to go in advance of the Hall’s 12 pm ET official press release, save for the final total of candidates and the list of first-timers. While the official rules make anybody who played at least 10 seasons in the majors and has been retired for five seasons eligible — anybody who’s not on baseball’s ineligible list, that is, or has not otherwise exhausted his eligibility — not everybody who meets those requirements actually lands on the ballot. That’s because there’s a stage that involves some subjective choices by the BBWAA Screening Committee, a six-member panel that puts the ballot together.

To appear on the ballot, a player must be nominated by any two of the six members of that committee. That’s a mere formality for all of the obvious candidates, but it becomes a coin toss the further down the list you go. Historically, the worst slights probably belong to three-time Gold Glove winner and two-time All-Star Willie Davis, who racked up 60.7 WAR (Baseball-Reference version, which I’m sticking with for all things ballot-related) in an 18-year career that spanned from 1960-1979 and included a 1977-1978 detour to Japan that put him out of sight and out of mind, and Negro Leagues-turned-Brooklyn Dodgers staple Jim Gilliam, who accrued 40.7 WAR from 1953-1966.

That pair is hardly alone. Among recent examples, in 2014, outfielder Shannon Stewart (24.9 WAR from 1995-2008, highlighted by a fourth-place finish in the 2003 AL MVP voting) was left off the ballot, while his former Twins teammate Jacque Jones (11.6 WAR from 1999-2008) was included. That same year, Esteban Loaiza (23.0 WAR from 1995-2008, highlighted by a second-place finish in the 2003 AL Cy Young voting) was on the outside, while Armando Benitez (17.0 WAR from 1994-2008, highlighted by a cheap shot that set off an infamous brawl between the Orioles and Yankees in 1998) was on the inside. Yes, Jones had more homers than Stewart in less playing time, and yes, Benitez had more saves than Loaiza had wins, but none of them had a chance at actually being elected. It was completely arbitrary who among them received the honor of being on the ballot.

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The free-agent market includes names like Patrick Corbin and Dallas Keuchel. There’s been chatter the Mets might be willing to trade Noah Syndergaard. There’s been chatter the Indians might be willing to trade Carlos Carrasco or Corey Kluber. But when the Mariners signaled their intent to take a step back this offseason, James Paxton became an obvious trade candidate, and quite possibly the best pitcher available. At least, the best pitcher available under realistic circumstances, since I don’t even know what it would take to pry Kluber away. Paxton rumors circulated for a couple of weeks, and now we’ve arrived at a conclusion, since Jerry Dipoto is hardly opposed to making moves in November. Paxton will be on his way to New York, where he’ll share a rotation with Luis Severino.

Yankees get:

• James Paxton

Mariners get:

• Justus Sheffield
• Erik Swanson
• Dom Thompson-Williams

Before too long, Paxton’s presence will be taken for granted, and attention will turn to the Yankees’ pursuit of still another starter in free agency. We’re seemingly always focused on what’s just in front of us, and what might be in front of Yankees fans soon is Corbin, or Keuchel, or somebody else. They seem likely to make another impact move to bolster the starting rotation. But for this moment, getting Paxton is a move to be celebrated. For a variety of reasons, Paxton has flown somewhat under the radar, but he’s a No. 1 starter, added to a team with a No. 1 starter.

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For all the ups and downs of St. Louis’ 2018 season, the team finished with an 88-74 record, fully in that 85-90 win-window that forms the team’s bog-standard result. The Cardinals made it interesting over the summer after the merciful guillotining of manager Mike Matheny, but a bleak September left them a distant third in the NL Central.

The Setup

Some teams are wild gamblers, throwing caution and giant wads of money to the wind, hoping to end up as either spectacular successes or failures that are quickly forgotten as attentions shift to the next crazy scheme. The St. Louis Cardinals stand in opposition to that. They are the safe, sensible team that reminds you on nickel-shots night that you have work tomorrow and really should stop for the evening because the chair you’re talking to isn’t actually W.C. Fields.

St. Louis builds from within, signs reasonable players to reasonable contracts, and when a beloved franchise player hits free agency, won’t spend exorbitantly to chase crazy bids. Even Albert Pujols, the team’s soul for a decade, was allowed to move on when the numbers got too uncomfortably high.

