Yesterday, the Cardinals got some bad news. Miles Mikolas, the team’s second-best pitcher and a valuable source of bulk innings, suffered a setback in dealing with the arm injury that had bothered him all year. He’ll need surgery to repair his flexor tendon, which will keep him out for all of 2020.

After a scintillating 2018 (2.83 ERA, 3.28 FIP, and a sixth-place finish in Cy Young voting), Mikolas came back to earth slightly in 2019. Even then, his pinpoint control and ability to coax grounders out of opposing batters gave him an excellent floor. While a 4.16 ERA might not sound impressive, it was better than league average in this homer-crazed era, and 184 innings of average pitching is hugely valuable.

The Cardinals came into this season with a competition for starting spots, but Mikolas wasn’t one of the competitors. He and Jack Flaherty would provide the guaranteed quality atop the rotation, while Adam Wainwright, Dakota Hudson, Carlos Martínez, Daniel Ponce de Leon, and Kwang Hyun Kim battled it out for the remaining three slots.

If there’s good news in Mikolas’s injury, it’s that deep bench of starting options. They’re all worse than Mikolas — all worse by a decent margin — but all five look to be quality major league options, which softens the blow. Ponce de Leon, who will take the hill today, made spot starts in 2018 and 2019 with solid results. We project him to be roughly 0.25 runs of ERA worse than Mikolas, which is hardly an unbridgeable gulf.

The real trouble begins if another Cardinals starter goes down. Kim is still an option, but he currently serves as the team’s closer, which is still a pretty wild sentence to write. The bullpen is already a little short-handed, though that should change as Giovanny Gallegos settles in and Alex Reyes and Génesis Cabrera return to the team. At the moment, however, Kim probably can’t stop closing, which leaves St. Louis in a bind. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is my latest in a series discussing each team’s 60-man player pool with a focus on prospects. Previous installments of these rundowns, including potentially relevant context for discussion, can be found here:

AL East and Intro
NL East
AL Central

Chicago Cubs

Prospect List / Depth Chart

It’s likely top prospect Nico Hoerner sees a lot of time at second base and center field. The prospects ranked two through five in the system are all on the 60-man player pool. Of those, right-hander Adbert Alzolay and, to a lesser extent, catcher Miguel Amaya (who is now on the 40-man) are the two most likely to see some big league time this year. Were Willson Contreras to get hurt, I’m not sure if the club would let iffy defender Victor Caratini play every day, add veteran NRI Josh Phegley to the 40-man to share duties, or if they’d simply promote 21-year-old Amaya, who has been lauded for his maturity and advanced defense since he was 18.

I also think there’s a chance the Cubs are in the thick of it come September, consider 21-year-old lefty flamethrower Brailyn Marquez one of the org’s best dozen pitchers, and decide to bring him up as a late-inning relief piece. He’s going to be added to the 40-man this offseason regardless.

The other very young guys in the player pool are Christopher Morel and Brennen Davis, two big-framed, tooled-up developmental projects. It’s interesting that the Cubs added Morel ahead of Cole Roederer or any of their 2019 and 2020 college draftees, but the club is only at about 50 of their 60 allotted players and they clearly need more hitters in the offsite camp, so I expect several notable names to be part of the group in South Bend soon. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2001, HBO Films aired a made-for-television movie called 61*, about the 1961 race between Yankees sluggers Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris as they attempted to topple the hallowed single-season home run record held by Babe Ruth. The movie opened with footage of Mark McGwire hitting his 60th home run in 1998, as actors playing Maris’ sons paged through a scrapbook their mother kept of their late father’s accomplishments. Soon enough, the movie delved into a dramatization of the 1961 race, with a script that reflected upon the question offered by 61*’s tagline: “Why did America have room in its heart for only one hero?”

