Archive for St. Louis Cardinals

This past weekend was an eventful one for the Cardinals’ bullpen. At the team’s Winter Warmup, president of baseball operations John Mozeliak said that Carlos Martínez was ahead of schedule in his return from offseason shoulder surgery, giving momentum to his push to become a starter again. Martínez was slated to begin his road back with a bullpen session on Tuesday, and barring a change in plans, bullpen roles are now up for grabs. Once Jordan Hicks was shelved by a torn UCL and subsequent Tommy John surgery last summer, Martínez took over as closer. He secured 22 of the Cardinals’ 30 saves after Hicks’ season had come to an end.

There was also news regarding Hicks. He is currently tossing on flat ground two or three times a week and could return by the middle of the season. While it seems unlikely that Mike Shildt would put Hicks immediately back in the closer’s role, it does complicate our calculus for determining who (if anyone) we should target from the Cardinals for saves in this year’s drafts. Even if there was a clear successor to Martínez as the team’s closer, that reliever could conceivably get pulled from the role if Hicks made a sufficiently early and strong return.
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Last week, I wrote a reaction piece to Yahoo’s average auction values at second base. This exercise helped me identify some trends regarding underpaid and overpaid players at the position heading into the 2017 season. One such discovery was that of Matt Carpenter’s budget-friendly $16.2 average auction price.

Considering Carpenter’s prodigious power production over the last two seasons, it surprised me to see that owners were spending more on 11 other 2B, all the way up to Jose Altuve’s steep $49.0 price tag. Specifically, I’m wondering why Carp costs about ten bucks less than anyone in the Robinson Cano/Brian Dozier/Jonathan Villar/Daniel Murphy/Rougned Odor tier. All of those players are going off the board for $25-$28.

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Second base looks like a deep position heading into 2017. This is likely news to no one reading this column. However, something that goes overlooked a bit is how shallow the position is in NL-only leagues.

Taking a look at the average draft position for 2B, this becomes quite clear. After Nats teammates Trea Turner and Daniel Murphy, second-base options for NL-only formats grow thin in a hurry. Dee Gordon, DJ LeMahieu, Jose Peraza, Ben Zobrist, Jedd Gyorko, Logan Forsythe, Neil Walker and Josh Harrison round out the top ten. There’s a pretty big drop-off after Gordon and LeMahieu, both of whom I personally value significantly less than Turner and Murphy to begin with.

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As many surely are, I’m finding it particularly difficult to write about baseball today. And it’ll be a while before the sting of the events of November 8th wears off. More than four years, probably. But in this instance, I must press on. And since we’re likely saying goodbye to a lot of things that we enjoy about the United States (in the most dramatic sense possible), it’s probably appropriate to say goodbye to someone that I’ve really come to admire as a third baseman in Matt Carpenter.

Not that Carpenter is disappearing from the St. Louis Cardinals in the way that many of our American principles are set to disappear from mainstream society. But the Cardinals announced earlier this week that he’d likely become the Cards’ everyday first baseman in 2017. This was a transition that became more apparent down the stretch this past year, with Kolten Wong, Aledmys Diaz, and Jhonny Peralta set to make up the remainder of the infield by the time next season rolls around.

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In the interest of transparency, my original goal here was to examine contact rates across the board for third basemen. But given the factors involved a much more intricate study and time overall, something I currently lack as a high school teacher, I elected to focus on one player in particular that really caught my eye out on the contact side of things.

Given my relatively obvious North Side loyalties, it’s often difficult for me to say positive things about the baseball club from St. Louis, Missouri. But what Matt Carpenter has accomplished to this point in the season has become absolutely impossible to ignore, in at least one very specific respect. While he doesn’t necessarily bring the loud home run power that some of his third base counterparts tend to demonstrate on a daily basis, he’s hitting the ball harder than all of them. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a hitter in Major League Baseball that makes hard contact at the rate that Carpenter has turned in this year.

That’s because only two of them exist.

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One of my strongest beliefs as a prospect/minor league writer is that there is far too much absolutism in most discussions of prospects in the online community. Part of the reason for this is simply a matter of demand–as you read about a minor league player (or, really, any player) at a place like FanGraphs or RotoGraphs, you’re likely interested in some sort of bottom line about how good the player is and might be. As such, there is a lot of pressure on the arbiters of the players to come up with a concrete answer–to make an actual prediction of their futures. In reality, though, prospecting is all about shades of gray, particularly in the low minors, which are my main focus. Just about every player in full-season ball has something going for them, but likewise, almost every player below Double-A has several aspects which need refinement before he has a chance at big league success. Predicting the eradication of those problems and the amount to which the strengths are realized is largely an exercise in probability, not one of guessing “good,” “bad,” or “okay” and clinging to it…to say nothing of the factors of injuries, regression, and the like. Any glance at a top prospect list from five years ago, regardless of the authors or their credibility, should drive this point home soundly–many of the top players go on to struggle, whereas several off the list entirely go on to have excellent careers.

For all of my relativistic outlook, though, occasionally I run into a player who’s just so impressive that my mind can’t help but jump directly to concrete thoughts of stardom. Of the couple hundred pitchers I saw in person last year, nobody evoked those thoughts more strongly than Cardinals pitching prospect Alex Reyes.

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There seems to be plenty to love about the Cardinals bullpen here in 2014, particularly from a fantasy standpoint. And we’re not just talking about saves here. Should your league count holds and use stats such as K/9 or HRA, then this is the pen you want to sift through on draft day. The arms are young, electric and should miss an awful lot of bats this season. Read the rest of this entry »

Heading into the offseason, the Cardinals didn’t seem to have too much work to do with their outfield. Sure, they were set to lose Carlos Beltran, but they had depth within the organization and there hardly seemed to be a need to go fishing on the free agent market. A quick trade to maybe give themselves some improvement in center field happened early in the winter, but everything else was left alone. Now here we are with less than two weeks before pitchers and catcher report and less than a month before position players make their way and there’s still no room for potential rookie sensation, Oscar Taveras. Read the rest of this entry »

We are entering year two of the post-Albert era in St. Louis and after an 88-win season that resulted in a wild card berth and a trip to the NLCS that fell just one win short of a World Series appearance, the Cardinals are returning with a largely unchanged infield configuration. For better or for worse, the St. Louis brass opted to leave things as is and let other teams play the free agent market this season. The “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” philosophy is in play here and for fantasy purposes, it’s not bad, but the upside is just as limited now as it was just a year ago. Read the rest of this entry »

Yes. No. Maybe? I don’t know. 2012 has been an enigmatic year for the 21-year-old Texan. After being rated highly coming into the year Shelby Miller is the not-so-proud owner of a 5.19 ERA with Triple-A Memphis. To make matters worse, his maturity and makeup have been questioned – or depending on who you speak to, continue to be questioned. But, his in last few starts Miller has surged. Is he  ready to face his most important task to date, helping your fantasy team? Read the rest of this entry »