That’s not to say the Cardinals don’t make moves, but rather, that they make reasonable ones. Marcell Ozuna, coming off a .312/.376/.548 breakout campaign with the Marlins, was the team’s big offseason pickup, one that didn’t demand the team’s crown jewels. And with Ozuna in tow, giving the Cardinals an easy Ozuna-Tommy Pham–Dexter Fowler outfield rather than the juggling act of recent years, the team felt comfortable enough to trade Stephen Piscotty and Randal Grichuk to claw back some of the value given to the Marlins.

Another quiet move was the signing of former Padres relief prospect Miles Mikolas to a two-year, $15.5 million contract after he was reinvented as a harder-throwing Bob Tewksbury for the Yomiuri Giants. It was another sensible move compared to the prospect of overpaying for one of the multitude of third-tier starters otherwise found in a weak free agent market.

For a smart, well-run team with a knack for punching above their market size, there was always a worry on the horizon stemming from the team’s longtime rival, the Chicago Cubs. Being safe and sensible was a better playbook when the Cubs were in their Jim Hendry years or during the long rebuilding phase; there was no heavy in the division that could use cash to suffocate St. Louis’s measured approach.

But the Cubs happened, a team with the unfortunate tendency of being rich while also not being completely insane with their money. A Jason Heyward-size error would have really hurt St. Louis’s flexibility but the Cubs could seemingly say “Nah, it’s cool, bro, that wasn’t even our favorite Scrooge McDuck vault of gold coins.”

Even in a 2017 season when everything went wrong, the Cubs still won 92 games, enough to win the NL Central by six games. Could a high-floor, low-ceiling St. Louis team full of three-win players really provide a consistent threat to the Cubs? Or would the Cardinals be better served by taking a little more risk, given their division? That was the key uncertainty as the team entered 2018.

The Projection

This question was precisely what worried ZiPS going into the season. With a 94-win projection for the Cubs, ZiPS only gave the Cardinals and Brewers about a combined one-in-three shot of catching Chicago. St. Louis’ 87 forecasted wins looked a lot like the typical Cardinals season; that aforementioned 85-90 wins that has led the team to consistent contend for a playoff spot while never really being spoken of as an elite team.

The Results

The team started the season with Adam Wainwright on the disabled list with a hamstring pull, but St. Louis had already moved on from the days when they counted on Wainwright being in the rotation. Jack Flaherty, the eventual fifth-place Rookie of the Year finisher, filled in. Wainwright struggled upon his return, but the rest of the starters pitched as well as could have been expected, combining for a 3.00 ERA through the end of May, the third-best in baseball behind the Astros and Nationals.

Until the final month of the season, when St. Louis struggled in a variety of interesting ways, the rotation held up admirably, with little fault attached during the year’s doldrums. Wainwright was back on the DL by the end of April with elbow problems and Michael Wacha’s oblique strain ended his season in June, though he was set to return in September before a setback. But Flaherty was already a superior option to Wainwright and John Gant and Austin Gomber picked up most of the rest of the missing starts; the starting pitching was never really a serious problem.

The offense, on the other hand, was a regular problem. Matt Carpenter started out heat-death-of-the-universe cold, but while he heated up to a blazing MVP-like level for the middle months of the season, other pieces who were expected to contribute, like Ozuna and Fowler, largely didn’t.

Except for a brief period at the top of the division in May, after a fun week in which they swept both Chicago teams, the team hovered around the .500 mark for most of the first half. Milwaukee was the team to take advantage of Chicago not putting away the division early, which resulted in a great deal of tension surrounding St. Louis, something that’s fairly unusual for a Cardinals team.

Pham had already expressed displeasure with his contract situation before the season — the unfortunate result of being a late bloomer scheduled to hit free agency right before his age-34 season. Fowler and John Mozeliak publicly traded barbs and while the latter clarified his comments in the press, there were indications bubbling to the surface that manager Mike Matheny had lost the team.

Matheny was always kind of an oddball fit for the Cardinals; an old-school style manager they hoped would embrace at least some analytics and handle the team, and especially the pitching staff, well. The latter characteristic matched his reputation as a veteran catcher.