Nineteen years later, Long Gone Summer, an ESPN 30 for 30 documentary that premiered on Sunday night, looks back at that 1998 race between McGwire and Sammy Sosa, and the brief stretch when the baseball world carried the two rival sluggers in its collective heart as the pair challenged a record that had stood for nearly four decades. While subsequent allegations about both players’ use of performance-enhancing drugs have dulled the luster of their achievements and astronomical home run totals — 70 for McGwire, 66 for Sosa — director A.J. Schnack’s movie is far less interested in scolding anyone than it is in reliving the excitement of the race and the mutual respect and camaraderie of the two rivals. That’s not to say that the topic of PED usage goes unaddressed, but it does take a back seat to what was, at the time, a feel-good story in a sport that was still recovering from the impact of the 1994 season-ending players’ strike.

I was one of more than three dozen people interviewed for Long Gone Summer, nearly all of whom were otherwise connected to the race as players, coaches, managers, executives, club employees, family members, broadcasters, or print media; to my eye, Effectively Wild’s Ben Lindbergh and MLB.com’s Jennifer Langosch were the only other participants besides myself who were outsiders at the time. It was a unique opportunity, and while my time onscreen was limited, I’m glad that the final product — which I only viewed for the first time late last week — turned out well while taking a lighter tack than we’ve seen over the past two decades. It’s not hard to find people, inside baseball or beyond, willing to rebuke McGwire, Sosa, and MLB itself for the game’s drug problem, as the annual Hall of Fame voting reminds us. Schnack, a native of Edwardsville, Illinois — about half an hour from St. Louis — and an award-winning documentarian whose previous credits include films covering They Might Be Giants and Kurt Cobain, chose a different route. In doing so, he secured the cooperation of both McGwire and Sosa, both of whom offer a generous share of recollections and introspection regarding that season 22 years ago.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not the year of a round-numbered anniversary, but as it’s a time without major league baseball, it will do. On Sunday at 9 pm ET, ESPN will air its premiere of Long Gone Summer, a 30 for 30 documentary on the 1998 home run race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa as they vied to break Roger Maris‘ single-season mark of 61 homers, which had stood since 1961. While subsequent allegations concerning performance-enhancing drugs have dulled the luster of the two sluggers’ astronomical totals — 70 for McGwire, 66 for Sosa — director AJ Schnack is far less interested in singling out the pair for scolding than in reliving the excitement of the race, and the camaraderie of the two rivals, which isn’t to say that the topic of PEDs goes unaddressed.

Indeed, Schnack, an award-winning filmmaker whose previous credits include documentaries about They Might be Giants and Kurt Cobain, has gone against the industry grain at least somewhat in making the movie. As he told Uproxx’s Mike Adams this week:

I grew up outside St. Louis, also went to Mizzou. I was a Cardinal fan. That summer really reconnected me with my childhood experience of enjoying sports and enjoying baseball, driving around with my dad, listening to Jack Buck and Mike Shannon on the radio. And when that summer happened, I’d moved to L.A. I was starting to work in film, and it just reconnected me with all of those feelings and the emotions and the excitement that I felt about baseball. So I felt like, yes, we now know that that summer took place in baseball’s steroid era. But, first, >especially for people younger than us, I want to just say this is what that felt like, to be in the middle of that summer.

Read the rest of this entry »

The NPB season is currently slated to start on June 19th, with hopes of playing a 120-game schedule followed by a condensed playoff docket. The 120 isn’t arbitrary. Per the league’s bylaws, that’s the number required for a season to be considered official. In a normal year, each NPB team plays 143 games.

The MLB season? That remains an unanswered question. It is also an angst-inducing question. As everyone reading this knows all too well, there may not even be a season.

Frank Herrmann knows baseball on both sides of the planet.The Harvard-educated hurler is heading into his fourth NPB season after playing professionally stateside from 2006-2016. As you might expect, he’s monitoring not only what’s happening in Japan, but also what’s happening back home.

