raisincharlie

I think Yadi has been a great catcher but you bet your ass I would trade him for almost anyone who got 6+ WAR yearly. Stop judging Cardinal fans by fringe Twitter and newspaper forums lol. There's plenty of smart ones that are ready to see the Yadi era end soon. Including me.

Cardinals went 5-2 against them this year, including 3 of 4 at home and have home field advantage. With Anibal Sanchez starting game 1. This won't be a cakewalk. Especially since it'll set up where Wainwright only pitches at home. Cardinals beat Scherzer twice this year. none of these things mean anything, I dont understand why people cite stuff like this in baseball Beating Scherzer twice does mean something, lol. Sorry you can't do "small samples!!!" to things like that. That guy wrecked almost every one he faced. Since Jeff Albert (came over from Houston) became the primary hitting coach, the Cardinals have had the 4th best offense in baseball. Nationals, like the Braves, have a crap bullpen. You need that to win in the playoffs. Cardinals will just hack fouls and take take take until the 5th-6th when starters are lifted and feast on their pen. Just like we did Atlanta. I don't put a lot of stock into WAR for pitchers when the stat doesn't consider weak contact/ground balls. And that's the moneyball market efficiency that Cardinals were all-in on. Mikolas, Waino, and Hudson are all groundball specialists. The whole staff is. With Edman and Wong and DeJong in the infield... it'll be smooth sailing barring crazy BABIP luck. Cardinals are the best postseason team remaining with HR/FB rates too. We keep the ball in the park in a homer-crazy league. That's how you win. That's how we'll beat the Nationals.

Cardinals went 5-2 against them this year, including 3 of 4 at home and have home field advantage. With Anibal Sanchez starting game 1. This won't be a cakewalk. Especially since it'll set up where Wainwright only pitches at home. Cardinals beat Scherzer twice this year.

The only thing more predictable is that he’ll be a fringe major league player next year and slash like .210/.280/.360 2.1 fWAR in limited playing time most of the season isn't "fringe" lol. 110 wRC+ as a floating type between 3B/2B/RF is more than okay. Gets lots of value from speed and defense.

You realize he was injured all year, right? Losing a year of development to injury time is not a point in a player's favor. Yeah, duh But acting like those numbers mean jack in a handful of games is silly. He will be up here by 23. Pretty standard age to come to MLB. Not concerned.

Our top 4 prospects are all position players so I'm sure I'll be fine. You do realize our #4 prospect according to you, Montero, just put up a .552 OPS and K'd in 29.8% of his PA over a full season of AA ball, right? The farm lacks high end upside outside of maybe 3 players. You realize he was injured all year, right?

Our top 4 prospects are all position players so I'm sure I'll be fine.

10-0. Goldy's second shot of the game. 7 RBIs for him alone. New hitting coach Jeff Albert is paying off.

Except they have no defenders or bullpen

Counting on young pitchers to not have their arms fall off is not a recipe for long term success. Cubs fans who remember the dusty baker days may be a little too sensitive to this, but it’s still true. Meh. Hudson doesn't overpower and Flaherty has nothing in his delivery or injury history that says he will drop off the map. He's only getting better. Hicks is getting his Tommy John out of the way now so he will be good. Reyes already got his out of the way, so anything from him is a bonus. No offense, but the Cardinals don't operate like the early 2000s Cubs on any level so I think we'll be fine in how we forecast for the future. We've been a contact-pitching team since DeWitt bought the team. We rely on defense and contact. And it works long term, demonstrably. Plus...

As good as Jack Flaherty is, Dakota Hudson has been just nearly as effective. Hudson has a 0.9 fWAR. But is 15-6 for a reason. Generates the weakest contact in baseball. Fangraphs needs to figure out how to quantify that in their WAR calc. Both young cornerstones of the rotation. In less than two years the team’s regulars will include Flaherty, Carlson, Hudson, Hicks, Gorman, Knizner, Fernandez, and possibly Reyes, Wong, Edman, and Bader too. Great young core to work with. High output from Goldy and Carpenter will be bonuses.

