St. Louis Cardinals Organization Discussion

With guys like Miller in the minors there not all bad.

http://www.vivaelbirdos.com/2011/9/9/2413611/st-louis-cardinals-top-prospects-list-2011

well that’s only if they can stay healthy.

He can hit anything in the zone what the problem is he chases a lot of pitches outside of the zone. It seemed like he made up his mind to swing a lot before the pitch was delivered. I have never seen anyone chase more off speed in the dirt. But he can hit all fields and has power to the opposite field. Will be an interesting grade.

As a longtime Cards fan I have never been impressed with their draft philosophy or their overall farm system. Times have changed in recent years and we are starting to see plenty of talent and an extremely well rounded farm for the first time of my lifetime. We have solid pitching, hitting, high end talent and depth. There are few positions that we don’t have some solid and/or very intriguing guys. The other thing that has happened over the past year is some of our upside players have started producing at higher levels to validate their prospect profile. Here is a list of players that certainly will get mentioned in John’s Cards Prospect List and the reason why the Cards will certainly have a Top 8 system going into 2012.

C - Audry Perez, Cody Stanley, Robert Stock, Tony Cruz
1B - Matt Adams
2B - Kolten Wong, Pete Kozma (2B/SS), Tyler Rahmatulla, Greg Garcia
3B - Zack Cox, Matt Carpenter,
SS - Ryan Jackson, Pete Kozma (2B/SS), Ronny Gil
OF - Oscar Taveras, Adron Chambers, Charles Tilson, Anthony Garcia, Tommy Pham, Daryl Jones, Reggie Williams, Virgil Hill, Nick Longmire, Chris Edmondson
P - Shelby Miller, Carlos Martinez, Jordan Swagerty, Tyrell Jenkins, Adam Riefer, Lance Lynn (still a prospect), John Gast, Deryk Hooker, Joe Kelly, Trevor Rosenthal, Hector Hernandez, Seth Blair

There are plenty of other guys that could get a mention and everyone has their opinion. But this shows the depth at many positions and some of these guys have extreme upside (Miller, Martinez, Jenkins, Taveras to name a few). As long as the Cards stick with their new strategy on drafting they should continuously pump a good mix of polished and upside talent into the system to take over for the talent that either gets traded or promoted.

They’ve taken Zach Cox, Kolten Wong, and Charles Tilson in the top 100 picks in each of the last two drafts. To be fair, position players were targeted early and often in the 2010 draft, which allowed Cox to fall to them late in the first round as a quick mover/safety pick and allowed them to grab Tyrell Jenkins in the supplemental (best player available on a lot of boards when they selected). The 2011 draft was pitching heavy with not a lot of above average bats, and Wong and Tilson are both good players with good skill sets. Wong was impressive in the Quad Cities and could be a very quick mover through a system that has had a lot of trouble producing middle infield prospects since around, oh, 1965 or so.

The Cardinals haven’t picked in the top half of the draft since they took Brett Wallace in ‘08, haven’t had a lot of supplemental picks over that time, and have been in on a number of Latin American position players that ultimately went somewhere else or had vision problems that negated the proposed contract.

I think that this system has as much top end talent as a lot of the other systems around the big leagues, but probably does not have the overall depth of the top systems. I think this is mostly due to having a lot of unproven players below AA and having a lot of retreads at AA and AAA. That should change significantly in 2012 as the 2010 and 2011 drafts both start to move into the top of the farm system and either succeed or fall flat on their faces.

I can definitely see him hitting like Matt Adams next year in springfield.