“The schedule alignment here is essentially the opposite of what is being proposed by MLB clubs, who want fewer regular season games with longer playoffs,” Herrmann told me via email from Chiba, Japan. “Like most things, the motivation in both cases is money. NPB doesn’t have the lucrative TV deals that MLB does. Japanese teams rely heavily on ticket sales, merchandise, and concessions to generate income and offset salaries. There have been discussions to incrementally allow fans into games starting as soon as July 10. More regular season home gates for each team, stretching into mid-November, affords teams the best chance to cover losses.”

Salary structures and legal language weigh heavily into that equation. As Herrmann pointed out, high-end salaries in Japan are “more in the $7-8 million a year range, as opposed to the $30Ms in MLB.” Moreover, NPB contracts differ from those in MLB in that they “lack a specific clause for national emergencies, therefore players have been receiving their full salaries since February.” Herrmann expects NPB will add such a clause once the season is completed. Read the rest of this entry »

The St. Louis Cardinals have taken seven players out of the state of Maine since the June amateur draft was instituted in 1965. None of them have reached the big leagues. Trejyn Fletcher is looking to change that. Selected 58th overall last summer out of Portland’s Deering High School, the tooled-up outfielder is No. 10 on our Cardinals Top Prospects list.

Scouting Fletcher — St. Louis’s first ever prep selection from the Pine Tree State — was unique challenge. He’d arrived on their radar in 2018 while playing in the East Coast Pro and Area Code Games showcases, but that was as an underclass invitee. Cardinals scouts were impressed by Fletcher, but with a plethora of draft-eligible players to assess, their focus was elsewhere.

That changed the following March when St. Louis learned that Fletcher had been reclassified and would be eligible for the upcoming draft. That left three months to more-intently assess a player now competing in a wholly-different environment. In charge of those efforts was Assistant GM Randy Flores, whose title includes Director of Scouting.

“As you know, the scouting format for players in the Northeast is different than it is in warmer regions,” said Flores. “In particular, the level of competition Tre was facing. That, along with the limited amount of fair weather before the draft, makes it difficult to accumulate spring at-bats that mirror evaluation periods of Southern California prospects.”

Flores and Co. embraced that challenge. Along the way, they discovered that Maine contains more than raw-but-talented athletes. The state is flush with culinary delights… and not just fresh lobster. Read the rest of this entry »

John Tudor quietly had an outstanding career. Pitching for four teams from 1979-1990, he finessed his way to a 3.12 ERA over 1,797 innings. A crafty lefty who broke in with the Boston Red Sox, he had his best seasons with the St. Louis Cardinals. In 1985, Tudor threw 10 shutouts on his way to 21 wins and a second-place showing in that year’s Cy Young balloting. In five seasons with St. Louis, his ERA was a sparkling 2.52.

Tudor talked about his career, and gave his thoughts on won-lost records (he finished 117-72), at a Red Sox alumni gathering at Fenway Park a handful of years ago.

———

David Laurila: By and large you were what’s known as “a crafty lefty.” I’m guessing you approached pitching as more of an art than a science?

John Tudor: “I’d say I look at pitching as an art. An acquired art. If you consider the thinking aspect of pitching a science, then there’s probably a little bit of both. Let me put it from an old guy’s perspective: I think it was more of an art in the years that I played than it is now. Now it’s more power. Guys are judged by how hard they throw almost more than their ability to get people out.”

Laurila: Do today’s pitcher really throw that much harder?

Tudor: “According to the radar guns they do. I haven’t been in a batter’s box for a long time, so I don’t know for sure, but I have a hard time rationalizing 104 mph when I’ve stood in there and seen 94-95. That was from some of the harder throwers. I think the guns are juiced a little bit.

“I do know that players today are bigger, stronger, and faster. Hitters are more disciplined. The strike zone has shrunk. It’s a more difficult game for pitchers compared to when I was playing.”

Laurila: How hard did you throw? Read the rest of this entry »

Who was better, Jim Edmonds or Andruw Jones?

