St. Louis Cardinals’ identity starting to take shape as 2021 MLB season on the horizon
For professional baseball players, little that happens in February is typically worth closely scrutinizing in the context of a broader season. After only one week of full squad workouts, players who participated in winter ball may be in full swing while those who participated in winter fishing are likely to still be knocking the barnacles from their various appendages.
And yet with a condensed spring training schedule and a camp of limited size, the St. Louis Cardinals revealed enough about themselves over the last week that it’s fair to develop a sense of where this spring’s path is likely to be heading.
Change happens more slowly when workout groups are forced to be heavily scripted and isolated from each other, and the choices the Cardinals have made since arriving in Florida have made these five things abundantly clear.
The outfield competition isn’t much of a competition
After COVID-19 disrupted another opportunity for the Cardinals to evaluate Lane Thomas, the late offseason trade of Dexter Fowler to the Los Angeles Angels seemed to be the most recent step in their professed commitment to allow their young outfielders — Thomas as well as Austin Dean and Justin Williams — every opportunity to secure playing time.
Yet as the spring has worn on, the Cardinals have grouped Tyler O’Neill, Harrison Bader and Dylan Carlson as the starting outfield at every opportunity, including starting that trio in the team’s Grapefruit League opener. Thomas seems firmly ensconced as the team’s fourth outfielder, but Dean has in recent days taken a large amount of his work at first base.
Williams’s status may depend on a ruling from Major League Baseball. The Cardinals are seeking to restore one of his minor league options, arguing that the non-baseball injury which short circuited his 2019 season should allow the team one more year in which they can send him to and from the minor leagues at will. That appeal is pending.
Edman will lead off & play 2nd base, except when he doesn’t
Edman was advertised throughout the winter as the Cardinals’ primary second baseman, and all indications are he will receive that opportunity as the season opens. However, that leaves open the question of playing time for Matt Carpenter, who told reporters over the weekend that he wasn’t yet ready to concede that he’s merely a part time player.
Carpenter and manager Mike Shildt have been adamant that the team doesn’t see a fit for Carpenter in the outfield, where he hasn’t played since a brief cameo in 2014. Edman, though, has seen regular action there in each of his first two seasons, and profiles as an option in left against difficult righties.
On opening day in Cincinnati, the Cardinals are certain to face either Luis Castillo or Sonny Gray, either of whom could bring forth such an alignment. The starting trio of outfielders and the starting second baseman could conceivably look different on the season’s first day, with Carpenter slotting in at second, where he feels comfortable and has been getting considerable work.
Or, perhaps, the league and the players’ association could once again announce a full-league designated hitter on the eve of the season, creating a much more natural fit for Carpenter in the last guaranteed year of his contract.
You can never have too much pitching, still
The Cardinals have declared Jack Flahery to be their opening day starter and have lined up the rotation for their 24 spring training games in such a way that Adam Wainwright is likely to pitch the season’s second game and the team’s home opener April 8.
Both Kwang Hyun Kim and Carlos Martínez are on track to follow Wainwright, and Martínez in particular has looked impressive in camp following a solid stretch for the Dominican Republic’s representative in the Caribbean Series.
Miles Mikolas, however, has only once faced hitters this spring, and after doing so, the Cardinals determined that his schedule needed to be slowed. Mikolas missed the shortened 2020 season after surgery to repair the flexor tendon in his throwing elbow, and while the team is advertising mere caution and low concern, Mikolas’s trajectory is undoubtedly alarming.
Highland native Jake Odorizzi remains a free agent, though his search for a multi-year deal has thus far limited the interest he might receive from the Cardinals. If circumstances change for either party — Odorizzi as the season looms and the Cardinals if a need for innings becomes clear — the two could come together quickly.
The bullpen looks lethal
To watch a healthy Alex Reyes take the mound is to see the promise that once made him the top pitching prospect in all of baseball and to simultaneously wonder whether that might still translate to the starting rotation. Still just 26, Reyes features a 20-miles-per-hour difference between his fastball and curveball, and is as capable of overpowering hitters as he is of completely beguiling them.
Rather than the rotation, Reyes seems destined for a back end bullpen group that will also feature Giovanny Gallegos, Génesis Cabrera, and Jordan Hicks, healthy after his 2019 Tommy John surgery. Any of the four could prove a dominant closer for a Major League team, and the Cardinals will be able to mix and match each of them into the appropriate spots.
Andrew Miller, the group’s most accomplished member, should be able to be more carefully shielded and utilized in matchups that will allow him to shine, and John Gant and Tyler Webb are steady, reliable out getters.
The virus remains, but the game persists
The return of fans to Roger Dean Stadium on Sunday was at once a cause for celebration and a cause for concern. Facial covering enforcement was lax, to say the least, with many fans seeming to deduce that simply having a drink at their seat was sufficient to count as “drinking” for purposes of mask evasion.
Veteran base umpires Lance Barksdale and C.B. Bucknor eschewed masks entirely, though Angel Hernandez stayed covered up behind home plate. The Cardinals advertised a complicated system of personnel swap outs in order to maintain social distance, but were largely piled into the (open air) first base dugout with masks only seen on coaches.
The Cardinals have tracked the number of personnel in camp who carry active antibodies for COVID-19 and who thus likely maintain a degree of immunity. They’re yet to have a positive case pop up since intake, and MLB as a whole has announced only 20 positive tests of nearly 21,000 taken since camps officially opened.
Those numbers are encouraging from a health perspective, and also speak to the relative ease with which MLB hopes to be able to conduct a season which they hope will inch ever more toward normalcy.
