So all this talk about the Cardinals farm system and pitching, is it actually good or is that just Cards talk spin?

Fine place to start. The team is, sadly, hell-bent on giving Fowler a chance and if you're going to do so, that's not a bad place to put him while trying to minimize his damage during his tryout period. If his OBP comes back, you can move him up a bit, if the OBP doesn't come back but he at least recaptures some of the thump he had during '17, then the 6 spot ahead of the lefty in Wong is also a pretty decent spot.

Bader's exactly where he should be against righties unless/until he shows some ability to lay off breaking balls in the dirt. Wong is a wild card until he isn't.

That's a good lineup. For now.

It's deep. It doesn't have the high end, top of the rotation kind of prospects it did just a year or two ago, but there are a lot of bodies to throw at problems as they arise.

It's the same way in the OF.

Also, wtf? LG doesn't support MLB.tv anymore? Wish they would have told me that before they automatically renewed my subscription.

That was kind of my take on it. I also think "Deep" sometimes is code for meh. and not much separation.

The pitching high end guys are hopefully just now getting to the big club so that should help.

When you're talking hitters I will agree that 'deep' often means 'meh'.

But with pitching, quantity has a quality of its own. Guys get hurt and relievers are volatile as hell. When you know that 1 or 2 guys you counted on in the bullpen will likely be ineffective and another 1 or 2 guys in your rotation will likely be injured/ineffective at some point, having 3-4 guys that you trust to come in and be league average is huge.

Especially when league average starting pitching cost $12-$14 million/season and 8th inning guys cost $8-9 million.

It’s good but don’t think it has a bunch of obvious high-end/high-upside talent.

Gorman and Nunez could be star hitters but are really far away from the show.

With Gorman, Montero, Nunez and Torres the Cardinals have the best group of young hitting prospects they've had since I started following the system closely.

Now you can generally guess that 1/2 of those guys will wash out entirely and at least one of the other ones will disappoint. But when you have 4 guys with potential 5 win bats parked in the low minors, you really like your odds of getting at least one impact hitter out of that lot.

It's pretty far removed from the days where we had Drew down there and were waiting on him. Then Rasmus. Then Taveras. We have usually had one premier hitting prospect in our low minors that we followed with baited breath in the hopes that they develop perfectly. Then we'd get to overrating someone like Evan Mendoza and calling him a possible All-Star. Right now we have numbers we can throw at it and that's a biiiiiig difference. A guy like Mendoza is someone that a honk such as myself says "man, just see if you can get some solid innings at SS with him, pump his value in the Tx league and trade his ass for a lefty reliever with a couple years of control..."

This system could explode up the rankings next season if even 2 of those guys do well in full-season ball (or a taste of a full season level), especially if Carlson puts himself into the top 50 conversation as I expect he will.

Thanks guys.

The rate at which they can't develop bats has been fun to see. On opposite day.

No system has ever had four 5-win bats in it

Holy shit, Wong crushed that ball.

What part of "maybe one of them develops" is lost on you?

Scurry back to the ****ing pit of dispair/royals thread, cumstain.

That other fun trade from last year - Voit just hit a 3 run HR.

The max fWAR from the Royals all-time best 2011 system was only 4.1 (Hoz 2017). Altho, Whit was 5.2 last year so anything is possible.

Why does this team struggle so hard to get pitchers out? Year after year it seems. Chacin is 2-2 with a HR today.

Yea, strangely I am concerned he hit a HR his first at bat of the season. We know how it usually ends up when he goes on a HR binge for a minute then starts trying to hit every pitch out.

And as I typed that Wong hits his 2nd HR of the day. LMAO

Good to see Carp learned from his slow start last season. He currently sits 0-4 and hasn't made decent contact on a single pitch.

Bad things happen when you don't get the pitchers out

Not a bad first game. That place is the classic band box. Balls fly out that shouldn’t. Mikolas just missed location a few times and they made him pay. Wong and Bader stepping up. Lower rung bullpen guys got the job done. Martinez has the game tying home run in the 9th but Cain makes a helluva play. Tip your cap.

If this is what we see all year, going to be a lot more fun to watch over that Matheny shitshow we had to endure the last few years.

so let me get this straight, we have 4 players that “potentially” give us 5+ wins in the majors? That’s their ceiling. Like you said, odds are only 1 makes it to the majors but still...... isn’t that damn good for us?

Question:
With Carpenter 1 and Goldschmidt 2, why hit the pitcher 9th?

Also: Man, 5 wins might be a stretch to swing for Gorman, Nunez, and Montero. All have questionable gloves, which doesn’t give you much margin. You have to be a superstar, all-around hitter to get to 5 without help from your glove and legs.