I asked that question in a Twitter poll earlier this week, expecting that it would be a close call. Centerfielders both, they played 17 seasons each and finished with similar WAR totals (Jones 67, Edmonds 64.5). Making the comparison especially intriguing was the fact that one was clearly the better defender, while the other was clearly the better hitter.

Instead of a nail-biter, I got a landslide. A total of 4,017 people voted, and a resounding 71.4% opted for Jones. Edmonds, despite having a huge edge in wRC+, garnered a meager 28.6%.

My eyebrows raised a full inch when I unearthed these statistical comps:

Edmonds had a career 132 wRC+. So did Wade Boggs, George Brett, Rod Carew, Tony Gwynn, Todd Helton, and Billy Williams (among others).

Jones had a 111 wRC+. So did Russell Branyan, Bernard Gilkey, Geoff Jenkins, Adam Lind, Hal Morris, and Neil Walker (among others). Read the rest of this entry »

Last year’s Cardinals were successful. Thanks to a solid rotation, a good bullpen, and excellent defense and baserunning, St. Louis won the division and advanced to the NLCS. The Cardinals’ main weakness was at the plate, where they were mostly average. Excluding pitchers, the team’s wRC+ for the season was 100, and ranked 14th in the game. The team’s outfield was no exception; the group put up an identical 100 wRC+, which ranked 17th among major league outfields, with their 7.0 WAR occupying that same ranking. Despite allowing Marcell Ozuna to leave in free agency and trading Randy Arozarena and José Martínez to the Rays, the team still has a glut of outfielders competing for roles this spring. They have quantity and they might have quality as well, but sorting out playing time could be a mess.

The Cardinals have three players who accumulated at least 100 plate appearances in the outfield last season. Here’s how those players performed:

That trio probably doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. Fowler had a bounce-back season, but with an average batting line and most of his time spent in a corner outfield spot, he was slightly below average overall and turns 34 years old before Opening Day. Bader saw his walk rate improve, but hitting in the eighth spot the majority of the time probably helps account for some of that uptick, and might have made Bader too passive. His overall numbers against righties last season were in line with his breakout 2018 at about 10% below league average, but his numbers against lefties plummeted, unusual given he has hit well against them his entire career, including in the minors. Despite Bader’s weak year at the plate, his fantastic defense makes him an above-average player. As for O’Neill, he struggled mightily as a pinch hitter last season; he put up a slightly above-average line as an outfielder and a 116 wRC+ in July in more regular starting duty before he injured his wrist. Given his somewhat inconsistent minor league history — sometimes crushing, sometimes hitting closer to average — it’s fair to say we still don’t know much about O’Neill’s abilities as a hitter against major league pitcher or how he might fare given extended playing time.

So the incumbents, if you want to call them that, consist of an aging, should-be fourth outfielder, a glove-first center fielder, and a 24-year-old with a lot of power and strikeouts who may or may not be capable of starting at an average to above-average level. The outfield situation is emblematic of an offseason that seems to have passed St. Louis by. The Cardinals do have other outfield options in camp, including one of the better prospects in baseball, Dylan Carlson. Here are the 2020 projection for Carlson and a few other options who are in the mix:

Projections aren’t perfect, but they don’t paint a sunny picture for the Cardinals’ outfield. One of the better projected players is Tommy Edman, and he is a better fit on the infield; he’s likely to be more of a super-utility player this season, which would take him out of a starting role. While Lane Thomas, Austin Dean, and Justin Williams are in the mix for roster spots, Thomas has put up mostly average numbers in Triple-A, Dean is a 26-year-old with defensive issues, and Williams hasn’t been able to put the ball in the air consistently. That leaves four starters for three spots.

