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It feels like a transition year and try to be competitive until they can sort out which of the nine top prospect pitchers close to the majors will be good enough to join the rotation.
To me it feels like Mo kicking the can down the road while he figures out how to survive with a broken acquisition and development system when your owner is not Steve Cohen.
Its really going to be something watching Mo and the gang try to make something out of this. Mo super sized the laundry list. BDW spent $25 Million on a couple back of rotation place holders. That’s 25 years worth of min wage guy salary. Now its up to the system that hasn’t had any luck turning out starters for a while now. For us, I mean. They turned out some for other teams.
The scary thing is the system is pretty dry on the position player side too. If we do another sell off this year we should focus on that.
Since you brought it up, let’s look at the positional player depth. Note that the Cardinals do have position player depth, but not really at the top levels as BB points out. At the upper levels, here’s the way I see it in 3 categories:
Guys who could be MLB average or potential impact players:
1B: Luken Baker
Guys who could possibly be MLB average in 2024 if you squint hard enough, but certainly could at least be adequate platoon players:
1B: Chandler Redmond, Jared Young
2B: Cesar Prieto, Nick Dunn, Noah Mendlinger, Thomas Saggese
3B: Prieto, Mendlinger, Saggese
CF: Victor Scott
RF/LF: Scott, Young, Mendlinger, Moises Gomez, Matt Koperniak
C: PagesGuys who would almost certainly be below average as everyday players, but still playable in a pinch:
2B: Buddy Kennedy, Jose Fermin
SS: Fermin
OF: Mike Antico, SianiSo basically, the OF is covered. And 1B and 2B are also solid. 3B isn’t bad either, although we would likely not get enough upside in any of the bats to be an average MLB hitting third baseman. C and SS are the 2 glaring holes. C should be ok after 2024 with Crooks and Bernal both on the way up but I can’t see either playing in the majors this year. So right now it’s just Pages. SS is a mega hole. No one is close to ready.
If Edman is the best defensive SS in baseball, there would be a lot more talk about him from media and those in the game.
It would be great to see stats or quotes or at least some logic to support that statement, but they aren’t coming. “Because I said so” is the extent of it, making it impossible to have a discussion.
Maybe its deserved.
GameCard uses his eyeball, not the numbers. If we are waiting for a detailed numbers crunch, to support his opinion, it ain’t coming.
If you are wanting to counter his opinion, the numbers are available to use. Is he wrong?
Here is how I look at it. Why bother to expend the time and energy to refute a questionable position that the original poster cannot and will not support? There won’t be a give and take discussion, so better to just let it go…
SS, 2B and CF roles: the second thru fourth hardest positions on the defensive spectrum.
Edman has posted 11.9 bWAR over the last 3 seasons overall, and is a plus defender at all three positions.
Kiki Hernandez, Garrett Hampson, Chris Taylor and Tommy Edman all have covered these roles. Unique players, and I’m likely forgetting a few. Maybe they are undervalued because they block from sight, the replacement level player that wasn’t put in a starters role.
There won’t be a give and take discussion, so better to just let it go…
That’s an approach, i.e., to let it go, but that’s not what happens.
I think jj is right, GC probably evals Edman mostly with his eyes. If you watch a lot of games, that can be a good way. Edman seems to look pretty darn good defensively wherever they stick him to me also. Of course if you’re professional making big $$$ personnel decisions, you need some quantifiable facts to back it up. Posters on a message board giving opinions, not so much.
I’m a numbers guy by nature and needed to be for most of my working career, so I like to get into that, but don’t mind talking opinions without a deep data dive. Sometimes something is just beautiful or butt ugly, and you can’t really explain it, lol. Baseball isn’t pure science and I believe the intangibles mean a lot more than perhaps we know.