Carlson might actually be the best bet for that. I like him a ton (but I’m also a sucker for do-it-all OF, especially switch hitters).

I don't get why Fowler was hitting 6 and Bader 8

Or get what Fowler did to earn opening day starter over O'Neill when spring training was just more of last year.

$50 million reasons.

Unfortunatly yes. I really had no problem keeping him around and hoping he managed to rebound some. It’s a sunk cost but not the worst idea just to make sure since shit season do happen but spring training seemed more of the same with O’Neill being productive.

Dont forget his smile!

Dewitt and Mo say its a business. Every business makes bad investments or in projects. But, successful ones cut their losses on bad projects or investments that are hurting the company.

Y'all seem to forget that I'm much more careful than you give me credit for.

I said '5 win bat'. That means a bat that could yield a 5 win player. Matt Carpenter's glove/baserunning sucks bawls but on 3 occasions he's been roughly a 5 win player. Those years were driven by his offense and generally credible defensive play at positions that give him just enough of a positional adjustment to boost him the rest of the way.

I figure a neutral defender/baserunner can be at/near 5 wins w/ a WRC+ in the neighborhood of, what, 145? Seem fair?

All four of those guys have the potential to develop into a hitter than can hit that mark.

Look at it this way - from 2011-2013 Allen Craig had a WRC+ of 139. Would you say that those 4 guys I mentioned have the potential to be, say, 10% better than Craig was over that period of time? They'd get there in different ways (Torres excluded, who may be EXACTLY that kind of hitter if he continues on his present course), but if you pare that development down and 1 of them makes it to his top 20% projection, isn't that the kind of bat you're looking at?

Craig was never a 5 win player due to injury issues and negative defensive adjustments (I think all 4 of those guys profile better defensively than Craig, who was not quite Jose Martinez out there, but he made Matt Adams appear look like a MASSIVE improvement at 1b and was only a marginal upgrade on Matt Holliday in the OF). And I wouldn't say he QUITE reached the level of a 5 win bat. But I'd say he's pretty close and with a little bit of improvement on who he was over that 3 year period, you get to what I would call a 5 win bat.

Any of those 4 guys is capable of that. Which was precisely my point from the jump. I'm not saying all 4 of those guys are going to be dude's capable of getting MVP votes in any given year. I'm saying that with 4 of those dudes, you can be a lot more comfortable that at least ONE of them will be that kind of player and maybe another settles into a solid complementary lineup piece.

So in softball games if we ever get to where we're just ramrodding some team, I'll get bored, want to get the game over with and I'll just go take an AB lefthanded. It's kinda douchy but no more douchy than scalding a liner at some poor bastard 2b that just wants to go get another beer (and I really can't help it, my swing is so ludicrously inside out that I'm almost certainly hitting it at that 2b even if I'd prefer roll one to SS).

For perspective on how that tends to go, when I broke my right arm, I had to pee sitting down for 6 weeks because if I used my left I'd piss on the wall. My left hand might as well be that golden thing that Jaime Lannister has in Game of Thrones. It is useless. And my prescriptions on my eyes are so different that my L and R contacts are different BRANDS, so needless to say, I have a clear dominant eye and it ain't the one facing forward when hitting lefty.

And I'm confident that despite all that, I only look marginally worse swinging from the left side than Dexter Fowler does swinging from his right.

Stop calling yourself a switch hitter, Fowler. Going up there and swinging like a 12 year old from the right side of the plate doesn't mean you can competently switch hit. And on a team with no good LH hitting options off the bench but a bit of a surplus from the right, what the **** would you EVER send him up there to swing from that side for?

You have Munoz on the bench and Martinez. You're pulling Wong (who Munoz could play for) so you could use Martinez to face Hader in Fowler's place and Munoz to face Hader in Wong's place. Even if you end up in a tie game situation you have Robinson on the bench who can play IF or OF. And that's only necessary if you're completely uncomfortable with the Martinez in RF, Munoz at 2b alignment (which is admittedly not ideal but it'll play for a bit in extras if needed).

We went north with 7 relievers and I thought that meant maybe we would FINALLY use our bench aggressively. Nope - we sent Dexter Fowler out there to do a thing he is woefully ill-equipped to do while leaving a bench option on the pine who would've unquestionably given a better at-bat than Fowler did in that situation. That was some Mathenaging from Shildt and so far I haven't seen it called out.

Dexter Fowler should not take another at-bat from the right side of the plate for the remainder of his career. He's absolute garbage at it.

I give you all the credit for careful statements, man. Your reasoning here makes sense - thanks for clarifying!