Bader plays center field so well, it’s tough to see him not getting the starting spot out there. While O’Neill, Fowler, and Carlson have all shown some ability to play center, those days are mostly behind Fowler, O’Neill has been a corner outfielder for most of his career between the majors and minors, and Carlson might not be a center fielder long-term, as Eric Longenhagen noted in his prospect write-up when he placed Carlson 39th on this year’s Top 100:

Carlson is an average runner and a large dude for a 20-year-old. His instincts in center field are okay, but not good enough to overcome long speed that typically falls short at the position. Because of where we have his arm strength graded, we think he fits in left field or at first base.

So if we put Bader in center at least most of the time, there are two starting spot for Carlson, Fowler, and O’Neill. The projections say Carlson is the better outfielder of the three, and his prospect status indicates his ceiling is probably higher as well. There are going to be some service time considerations; Carlson could be held down in the minors for a few weeks to gain an extra year of service time, though that’s not a tactic that has been used by the Cardinals in the past. Carlson is not yet on the 40-man roster, but that’s an obstacle easily overcome.

A neutral evaluation of the three players would give Carlson one of the remaining corner spots, creating a toss-up between O’Neill and Fowler. While spring stats aren’t indicative of talent level (given the small sample size of plate appearances and the potential disparity in opponents’ skill levels), it should be noted that none of the play so far this spring has served to change the order of the projections, with O’Neill and Carlson producing and Fowler not. It’s reasonable for the Cardinals to want to actually see what they might have in O’Neill; while perhaps less reasonable to play Fowler due to his contract status, it is something that teams do all the time. It’s possible those two factors might be enough to keep Carlson in the minors.

Carlson isn’t a sure thing, but his projections make him out to be a clear rung ahead of the other potential outfielders. The “path of least resistance” so often used by the Cardinals would put the veteran in one corner outfield spot and the young, but uncertain talent already on the 40-man ahead of a top prospect with a high floor. But the Cardinals as a team already have a pretty high floor. It’s the ceiling that is in issue. If the club is going to beat their 82-win projection this season, the outfield provides the biggest opportunity. The outfielder with the lowest ceiling also makes the most money. Dexter Fowler would make a solid fourth outfielder for the Cardinals as the team looks to see just how good a young outfield of Bader, O’Neill, and Carlson could be, but that’s a tough conversation to have with a veteran whose been starting for more than a decade. It’s a bit messy, but in order for the Cardinals to see what they have, they have to play the most promising players who project to have the best performance.

My first ever conversation with Jarren Duran took place prior to spring training when the Red Sox held their annual rookie development camp. Things started off clumsily. The speedy outfield prospect has a certain intensity about him, and his responses to my initial inquiries came couched with edgy caution.

Duran has a 50% ground-ball rate since turning pro, and when I noted that worm-killing isn’t exactly de rigueur in today’s game, his reply was a terse, “Yeah, but I can’t beat out a fly ball. That would be a waste of my speed, so why not use the tool that I have?”

Fair enough. Duran has plus-plus wheels — he swiped 46 bags last season — and he profiles as a table-setter as opposed to a bopper. Even so, is a willingness to stay on the ground really in his best interest?


“I’m willing to accept any ball that will give me a hit,” Duran proclaimed. “Ground balls. Line drives. Even fly balls. I’m just trying to make hard contact.”

Again, fair enough. But it’s not as though the 23-year-old Long Beach State product is wholly without pop. The 2018 seventh-round pick did leave the yard five times between high-A Salem and Double-A Portland, and he’s by no means built like a beanpole. Plus, fence-clearing ability is a quality any hitter should aspire to. Right?

“Bobby Dalbec is the big guy, the home run hitter,” Duran said of his muscular minor-league teammate. “I’m the little guy who gets on for the bigger guys.” When I pointed out that he’s bigger than Mookie Betts, Duran shrugged and deadpanned, “He’s got more power than me.” Asked if power is something he’s hoping to grow into, his response was an equally-shrug-worthy, “If it comes it comes. If it doesn’t it doesn’t.” Read the rest of this entry »