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I know in baseball there are rules against trading draft picks like what happens in other sports where teams trade to move up in draft position, but I read compensation picks can actually be traded or bought. Does anyone else think that would be a smart move for us to try and acquire a pick in the thirties to grab an extra player we like? Maybe we could give up some ifa pool bonus money and a minor league player we don’t have a spot for, like an Evan Mendoza?
Viva El Birdos does a nice job.
Yeah, I agree. My favorite writer they have is A.E. Schafer, who does most of their prospect stuff and has excellent articles for the draft. His draft stuff in particular is fantastic and I’m looking forward to reading what he thinks of our draft this year. By the way, he said in the comments section of his most recent article on the draft that he has Jordan Walker as our number one prospect right now. Thinks he could be a superstar and what he is doing at his age the Cardinals haven’t really seen since Taveras.
FYI, viva el birdos is starting to do a series of articles evaluating Mozeliak. It looks like they are going to look at his entire tenure as president of baseball operations. They just released their first article looking at how he has done in free agency. The writer is pretty great at doing analysis-based deep dives, so this series should be really good.
Forsch, Luhnow was definitely a big part of our success and probably the biggest loss from our front office, but we also lost Kantrovitz who was great as scouting director and was responsible for us drafting Flaherty. Thankfully, Flores seems to be really good based on his results so far and our system is getting rebuilt.
I agree we needed moto bats. That is why everyone was hoping he would sign Harper or Machado, but instead Mozeliak chose to make three trades for big bats rather than use free agency. This meant he wouldn’t have to give out a ten plus year contract, which he preferred. But it also meant he would get older players that teams were willing to move on from and because he did these trades multiple times, it also means he depleted our system of its young players who could be the core of the next good Cardinals team and comprised our depth. This is why we are having the year we are having now, our depth is terrible.
I heard on the radio that the front office was treating this as a transition year to find out what we have in these young players. Hopefully those questions have mostly been answered and they address the most pertinent needs of the team. What I’m waiting for them to say is if spending will return to pre COVID levels this off-season. We had no fans last season and did not have full capacity for this entire season either, so Dewitt may want to ease up spending. If our budget is $130 million instead of $160 million, we could be in for a rough offseason.
dac – All 3 trades looked good on paper. Very few people on here complained at the time. Most cheered.
My response to that is our fan base is always clamoring for the big, sexy move every offseason that is going to solve all our problems. Maybe we should have been more skeptical of Ozuna, who was injured and had only been dominant for one year? Maybe we should have wondered why Arizona was willing to give up Goldschmidt? Some of the advanced metrics from his last year in Arizona showed he was struggling with fastballs, a sign of declining bat speed that comes with aging. Maybe we should have expected Goldschmidt to be declining or at least not extended him before he even played for us?
The Arenado deal I have no complaints about but it is also still early. In isolation, maybe none of these trades look bad to the average fan at the time they happened. But when the overwhelming majority of trades we’ve made, going back to the Gonzalez-O’Neill deal to the present, haven’t worked out, I think it’s fair to question our process and the decision makers. I think we’ve had too many glaring examples of losing trades not to take a second and evaluate ourselves at this point.
14NyquisT, I feel it isn’t so much the front office neglected Memphis. For me, it goes back to making three trades for a premium bat with Ozuna, Goldschmidt, and Arenado. Those trades pillaged our young pitching depth in service of the offense to make us competitive with teams like the Cubs and the Brewers. Mozeliak went to that well too many times. I think Mo would probably not do the Ozuna and Goldschmidt trades again if given the chance to do it over. If we still had Gallen, Alcantra, Weaver, and Kelly with Voit at first and Arozarena in the outfield, how much better are we? Maybe the only good trade this front office has made in the last five years is the Arenado deal. Mo and Girsch went through a pretty rough five year stretch of moves that involve both bad talent evaluation of our own prospects and betting on veterans past their prime to beat the aging curve.
Kim is a free agent, Mikolas hasn’t been healthy, who knows what you’ll get from Hudson, if Reyes can stay healthy as a starter, and most of the other names you have listed have not demonstrated they can seriously be counted on as viable starting options. I know you are disappointed in outfielders like Bader and O’Neill, but they have proven far more at the mlb level than Woodford, Ponce, Cabrera, or Helseley have as viable starting pitchers. I’m for bringing Wainwright back, but outside of him and Flaherty, who on that list are you even confident could regularly give you even five innings as a starter and keep the team in the ballgame? There is a reason a lot of those guys are in bullpen roles. Not to mention, if you take them out of the pen, those roles will need to be replaced.