I think it’s reasonable to hope for a lineup centerpiece from that group (my money is on Nunez) and a good starter (money is on Gorman and Carlson, both, actually).

Nunez is the most fun, but he's the least projectable at the moment. Nobody hits the DSL the way he just hit the DSL; it was truly historic. But...it's the DSL. If you consider it high-level high school ball you're probably not far off the mark.

You just can draw so very little from it. I mean if he were 85% that good in RK ball it would mean more to me than what he did in the DSL. But the good news is that he'll get that shot soon enough. There's a ton of helium there.

I don't even include Carlson in that group of 4, to be honest. He's a completely different animal in that I think he's actually immediately projectable and as sure a bet to contribute in the major leagues as anyone we have.

Montero has more power projection than he's shown but he needs to show it. He's super-young for full-season ball so I'm not too worried, but if we don't see him take a step forward there this year, his ceiling starts to drop and Craig becomes your target mark. It's not the raw HRs that concerns me, it's the lower ISO in general. But 37 doubles in 531 PAs as an underaged player in your first crack at full-season ball is no joke, especially when he played in a couple of fairly tough pitcher's leagues. I don't think he becomes an annual 30 HR hitter but I won't close the book on the possibility just yet.

Torres is that "85% of Nunez in RK ball" that I mentioned. He got to the GCL and man they had no idea what to do with him. The problem there is a really really short sample size. The Cards had a kid named Juan Yepez murdering the midwest league last year over 100 or so PAs and when they moved him up he fell flat on his face. It's reeeeaaaaaal early in the game on Torres but he's less about stats than he is some of the scouting reports that got out once he got into the system. There are some folks that love the guy's swing and raw athleticism for his size.

Gorman...well, he's probably my highest floor, lowest ceiling prospect in the lot. His raw power will get him to the majors. But his K rate is just spooky. Even before he was super-aggressively promoted and hitting very well in RK ball, he was striking out a bit too much. And obviously getting to full-season ball his first year out of HS is impressive as hell and very rare, but he was obviously overmatched. The good(ish) version of Mark Reynolds in Arizona is his disappointing but not terribly unlikely outcome. If you see additional development in his K rates and general plate discipline you could see a peak Troy Glaus type, maybe? Probably not that 8 win monster he was for a season, but the 4-5 win guy he kinda settled into when healthy.

Carlson's gonna be a dude you overlook but holds a lot of shit together for you for years, though. Maybe the Cincinnati version of Paul O'Neill? Just a really good, really overlooked player for a lot of years. Not the post-strike, steroid era version of O'Neill that coincidentally became an MVP candidate in his mid-30s when the juice became rampant, but the athletically underrated, steady offensive weapon and solid defensive ballplayer he was prior to that.

What does Nunez profile out at in terms of player comp?

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He's 9 years old or something like that and playing high level rec league ball.

He's a likely 1b prospect going forward and by most accounts he's so physically mature that he was playing as a men among boys in the DSL.

And the list of greatest seasons in DSL history BEFORE his is littered with washouts.

I don't think you can put a comp on him right now, to be honest. I mean I could make up some name and be like "yeah, he's gonna be....Tim Salmon" but I have no idea really. You can find some videos of his swing and it looks damn good. But it's also super-aggressive and for a physically advanced dude against high school pitching with a really aggressive swing, he's gonna have a hell of an adjustment to make in as much as RK ball. He's probably gonna have to dial that load/kick down a bit and if he does, can his raw power still hang at/near a 60 grade? Shit if I know. But if it can and if there's even a little more projection in that frame (even some of the 'grown ass man at 17' types like Moncada and Jimenez still got stronger as they got to their early 20s), he could be damn impressive.

But he's gonna have to get a little less aggressive with his swing and there's a chance that it could take a full year or more to see those adjustments take place without destroying his timing/production.

I mean for real - this look like many 17 yr olds you've ever met?

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I mean...I guess Gorman looked pretty stout at 17 in his own right, but Gorman wasn't terrorizing a bunch of 155 lb DSL kids. He's just so much more physically advanced than what you normally see at that level that he can just waylay those guys.

8 players in MLB had a 145+ wRC last year.

Mo hasn’t exactly covered himself with glory in drafting position players over the years. Why do we suddenly have these high ceiling position player prospects?

Randy Flores

the middle innings reliever we use to have? sounds like they had better be locking him up long term. Promising promotions etc.

He's already been promoted to Asst. GM.

Damn. Haven’t seen much of Goldschmidt but looks like he barely swung at that pitch and golfed it out. Is that what we’ll see of him all year?

