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I tend to think that Torres and Scott may both get sent down along with Saggese in the event all 3 of those return without another injury.
Nootbaar returns. Torres optioned. Pozo removed from 40-man.
Urias returns. Saggese optioned.
Church returns. Scott optioned.
I do think it’s entirely possible that Fermin or Velasquez also is DFA. But for right now, those listed above would be the easiest path (if you think biting the bullet and optioning Scott is easy).
It needs to be a position player that we would lose for Nootbaar because we are low on pitching options as it is – otherwise it probably would be Roycroft.
4 choices as I see it:
Velasquez – no options, limited defense, but maybe the best hitter of this bunch and he’s right handed. Also, still young enough that he may improve.
Prieto – Young, has options, challenges Velasquez for best hitter of this group, versatile on defense, but left handed and we have gobs of 2B/3B guys.
Fermin – No options remaining. The most versatile of this group. Right handed. Probably just a notch below the above 2 in hitting potential, but fairly equal to them today.
Pozo – Pozo isn’t really needed anymore especially with Bernal on the 40-man. He does have options and is right handed. The stats say he’s a really bad hitter. But boy oh boy the few hits he does get have come at perfect times. Still, I don’t think there is any reason to keep him.
His glove is not good Bling. He doesn’t move well. Ideally, he would only DH or pinch hit.
I would also expect Crooks to catch. My guess is Herrera continues to catch Pallante and McGreevey and then Crooks starts whenever there is a right handed pitcher on the mound for the opponent and one of Leahy, May, or Liberatore is pitching. Otherwise, Pages starts. That should work out to about a 40/40/20 split for our 3 catchers. Crooks may also get a few DH games when Herrera catches and it’s a right handed starter against us.
I get Crooks for Pozo. I didn’t necessarily expect it quite yet, but that should help the offense a little. I would expect Herrera to still catch his pitchers and Crooks to get 2 of the 3 that Pages catches.
The Velasquez move totally surprised me though. I figured with Nootbaar getting close to returning, they’d keep his 40-man spot open. However, Velasquez has had a very good month and more importantly, he’s right-handed. And, he’s a ex-Cub so maybe he can exact revenge tonight. That allows us to go almost all right-handed vs Imanaga tonight. It’s possible Velasquez gets DFA when Noot is ready to return, but that seems unlikely. More realistically, Prieto will be let go or traded if possible.
For April, 8 of our hitters with at least 30 plate appearances had above league average batting lines. In May, that’s been reduced to only 3 right now: Walker, Burleson, and Herrera (Torres only has 21 PAs). Still 3 days left to change that. We need to pummel the Cubbies.
Winn & Wetherholt? Although it could easily be Scott too. Or Pages, but I’m not sure he counts.
It’s been a rough month for our offense all around for anyone not bearing Walker or Torres on their jersey.
The reason they roster 3 catchers (aside from Pozo being a good team guy who doesn’t complain about playing time) is that when Pages catches, Herrera isn’t available as a backup because he’s the DH and they don’t want to give up the DH. You could argue that Torres has some catching experience (although it’s been awhile for him) and he could do it if necessary, but presumably he has no pitch calling experience at this level and isn’t even familiar with our pitchers.
I think under the old development system, Cho had very low odds of becoming good. But what we are seeing now is- at least with hitters – is the ability to maximize strengths of a player to really get the most out of their ability. Each player seems to be treated uniquely based on their aforementioned strengths. That takes a lot of instructors and systems to pull that off but now we seem to have those systems in place.
This process is turning some normal prospects into potential big leaguers and it’s turning guys who have a lot of athletic talent like Cho and Baez (and the other Baez for that matter) into potential home runs (pun intended). There are some other uniquely gifted guys who I’m really interested to see how it all turns out (Gurevitch, Yordelin Pena, Jordan, Peete, Flores, Mitchell, R Rodriguez, and Padilla).
but I would have thought that some visible progress would have begun to emerge.
What does this look like to you CiF?
For me, the ascension of Walker – getting him fixed – looks like progress. What they have done to help May, Leahy, Pallante, McGreevey, and to some extent Liberatore looks like progress. Those are all legitimate starting pitching options now whereas they were borderline (or mostly injured and ineffective in May’s case) a year ago. What they have worked on with O’Brien looks like progress. I’m not mentioning JJ because I’m not entirely certain they’ve done anything to help him much. What is being done with many of the hitters at the minor league level looks like progress though. Several are looking really promising.
Are there big questions, especially around future pitching? Absolutely! I don’t see a lot of progress there at all except on the acquisition side. I’m also really worried about Victor Scott and whether they can fix him or not and how long they will keep trying at the ML level. Gorman’s strikeout rate and overall hitting profile are also concerning, but at least he’s above replacement level. Those are all big concerns. But they haven’t had as much time to fix those as they have had on some of the areas of success so I’m willing to be patient there.
Over the past 4 seasons, one of our hitters has this line vs left handed pitching:
.230 BA
.265 OBP
65 WRC+
4.7% Walk RateThose are Burleson’s numbers. I know you guys hate platoons, but this is the reason you often see them. Burleson is actually a worse hitter than Victor Scott is overall when Burleson faces lefties. And sadly, his stats are even worse this season.