Also, I don’t think we need to spend to get a star pitcher like a Scherzer. I would be happy signing a few guys who look like good values, like we did with Mikolas and Kim.
Lastly, we keep investing resources to fix the lineup and it never seems to get fixed. Maybe we should be looking more at coaching for that? Part of the problem is that Busch is one of the most pitcher friendly stadiums in baseball and it really kills power, particularly right handed power. Maybe if we are going to try to sign a bat we should focus on left handed hitters?
Bccran, I agree the pitching has seen injuries. But it’s also true our depth in pitching is way worse which is why I feel we need to spend in free agency to fix it. Our rotation was more lucky than good even when healthy in my opinion, but once we had key injuries it was game over. With the offense, I just feel like it is not as desperate of a situation because we should have Gorman next year, hopefully better luck with health, and we can spend to improve our depth so injuries don’t hurt us as much. We have some hitters working their way through the system that should be ready to contribute over the next couple years, whereas with pitching it is not the same.
I’m aware of that, bccran, and I still feel the pitching is a bigger problem going into next year as it has been an abject disaster this year, we have no depth outside of Liberatore to speak of in the high minors to pencil in the rotation, and we do have Gorman and Burleson who could both be ready next year to supplement the lineup for league minimum.
The pitching is going to require significant overhaul to fix. The hitting is only this bad due to injuries forcing us to give too many at bats to below replacement level players. When healthy, our lineup was fine. We should still try to improve it, and I would advocate seeing what you can get for Dejong and signing Story. But going forward and including this year, the pitching in our organization is a bigger issue.
I’m wondering how much money we even have to spend this off-season. I know we have a lot of bad money coming off the books in Carpenter, Fowler, Miller, and Martinez. But we really have a bigger need in the starting rotation and bullpen than we do at short stop or corner outfield. And the unanswered question lurking over all of this is whether spending will return to pre COVID levels. Dewitt is definitely running the Cardinals like a business rather than acting like he’s Cohen of the Mets. He might not want to return to previous spending levels until we have fully recovered financially from what COVID has done last year and this year.
Bernie has always liked to look down from his ivory tower and tell the team everything they are doing wrong, that’s kind of his shtick. He loves the outrage machine and getting fans worked up into a frenzy. Sometimes he is right, other times I think he is being unfair. I never read his stuff anymore or listen to him on the radio because I think most times he is just being a curmudgeon for the sake of it because he feels other media members are too soft on the team.
Walker for me is the same category of prospect as Taveras and Pujols until he shows otherwise. At this point in time we would be insane to trade him. I also think he could do just fine in a corner outfield spot as he has a long stride that covers a lot of ground once he gets going, based on what I’ve read.
I wouldn’t be opposed to trading Nunez in the right move, but with the dh coming it might be wise to hold onto some of our bat first hitters.
Bccran, all the reports I’ve seen are that Tampa was enamored with Randy Arozarena and thought he was likely undervalued by the prospect community and our own organization. I haven’t seen anything suggesting they would have taken one of our other outfielders.
I think Mo and the organization deserve criticism for not properly evaluating Arozarena. But his stat line wasn’t even that unusual especially given his age. Nobody had him as a top 100 prospect until after the trade, and that was largely due to recognizing how smart the Rays are and figuring they saw something others hadn’t yet. The real problem I have with the Arozarena trade (in addition to the player development point I made) is that Mo and Girsch don’t seem to be better at evaluating our own players than the prospect community is, yet Mo and company should have way more information and skill in this area than they appear to have.
They would never trade away a Carlson or Gorman because their talent is obvious, but players like Arozarena and Gallen get misevaluated and become stars in other organizations.
27, my dad and I are already talking about making a trip to see Walker now that he’s in Peoria! We went to see Gorman when he was there back when the blues won the cup. That was our first minor league game and it was a lot of fun. We had plans to see Carlson in Springfield but I got busy with grad school. I told him a few weeks ago we definitely need to see Walker when he gets promoted.
Jj-cf-stl, player development is rapidly changing and not all organizations are even close to being as equally good at it. Part of the reason we hired Jeff Albert in the first place was because we were way behind at incorporating technology and analytics into our player development. Alberts results aside, all the best organizations invest heavily in this stuff, trying to find the next edge, and are able to take players from other organizations and turn them into key contributors.