Ozuna is running like it's a contract year

Sounds like he needs another promotion considering the front office's track record.

****ing Braun

That’s 2 bad strikeout calls ump. He’s needs a bat shoved up his ass.

That ****ing CS from Molina was literally as good as you will ever see.

Backhands a curveball in the dirt and is coming out of his stance in the same motion while firing a seed to get an excellent base stealer in Cain. Sub 2 pop to pop time.

It’s way to early but Dexter doesn’t look last year was just a bad year. I will give him until June to get right or be done with him.

I like this Goldschmidt guy.

I kinda like this Goldschmidt fella.

You dick!

This Goldschmidt guy seems decent.

Goldy is my new favorite Cardinal! And I’m sure I won’t be alone.

Goldy is a beast. So good!

Dodger killer too. Bet you’re glad to have him out of the division.

Nice to have a star player again.

That's a ****ing hell of a start by Goldschmidt.

Didn't see the 9th, but it looks like Hicks sawed through the Brewers

I hate Dexter too, but he’s currently third on the team in OBP.

He pitched instead of just throwing.

Threw 3 sliders to Moustakas that had 3 different planes.

I'm not sure he did that on purpose but if he did, EVERYONE is ****ed. Especially if he'll throw the change he was messing with in camp.

Lel

Team Goldschmidt

Just watched the replays of the homers. Very nice! :thumb:

Bingo. I’m sitting by the Dewitt family next week at the home opener in my dads boss green seats

Boom good luck everyone

I've not seen him bat either except for when we played him. Looks like to me he is sneakily very strong. Meaning he doesn't look like bro-neill. :rolleyes:

That ball flys out of there as good as any ballpark. But, still, some of the balls were way inside and low and he hit some foul near the top of that place. Put them in the 2nd deck in left center. Its just one game. Maybe DJ or Hamas can tell us if this is normal for the guy?

If he goes off this year, great. I'm still not interested in giving him a long term big money.

I hate that guy sooo much. What he did to an innocent guys life to protect his money and life....:# and still has not paid any price for that part of his lies.

That was a shitty ump for both sides.

Mid-June?:eek: geeezz thats a lot of wins we will leave on the table. For what reason? We saw a whole year, spring training was no different. We have other and better options in RF. I sure hope it doesnt take that long.

In case others missed them.


1st homer
2nd homer
3rd homer

The exit velocities and launch angles are legit. He's always played in a beneficial home park, save for when they added humidity in Arizona starting last year, which made it a neutral park.

Goldschmidt is top 30 in barrel % and exit velocity. That means that he squares it up and hits it hard, and while he does strike out a lot, he also walks a good amount and he's not a dead pull hitter, which is how you can maintain a good BA and OBP with power while still having a 22-25% K-rate.

No game like that is normal, but those would have been out of any park.

First at bat was the most impressive. Peralta was spotting everything where he needed. That was a war of attrition and he persevered and punished him.

The 2nd and 3rd dingers he hit two pretty much center cut middle of the zone hangers. You still have to hit it, but that is what you need usually to hit multiple dingers in a game...multiple mistakes by the pitcher. Still a helluva game.

Bader on the bench. BroNeill in CF against the lefty. Does Bader have issues against lefties?

Not a fan of the baby blue uni’s. Like the classic retro Saturday uni’s they started 5 or so years ago.

Currently in a Dodger suite courtesy of my employer.

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No. He has problems against RHP. Benching Bader against a LHP, unless he's hurt, is Matheny-level stupidity. Fowler should be the one sitting today, but apparently he has tenure.

Woodruff is RH.

But Fowler still should've been the one benched on account of him sucking.

Add Hader to the list of immaculate inning. That was filthy.

Its really pathetic up there. Especially right handed. Fowler looks like a little leaguer from the right side. Someone needs to put their foot down and say left handed batting only.

Never been to Dodger Stadium. How is it? Hoping to add Oakland to my list in August and potentially San Diego in June- both for the Cardinals games. I also own a home in Denver and was planning on going back for the Cards series but it's not on a weekend this year dammit.

Going to be another year of what ifs and “we thought our young pitching would be better”?

Wacha looks like his arm is toast.

It was Yelich who is arguably the best player in the NL. To bad the Cards traded for the crappy Marlin.

"What if" John Mozeliak would've given a 5 year deal to a CF who was actually capable of playing CF like Lorenzo Cain while trading for a corner OFer who DIDN'T have a hurt shoulder when acquired and actually hit left-handed like Christian Yelich?

The difference between Ozuna/Fowler and Yelich/Cain is literally 10 games or more. That's staggering.