Yes, BestFansStLouis compiles some truly awful fans' takes. Racist and otherwise. I don't know anyone like that and they are an awful, small subgroup of fan I never encounter, thankfully. But the whitest thing on earth is Wrigley-goers dancing to "Go Cubs Go" and I can find plenty of examples of racist Cubs fans tweets/Facebook comments by using a search term. Not hard. I'm glad this has devolved into a "no your city is more racist" when we all know Chicago's dark history and current and treatment of African Americans. I would think you'd be smart enough not to want to enter that low tier city-pride mudsling.

Yeah that's why the whole city loves Ozzie, Lou, and Gibby like no other. Perhaps you forgot how they were in their playing days? This ownership is fickle about the "brand" in a lame way, no doubt. But they'd traded off other people who were similarly picking at the fabric who were white like Rasmus and Rolen. You guys have the whitest, mayo, loafer-wearing fanbase around. Obvious "difference" between Wrigley and Guaranteed Rate fan demos.

Tommy Pham was traded because we have a fragile owner who didn’t like him firing off to the media about the organization. Zero to do with rebuilding. Silly you think that. Plus we had to make room for Tyler O’Neill and Bader one way or another. Trading one of the team's best players who didn't make anything for O'Neill and Bader is certainly a strategy. No argument here but it was ownership call. Not a rebuilding move. I don't think any Cards fan I know liked that trade. Now nor when it happened.

Tommy Pham was traded because we have a fragile owner who didn’t like him firing off to the media about the organization. Zero to do with rebuilding. Silly you think that. Plus we had to make room for Tyler O’Neill and Bader one way or another.

You either weren't paying attention to July of 2018 or didn't pick up on what was happening. Firing Matheny and trading Tommy Pham? There wasn't any tanking...? Enlighten me then. The team made a few lateral moves and pushed some money around. A poor man's Yankees style "rebuild" more than anything.

I agree on the star power. I think Goldy is a nice anchor, despite approaching the age cliff, but he's not homegrown. Hoping Carlson and/or Gorman can change that. I hate being above average but just bad enough to miss playoffs. Awful spot to be in for three years. There are days where I wish we would just tank for picks like you guys did. But our owner would probably not allow it.

I don’t think individual WAR is useful in grading team success and sustainability. Mostly because a guy like Hudson will never have a good WAR but always pitch well enough to keep his team in games and win despite a no good FIP. Until pitching WAR figures out that ground balls have significant meaning, it’s a flawed stat. And small sample UZR numbers mean nothing when you need several years of samples to get it close to an accurate number. Cardinals have a great team defense and base running value. Speed and defense has been a huge reason we failed in the Matheny years. That’s finally been corrected. And I don’t think Bader is a role player. He’s putting up starter WAR if that’s the measuring stick. Wong is having a 4 bWAR season finally and is peaking. Plenty of competitive baseball until Carlson and Gorman mature. That rant aside, we’re not really an old team. I mean when comparing to the Cubs, we’re on par. We have an ace in the making in Flaherty. Another top 5 prospect in Reyes, who had flume injuries and can still figure it out and be valuable. And tons of young, nice bullpen pieces. Jordan Hicks has an amazing ceiling. Mikolas’s age doesn’t matter too much because he’s a soft throwing ground ball pitcher. I see why they extended. Cubs have Lester, Hamels, Hendricks, and Darvish. With no one coming up the pipe that is scary. What’s the plan there? I mean if it’s about “your team vs my team” I just see an inverse of the same age problem.

A lot of goal post moving here. First off, Brennen Davis didn't get promoted and there's no telling what Gorman would have done with a full season in Midwest League. It's a straw man argument that compares two different players entirely. I don't see the point. This whole argument about Gorman started because someone said the Cardinals are getting old because of contracts. That was shot down quickly if you look at average age of the team and the fact that Molina is on his way out, Fowler will get be a backup if he's bad since he's in the OF. Carpenter is the only real issue and he's just a gap to Gorman anyways. Carlson up next year at freaking age 21. Cardinals have DeJong, Wong, Knizner, Carlson, Bader next year. Edman also only 24. Gorman sometime in late 2021. Not an "old" team. CMart only 27, and then Flaherty, Hudson, Hicks, Helsley, Gallegos, Brebbia, Gant, Ponce de Leon, Reyes, Junior Fernandez... who cares about Miller's age and nothing-contract? What's the average age there? I was just disputing the fact that we're old. And Cubs have several old starters. Your whole rotation is old. Azolay is already an older prospect. Marquez is years away. You also have a lot of position players getting up there and Bryant contract ready to jack up payroll.

