Let’s accept that the St. Louis Cardinals could probably use multiple upgrades. Let’s accept that, publicly, the Cardinals are more focused on improving their offense than they are on improving their pitching. Let’s accept that improving a team’s offense is a complicated matter. Let’s accept that part of the problem, but not the whole of the problem, is the struggling Allen Craig. Now then, with all of that accepted, I want to show you an at bat. I promise it’ll go quick. Let’s watch Craig’s first showdown against Brandon Cumpton, from Wednesday night.

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Close your eyes for a second and try to visualize the best defensive first basemen in baseball. The guy with the most range, diving to snag grounders, falling over dugout walls to snare popups and chasing guys down to make tags.

What did you see?

OK, the title of this post may have tipped you off a bit, but if not for that, you probably would have visualized someone like Adrian Gonzalez. Maybe it would be more along the lines of Joey Votto, Paul Goldschmidt or Anthony Rizzo. If you didn’t put a specific name to the face, it would probably be a younger guy, pretty athletic, maybe 6-2/220, with more speed than the average first basemen who could swipe a few bags over the course of a season.

Probably wouldn’t have visualized this behemoth:

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Last week, I wrote that the best suitors for David Price were primarily lower revenue clubs who might not be able to afford his 2015 arbitration raise, leading to the possibility that Price could be traded both this summer and again this winter. Then, on Sunday, the Cardinals made that column obsolete. On the same day, they placed both Michael Wacha and Jaime Garcia on the disabled list, with Wacha’s injury having a pretty open-ended timeline and raising the question of whether or not St. Louis can count on him returning this year.

Suddenly, the team with the most buying power of any team in baseball now has a glaring and immediate need for an impact starting pitcher. And David Price ending up in St. Louis almost feels inevitable.

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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

In this installment of the Prospect Watch, I’m checking in on three players who impressed me last year and are off to big starts this year in the short-season New York-Penn League.

Summary
Wick has two plus tools and he’s laying waste to the NYPL early on.

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Oscar Taveras is like a sad birthday gift.

He’s the big one. The first gift you asked your parents for, like, seven months before your birthday. You knew it was coming. You were even pretty sure it was that giant box in the back of your parents closet that you stumbled upon while you totally weren’t snooping around for presents. But you couldn’t open it yet. No, no. It just toiled there, right in front of your eyes. Big and beautiful. But you couldn’t play with it. No, you had to wait, damnit.

Then, finally, your birthday came.
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The Rays may be in a new position when it comes to this year’s trade deadline. Since their playoff odds have dropped more than any other team’s since the beginning of the season and are now close to 5%, it’s at least hard to see them as buyers. Then again, they haven’t made a ton of in-season acquisitions in their more competitive past, and their team is built for 2015 as much as it was built for this year — it’s likely that their transition from buyers to sellers may come without many big moves.

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Last year, the St. Louis Cardinals scored nearly five runs per game and bashed their way to the World Series. Okay, the pitching helped too, but the 2013 Cardinals were far better at scoring runs than any other NL team — the Rockies were #2 in the NL in runs scored, but were still 77 runs back — and that was their competitive advantage. And then, over the off-season, they replaced Pete Kozma with Jhonny Peralta, which is about as large of an offensive upgrade at a position as any team made over the winter. Sure, they lost Carlos Beltran, but he was replaced by Matt Adams, and swapping out David Freese for Kolten Wong didn’t appear to be a significant offensive downgrade.

The 2014 Cardinals aren’t exactly the same team as the 2013 Cardinals, but this is more of a tweaked line-up than an overhauled one, and the general core remains the same. And yet, after finishing third in the majors in run scoring last year, St. Louis currently finds themselves 28th in the majors this year, and has hit so poorly that the team has already made a few adjustments to their roster. So, what’s going on in the Gateway City?

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From Michael Wacha’s start Wednesday night in New York, there might be something to learn about the notion of a pitcher either having it or not having it on a particular day. Conventional wisdom is that pitchers have good days and bad days, and sometimes a guy just doesn’t feel it from the start. Through three innings against the Mets, Wacha had nine strikeouts out of a possible 12. In the fourth inning, Wacha had one strikeout out of a possible eight. In other words, Wacha went from doing something historically great to struggling to find the zone, in a matter of minutes. Reality is that a pitcher can find or lose his feel between pitches. How a guy looks at one minute might not mean very much with regard to how he’ll look a few minutes later on.

But while I went into this thinking I’d write about Wacha’s strikeouts, what I stumbled upon is something even more remarkable. There are more high-strikeout games now than ever before, and while Wacha’s feat was certainly unusual, it no longer feels so insane. But how Wacha actually pitched against the Mets — he didn’t really pitch like himself. Pitch mixes vary to some degree all the time, yet Wacha all but abandoned his signature.

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The shift! It’s the hot new thing, even if it’s not necessarily a new thing. (There’s evidence Ted Williams had to deal with it decades ago.) Some teams use it a lot, and some not so much, but it’s impossible to argue that it hasn’t had an increasing impact on the game over the last few years. It may not be the only reason that major leaguers have a .212 BABIP and .230 wOBA on ground balls so far this year as opposed to .222 and .239, respectively, in 2007 (and decreasing steadily since), but it’s certainly a part of it. We are all but certain to see more shifts across the sport in 2014 than we ever have before. “Hit ’em where they ain’t,” Wee Willie Keeler was purported to have said over a century ago, and it’s good advice. The only problem is, where they are — or ain’t — is changing.

What’s interesting, then, is not so much about which teams employ the shift, but how batters react to it. Thanks to the work of Jeff Zimmerman at The Hardball Times earlier this year, we’re able to get a look at how certain batters hit in 2013 with the shift both on and off, and the results were often more extreme than expected. (Ryan Howard’s .533 BABIP without the shift as compared to .312 with it stand out immediately.) It stands to reason that if you were one of the hitters on the list with a large split between being shifted and not, you should expect to see it even more this season.

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Last October, Shelby Miller became something of a mystery. After spending the year in the Cardinals rotation and developing into one of the league’s best young hurlers, Miller became nothing more than an active roster cheerleader in the postseaosn. He pitched one inning in the Cardinals five game NLDS victory over the Pirates, then didn’t enter a game in either the NLCS or the World Series. All told, St. Louis pitchers threw 152 innings in October, but even with that workload, the Cardinals managed to give 151 of them to pitchers not named Shelby Miller.

He insisted he wasn’t hurt. If he was injured, the Cardinals could have simply replaced him on the playoff roster with someone else, someone they would use. The fact that they carried him for all three postseason series suggests that it wasn’t a predetermined plan to not use him and supports Miller’s assertion that he could have pitched. Mike Matheny didn’t just trust him in any kind of meaningful situation, and the Cardinals didn’t play many low leverage innings in October.

The Cardinals didn’t say much publicly about their decision, but it was reported over the winter that Miller was dealing with some shoulder fatigue in September, so despite Miller’s claims that he felt good, there might have been a physical reason for his absence. However, with an off-season of rest, the Cardinals have put Miller right back into their plans, and were presumably hoping that a little rest would allow Miller to go back to what he was during the regular season last year.

Well, apparently, an off-season of rest hasn’t fixed anything, because the Shelby Miller that has taken the mound for two starts in April mostly looks like the September version who the Cardinals decided wasn’t up to pitching meaningful innings in October.

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