Gorman is actually statistically better vs lefties than righties FWIW. Yet he’s the one we typically see get replaced.
Just food for thought.
One issue lately has been that Winn and Scott went from the “spectacular” level of defense to the “good” level while both are also struggling at the plate. For Scott, struggling is probably an understatement.
Nootbaar may be able to help some of the offensive woes – especially if that means Scott goes down to AAA and Church or Torres mans CF. The team could also use a right handed complement to Burleson or Gorman. That very well could be Blaze Jordan. I’m still not quite ready to pull that lever yet, but we should by July 1 if Blaze is still mashing. Until then, there should be no sense of urgency. Let him keep getting better. There’s always Baez and Crooks, but I definitely want to keep waiting on those two.
That would mean adding Nootbaar, Church, and Jordan to the 26-man and subtracting Scott, Saggese, and Prieto. Overall, that should improve the offense.
The “rebuild” is three-fold. Hire a lot of good instructors and invest more in technology (check, probably). Sell off the veteran older players for whatever we can get to reduce payroll and give opportunities to younger players (check). Develop young players at both the major and minor league level who can give the team a competitive advantage (remains to be seen but there are some promising signs like with Walker, Baez, Crooks, R. Rodriguez, etc – however pitching has been limited in development mostly to just our current starting rotation becoming a bit more effective thus far). We are sort of 2 years into the rebuild now or just 2 months in depending on your perspective.
The answer is “Yes” but not until an injury, trade, or release forces that. Otherwise, Rajcic can only replace Fernandez or Graceffo because those are the only 2 with options. Is Rajcic currently better than either of those two? If an injury happened today though to a non-lefty bullpen guy, I believe Rajcic would get called up.
Despite the influx of pitching, pitching has been rough. Maybe a few of the wounded will return soon to help.
Fitts, Roby, Robberse, Z Thompson, Santos, Naughton, Moreno, Henderson, Clarke, Hjerpe, Bradt, Davila, Elissalt, King, B Lopez, Dutkanych, Reyes, R Lopez, Moran, and Knowles. Also, kind of sort of Hence. That’s a lot of injuries.
Thank you Brian. So many have paid a sacrifice of blood so that future generations might have a better world. We owe them our gratitude and certainly our remembrance for the deeds they have done.
And speaking of the fallen, let’s take a quick look into some fallen Redbirds who were traded away to help give our team a rebirth:
Arenado: .274 BA, .819 OPS, 1.2 FWAR
Contreras: .281 BA, .898 OPS, 2.0 FWAR
Donovan: .274 BA, .834 OPS, .6 FWAR
Gray: 3.27 ERA, .7 FWARDonovan only has 101 plate appearances as he has had injury issues. Gray has only pitched in 44 innings due to the same. All are doing really well though. That batting line from Arenado is pretty incredible compared to where we thought he was now – especially when you consider he started the year off slow.
I don’t love this move mostly because of the bullpen situation. Everyone but Pushard pitched yesterday out of the pen. With Mautz likely to struggle to get 5, that leaves our bullpen a bit gassed for the Milwaukee series. I think I would rather have Liberatore start on normal rest today and then insert Dobbins into the rotation at the appropriate time to keep everyone on normal rest. Instead, today we have a 7-man pen (because Svanson got optioned) with O’Brien likely unavailable and 5 of the 6 available pitched yesterday.
On the plus side, it will be fun to see how Mautz pitches (assuming they are able to get this game in) and it will be nice to bring Fernandez up in a swap for Mautz tomorrow which should be an upgrade to Svanson.
I did always love those HP collisions. But like Bling said, millionaires don’t want to get hurt and owners with contracts for millionaires don’t want to see their asset get hurt. The fans don’t get a vote in the CBA.
If Masyn’s throw doesn’t bounce, I think he had him. But that bounce slowed Pozo’s tag quite a bit. Alas. A couple bad innings did us in.
I’m not sure I understood not having Victor bunt there. I get that Pozo is slow. But I’d rather force a play in a pressure situation than have Victor try to hit.
Ugh. This one is going to be tough now.
Why was that bad base running?
He was going on impact due to the situation. He got a good jump. Made a good slide. A good throw just barely got him. Cards take the lead with any non-perfect throw. Good risk/reward. He didn’t want to be standing on 3B with 2 outs. That was a good call and his best chance. I had no issue with it whatsoever.
Well Willie, Fangraphs thinks Wetherholt has been the 19th best position player in all of baseball this season. Baseball Reference has him at 10th best. If that doesn’t exceed expectations for a #7 overall pick a year and a half ago, I’m not sure the expectations were reasonable to begin with.
Yeah, if you’re going by expectations coming into the season, those who are exceeding them by more than just a little:
Walker
Wetherholt
Pallante
McGreevey
O’Brien
Graceffo
Soriano
Arguably Church, Leahy, and MayThe list for well below expectations is short:
Svanson
Saggese
Arguably Stanek and Scott