The analytics-embracing never really happened and Matheny was a fairly poor in-game tactician, who generally ran his bullpen in a manner that could most kindly be described as slapdash. But he generally kept past teams together and had gotten results.

With the clubhouse melting down, Matheny fighting with the media, and incidents such as tacitly allowing Bud Norris to bully Jordan Hicks marring the season, the argument for keeping Matheny evaporated quickly.

I’m usually skeptical of the idea of managerial changes being a big reason for a team’s sudden improvement, but things in St. Louis calmed down quickly once Mike Shildt took over the job on an interim basis, performing well enough to lose the interim tag just six weeks after he inherited the job. The public infighting quickly stopped and the team went on a tear, going 28-13 through the end of August.

Gone was Pham, traded to the Rays at the deadline, a destination likely to please him even less from a financial perspective; Harrison Bader and his shockingly good glove were given centerfield. Also out was Greg Holland, who pitched so poorly in 2018 that even Matheny noticed and stopped using him in high-leverage situations.

In the midst of their best run of the season, Shildt showed little resistance to using the team’s secondary talents. Pitchers like Gomber, Tyson Ross, and Daniel Poncedeleon assumed more flexible roles, a drastic change from Matheny’s rigid pitcher usage.

September, though, was a tough one. The rotation had its first really weak stretch, with a 4.60 ERA and a 4.72 FIP, and the offense once again fell back to the middle of the pack, with a 90 wRC+ for the month. Carpenter dropped out of the MVP conversation almost completely, with a .170/.313/.245 line for the month. Ozuna was the only player on the team with an .800 OPS. The bullpen, though never the team’s strong suit, had shown some life tapping into the team’s Triple-A depth but regressed to a 4.99 FIP.

Going into the last week of the season, the Cardinals actually had a game-and-a-half lead over the Colorado Rockies for the second wild card spot. The team controlled their destiny, but then lost five of the last six games to the Brewers and Cubs by a 39-20 scoring margin.

What Comes Next?

One interesting thing about the Cardinals is that there’s a very real sense the team is willing to be more aggressive this winter, especially financially, than they have in the past. While they aren’t going to shout “Hey, we have $400 million, make us an offer,” I suspect that at a minimum, the team will contemplating entering the Bryce Harper or Manny Machado sweepstakes.

The Cardinals are a hard team to upgrade in that they’re just so solid in most places. The starting lineup is deep enough that, outside of Dexter Fowler, they really need to be exciting to justify the term. Taking a chance on Josh Donaldson is one of those moves that does have interesting upside, but the rest of the market’s second-tier should be rather uninteresting, at least as it concerns the lineup. It may seem a stretch for St. Louis to spend more than twice what they’ve ever spent on a player contract, but remember, they were a team connected with Giancarlo Stanton, and reportedly made a significant offer to David Price when the pitcher was a free agent.

Where second-tier free agents could prove more useful is the bullpen. While the pen has never really been as bad as advertised — many fans think the team’s relievers were Old Testament-bad — but the team could use a left-handed pitcher like Andrew Miller or Zach Britton and the stakes are high-enough that there’s an argument for overpaying a bit.

Early ZiPS Projection – Miles Mikolas

Given that Nippon Professional Baseball is a high-level league, Mikolas didn’t exactly come out of nowhere; he wouldn’t have been given a $7 million contract with a career 5.32 MLB ERA and no prospect pedigree if he had. But he’s also a pitcher who allows a lot of contact for someone who can hit 95 MPH with a slider that will be given a lot more respect the second go-around.

Despite the foreboding introduction, ZiPS is actually quite optimistic Mikolas’s regression still leaves him as a solid number two starter. A few more home runs come out in the projections, but ZiPS also sees a bump in his strikeout rate and top-notch control. Though not directly shown here, ZiPS also sees a lot more upside in his strikeout rate than downside; Mikolas obviously doesn’t throw as hard as Hicks, but he isn’t Jered Weaver either.

One last pedantic note: Mikolas will be a free agent after the 2019 season, not after 2022 as you would expect from a pitcher with his service time. Mikolas came to St. Louis as a pure free agent and the team agreed to him becoming a free agent at the end of his contract rather than entering the arbitration track like most three-year players. So the Lizard King gets to hit the open market fairly quickly after a terrific “rookie” season.