There’s no question in my mind that baseball is a game in which the intangibles take on more significance than they normally do in most types of games on the outcome of the contest. I’ve watched numerous games over the years in which the corporeal seemed as though it didn’t exist and the contest seemed to be goverened entirely by something that could be termed as abstract or even supernatural. Any baseball gypsy worth his salt knows this to be the case…Haha!
If the process of tossing the metrics overboard in favor of the eye test is embraced in evaluating Saggese, then it seems disingenuous to bash that approach as to Edman. He looks pretty slick to me, but it is subjective. The slickest I ever personally saw, IMO, was Brendan Ryan. He could boot routine ones though. In terms of best all around, it would be Ozzie. I would not put Edman on the same shelf as either of them. As to active players, I have no idea. He could be the best for all I know.
SS, 2B and CF roles: the second thru fourth hardest positions on the defensive spectrum.
Catcher is the hardest. As far as second through fourth, I’d be inclined to go with 3B as the third hardest position on the defensive spectrum, that is, when you’ve got a third baseman that can really go and get the ball.
the intangibles mean a lot more than perhaps we know.
This is what makes me wonder about Carlson.
Performing and competing are not quite the same thing, IMO.
What Bling mentioned about O. Smith is what in my view made him the best defensive SS I’ve ever seen play baseball. He never booted a routine play and he’d complete plays for outs that seemed impossible to make for a mortal human. Everyone has their favorites which is one more thing that makes baseball special. My dad always claimed that Marty Marion possessed a better mitt than Smith. I couldn’t argue too much because I never saw Marion play…Haha!
Hard to objectively know if Tommy is a a great defensive shortstop because he has not played there enough to compare.
As far as all-around ability, a couple of guys I like to watch are Bobby Witt Jr and JP Crawford. Two really good shortstops. Witt might be the best in the game in a couple of years.
It could be interesting down the road a little if our guy, Mr. Winn that is, really blossoms. We might see some comments like, “Bobby Witt Jr is a great player, but he may not even be the best shortstop in Missouri”.
There’s no question in my mind that Edman possesses a superior mitt almost anywhere he’s placed on the field of play. You can’t hardly go wrong with Eddie on defense and I’ve always really liked his style of play. The instant I saw that GB leave Segura’s bat in game 1 of the ’22 NLWC I immediately thought that there was no other Cardinal on that team that I would have rather had situated on the right side of the IF and defending against that baseball from bleeding through to the OF than Edman. I thought, “Little Eddie’s gonna save us!” Alas, it wasn’t meant to be. Great players make that play when it presents itself in high stake games. Ozzie woulda’ had it…Haha!
That’s a lot more than I would have guessed, but he was situated over there quite a bit in ’22. Pretty sure he was the everyday SS for the entire second half of that season. He should have remained there last season.
1tough: I’m not going to enter into the Marion/Smith discussion except to say that I played throughout most of my youth with a Marty Marion three-fingered glove but it didn’t seem to help me much handling ground balls…haha!
He isn’t getting better… Since MLB has no designated fielder position, Edman is still a long way away for being able to play.
#STLCards manager Oli Marmol makes it official: Tommy Edman will start the season on the Injured List.
He has been shut down again because of lingering pain in his surgically repaired right wrist.
— John Denton (@JohnDenton555) March 14, 2024
#STLCards manager Oli Marmol on Tommy Edman: “Tommy will be minimum of a week with no hitting. He can still do some defensive stuff, and he can throw, but the hitting is what's causing some of the pain. We’re going to allow that to completely go away before we restart any work.”
— John Denton (@JohnDenton555) March 14, 2024
I hope Winn stays healthy and hits so that Crawford only plays about once a week or even a little less.
CF is the real issue unless Carlson suddenly figures out how to hit RH pitching…. ugh
Nootbar being out really hurts even more now. Defensively it’s probably going to be rough out there.
Looks like Mo got caught with his pants down yet again.
jj asked:
BW, would you agree that Mo’s best case for Scott II, is using the Winn debut timeline?
That was my thinking before the OF injuries hit.
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