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A few quotes from Law that caught my attention:
Their evaluation of Dylan Carlson appears to have been well ahead of everyone else’s, they keep finding and/or creating catchers, and they’ve been shrewd about adding prospects in selected trades to balance out some of the other prospects they’ve traded away.
This is not a typo: Seattle’s farm system is actually … good. Someone should check on Jerry DiPoto, who hasn’t traded a prospect away in several weeks now.
The Dodgers get credit for the money they spend but not enough for the players they develop on their own.
Four Cardinals in Law’s new 2021 list.
9 Carlson
50 Liberatore
57 Gorman
68 HerreraMy 2021 ranking of the top 100 prospects in baseball is now up for @TheAthletic subscribers: https://t.co/OiBLRQiM3P
— keithlaw (@keithlaw) January 28, 2021
No additional Cardinals in his #101 through #112.
New post for subscribers to @TheAthleticMLB – a dozen prospects who just missed last week's top 100, from the Yankees, Phillies, Dbacks, Mets, Cubs, Nats, and more: https://t.co/QPJEFNrb8Q
— keithlaw (@keithlaw) February 1, 2021
Law has the Cardinals farm system no. 11.
https://theathletic.com/2375784/2021/02/10/mlb-2021-farm-system-rankings-keith-law/
Law has four Cardinals in his new national top 100.
17. Nolan Gorman
30. Jordan Walker
36. Matthew Liberatore
75. Ivan HerreraAnd now for something completely different … my ranking of the top 100 prospects in baseball is up for subscribers to @TheAthletic: https://t.co/TXifGkiDkD
— keithlaw (@keithlaw) January 31, 2022
Law has the Cardinals system at 13 in his new rankings, down from 11 last year.
New post for subscribers to @TheAthletic – my ranking of all 30 teams' farm systems: https://t.co/kSNkwa2nUC
— keithlaw (@keithlaw) February 7, 2022
The #STLCards have four representatives. In addition to OF @jwalker0522 at no. 5:
46. SS @MasynWinn
63. RHP @HenceTink3
66. RHP @GordonGraceffo https://t.co/Hzy5KHRaXZ— Brian Walton (@B_Walton) January 30, 2023
Though #STLCards Ivan Herrera and Matthew Liberatore missed The Athletic's national top 100 prospect list, they are both in the next 10. https://t.co/RaZsSInBK9
— Brian Walton (@B_Walton) February 1, 2023
Liberatore has spent his entire pro career being rated well above what his results would support. Even in A ball with the Rays he was good but not spectacular. But he was a first rounder, 16th overall, and apparently the computers said he was great. Then, after Arozarena set the MLB record for homers in a post season, Mo tried to convince himself and the world that he didn’t get snookered. So Liby magically beams straight up to AAA, fails to dominate at that level, and gets promoted to St. Louis where he gets a beat down.
At some point, those professing to evaluate talent need to put down the spreadsheet, take off the tin foil hat and take notice of what is actually happening on an actual diamond in the actual real world. Maybe for Liberatore that time has come at last.
My eye test on Liberatore when I first saw him after the trade was his breaking stuff has too much smooth bend to it. Needs sharper, snappier, more jagged contouring.
They used to call that a Texas League curveball, Euro. And its true, you see a lot of them in the mid levels. Its one of the main reasons I decline to get real excited about a hitter just because he can hit AA pitching. You see a lot better stuff in MLB and its a lot harder to square up. But we’ll see what happens this year.
and the Cardinals' top 20 prospects ranking, led by three picks from what looks like an epic 2020 draft class: https://t.co/tylAmFWyhD
— keithlaw (@keithlaw) February 8, 2023
Scott is 55 and Hence 73.
The #stlcards have three in the Top 100, led by Masyn Winn at no. 16. That's his best placement by far on any 2024 national rankings released to date. Also, Victor Scott and Tink Hence made the list. https://t.co/5Kwe9gDdPP
— Brian Walton (@B_Walton) February 5, 2024
Only Law himself could answer that. All I know is they are not in his top 100. Maybe he will have a later article on others who missed, but maybe not… Don’t know if he answers questions on social media, but you could try that…
The good news is that he is higher on Winn and Scott than most, but less on Hence, Roby and Saggese.
With Libby, he has the stuff and natural ability to be a real good pitcher. It seems to come down to mechanics. Sometimes he has a crisp fastball and good sinker and breaking pitch, and sometimes not so much.
Once he can find consistency with his mechanics I think he will be real good – a number 2 starter type. Whether he gets there and whether he ends up providing more value than Arozarena, we will see.
With Libby, he has the stuff and natural ability to be a real good pitcher. It seems to come down to mechanics.
I’m not sure if it is mechanics or the intangibles of pitching. This is an example of what I mean. Back in 2014, Jaime Garcia got hurt and the Cardinals called Marco Gonzales up straight from AA. In those early games Marco would blow through the lineup once, but then the second time around he’d get hammered. With Marco, all the stuff you could measure looked great, but pitching success depends on stuff you can’t measure. I can remember sitting there with my dad and him saying that Marco goes through the lineup the first time, and then just doesn’t know what to do next. By the time he learned what to do next, he’d had shoulder and elbow trouble, surgery, lost a couple years, and his best, physically, was behind him. The stuff you can measure said he was ready, but he wasn’t ready. The Cardinals handled Liberatore exactly that way. I think a lot of times the problem is he doesn’t know what to do next.
Law posted his next 10 after 100 and no Cardinals are in there. So that puts Roby and Saggese no better than #111 in his view.
https://theathletic.com/5244674/2024/02/06/mlb-prospects-top-100-just-missed-2024/
Rather than suggesting I am riding along inside a struggling player’s head and asserting “he doesn’t know what to do next”, my equally unknowing guess is that he does in fact know what to do, but cannot execute. Asserting otherwise is accusing him of being unprepared without any supporting facts whatsoever. Another thinly veiled way to try to assign blame to someone. I do not buy that. Whether the reasons behind a player’s ability to execute are mental or physical or a combination of the two is impossible for us to know.
Asserting otherwise is accusing him of being unprepared
I do not disagree with this, but we clearly have different ideas as to whose fault it would be if he is unprepared. I do not blame the young pitcher for it. I especially don’t blame the young pitcher for it when all of the young pitchers at or near the top seem to have come up short in the estimation of the FO, which has gone to lengths to bring in alternatives who came up through different systems.
I have previously remarked upon the strong reaction to any suggestion that the lowly state of the team and the system is anybody’s fault, so I am trying to make points while sidestepping that element. But I am not shifting blame to the players themselves.
Players like Liberatore,Thompson and Pallante were magically beamed up through the system, and have struggled at each level since, right up to now. The influx of new guys slotting in around them suggests their careers are imperiled. The point I made above is that we have seen this material before.
bling, how do you deal with the reality that not every player is going to reach his ceiling and if he doesn’t, it may not be anyone’s fault? You seem to expect too much from everyone instead of being realistic.
Regarding the general state of the system, there are many possible factors from drafting to international signings to development to bad personnel decisions (releases and trades) to bad luck (and others I didn’t mention). How one chooses to place the blame is a personal judgement call made with very incomplete information, but there can be no dispute that all paths of accountability report through the PBO.
I will add that Law talked about the organization being slow to change focus to strikeout pitchers rather than the pitch to contact guys they traditionally chose. Did scouting draft the wrong guys or did the organization as a whole not update their priorities quickly enough to reflect the changes in the game? It doesn’t seem realistic to blame player development for not being able to turn a low strikeout pitcher into a high one, for example.
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