This isn’t popular with my Cardinal fan buddies but Gorman will be a much better player than Carlson. I know the FSL and how hard it is on young hitters I’m not that worried. He will crush the Texas League. Hell Carlson struggled mightily until he was promoted. Carlson’s ceiling is the sky but I have the same reservations scouts have on him despite great numbers. I think Gorman could be very special. His defense is also impressing so it’s not all stick. I’m not worried about his strikeout to walk ratio yet. Especially seeing the same struggle of some of today’s biggest stars had in the same level and league and age.

What league are you talking about? Gorman is one of five 19 year olds in FSL and is only doing worse than Wander Franco (great prospect in his own right) and Jose Devers (guy in Stanton trade). Both good prospects. Your other point is noted.....thanks. Not trying to troll but just cutting the BS that Gorman isn’t “anything special.”

He's 19 with a 10% walk rate in the minors. What are you talking about? Have you seen what other people his age are doing? He blows them out of the water. 10/29 BB/K with a .826 OPS in his first ~700 PAs at 19 with a lot of those numbers coming in the brutal FSL is more than fine. You would be hyping any Cub with those numbers. Not to mention what scouts say about him and what he'll grow into. Wait until he’s in the Texas League and PCL...

Hey I know this is a Cubs forum but be fair! Cardinals have a .509 SOS to the Cubs's .499 SOS. Cardinals build their teams to live and die by contact. That's why conventional pitching WAR stats are useless in grading the talent of a guy like Dakota Hudson who throws the ball right down the middle and Shildt fields scrappy low-hit tool defenders like Edman, Wong, DeJong, Bader to get the outs. Only the A's have a better BABIP-against/UZR ratio.

1. Nolan Gorman is 19 years old. 2. Why don't you sort by all the other people his age on Fangraphs and see how they're all doing.... He is on par with Kelenic and Ramos... 3. We might not get to see what an expected K rate for him is at on-age competition until he's 25 and a 3 year MLB vet. 4. This is from another forum where I read this but, even guys like Fernando Tatis Jr. pretty consistently show promotion issues. Consider his '18 AA season. Again, small sample size (smaller than Gormans), but 3.5 BB rate and K rate near 30%, and his ISO tanked. He seems fine now! (That .410 BABIP is noteworthy, though).

To be fair, we've heard this for 15+ years. "They'll get old" but we always have more coming up the pipeline despite drafting low. Dylan Carlson and Nolan Gorman are top 30 level prospects. Flaherty is 23 and throwing like a top 15 pitcher now. Carlos will be in the rotation again. Jordan Hicks throws 103 and is 22. If Alex Reyes can be even half what we expected, then he will be a nice back end guy. Goldschmidt has good spray ability/exit velo and should be fine until at least the end of his contract. Fowler and Carpenter are the main problems. The team is already willing to put Fowler in a 4th OF role. So he will just be an expensive backup sunk-cost. Who cares, the owner is the third richest in the league, he can eat it. They may have to pray for Carpenter to defy age cliffs like Zobrist has until Gorman is ready. DeJong, Wong, Bader are all young. Edman is a great bench/role player and he's 24. Bader just needs to bat 100 wRC+ to be 3 WAR center fielder. More than doable. Gallegos has one of the better 3-year ZiPS projections of any Cardinal so he will be a good bullpen contributor. The Miller contract is nothing. And honestly, the Fowler contract is nothing--I look at it like they did Peralta's...you pay premium in years to get value in the earlier part of the deal. We're lucky he bounced back but he won't be penciled into the lineup if he's not at least hitting 108-115 wRC+. Not with his bad fielding. Molina's contract is up next year and they will move him to a mostly bench role with Knizner getting shared catcher duties. They are committed to Knizner because they traded Carson Kelly, a decent catcher in his own right, because they like him so much.