Part of that may be recognizing a certain player is well suited to your ballpark. Does Voit hit nearly as many homers in Busch as he would at Yankee stadium? Does Marco Gonzalez’s stuff play up as well at Busch as it does in Seattle? That kind of stuff I wouldn’t ding the Cardinals for.
But in the cases of Arozarena and Gallen, it’s pretty clear they made more changes than just being given more opportunity. Arozarena put on fifteen pounds of muscle and suddenly had a lot more power. Gallen’s stuff got a lot better after leaving the Cardinals, though that may have been in part because he was told to use sticky stuff by the Marlins. He recently admitted as much. It will be interesting to see how good he is without it.
The Cardinals in recent years have made more investments in using technology but we were pretty late to the game in that regard.
I think talent evaluation is just part of the issue. The list of prospects who are performing well for other organizations is getting longer than we all would be comfortable with. Arozarena, Gallen, Kelly, Alcantra, Voit, even Gomber has been a revelation for the Rockies. What is interesting about this list of players is that none of them were ever top 100 prospects while with the Cardinals outside of Kelly, if I remember correctly. They were all top ten or top twenty range prospects for our organization but weren’t pegged as what they have all turned into today. Maybe the org thought some might hit their upper range of outcomes, but all of them turning into key contributors? Now, some guys we gave up haven’t done much, like Sierra, maybe Weaver.
But I think this touches on we may have a player development issue in addition to a talent evaluation issue. Other organizations were able to put the finishing touches on those guys that made them key contributors and have a few of them looking like potential stars. I think the organization needs to ask itself how are these other organizations doing this and the best way to do that is for us to poach from other smart front offices. Hopefully Dewitt will be willing to do that as we seem to be behind the curve.
Thanks, bicyclemike. I will say that rotation looks like it has a higher ceiling but I also wonder about injury risk, walks, and if we would get enough innings from our starters. I should have included Mikolas as well in that list as a possibility. I still think we need to make some bargain signings and have a competition in spring training, then whomever does not make the starting five can be used to strengthen the bullpen
Maybe, sure. I know he was pitcher of the year when he was at Springfield and he is 23, so still within prospect age range. But him turning into a viable big league starter is far from a lock. That being said, he could be a valuable bullpen piece next year.
Thompson struggling so much is a far bigger issue than that, though Rondon’s numbers at Memphis aren’t great either. Going into this season, I was hoping both Liberatore and Thompson could be in the big league rotation sometime next year. But Thompson is not on that timeline with the year he’s had. Which really puts the front office in a bind as we only have so much money to spend.
Rotation next year could be Flaherty, Hudson, Reyes, Liberatore, and maybe Wainwright? Lot of talent but also a big potential of blowing up in our faces as well.
The longer this goes on, the more I wish we would commit to a rebuild. This organization is in a perilous spot that will take some time and a lot of smart moves to get out of. We have no depth in the big league club or upper minors to fill in when guys get injured. The state of the pitching in our organization is quite possibly the worst I can remember. Outside of Liberatore, what pitching prospect could we reasonably expect to be in the rotation within the next three years? Thompson is probably the only other guy but he has been horrible this year. We have some lottery tickets in the low minors that could work out, but they are multiple years and a lot of development away from being anything we can count on. I think we need to go heavy on pitching in the draft this year as a course correction. I really hope the front office doesn’t trade any prospects to acquire big league talent for the next couple years. We have some intriguing guys in the low minors but our system really needs to be rebuilt. Not just with prospects but with overall depth as well. My hope is that we try to make some value signings like we did in acquiring Mikolas and Kim, to rebuild our depth in St. Louis and Memphis. We don’t need a Scherzer level acquisition, that would tie up too much money.
Thanks for the info, 27. On Hence, I’m not too concerned yet given he was a high schooler and also I don’t believe he got an invitation to the alternate site last year like Walker and Winn did. They could be holding him back trying to build up arm strength and work on specific issues like fine tuning his secondary pitches with coaches and rapsodo cameras, for example. Honestly, that is something I would do with a high school pitcher before sending them to A ball. The types of leaps pitchers can make using that technology can be career altering.
Question for those who are familiar with our lower level teams, basically Springfield, Peoria and Palm Beach. Who do we have in terms of starting pitchers that looks promising? I realize pitching is our organizational weakness right now. I’m just curious if there are any young pitchers in the lower levels who should be on my radar? I’m familiar with Levi Prater, Ludwin Jimenez, Ian Bedell, and Tink Hence. Just looking for names that have maybe shown some flashes, or have a plus pitch or two. Much appreciated for the help!
