To start or not to start? St. Louis Cardinals face dilemma with pitcher Alex Reyes
A young boy growing up in Belleville in the 1990s received a set of baseball cards from his uncle every birthday and Christmas for a number of years.
The cards, though, were not to be played with. They were an investment, meant to be stored until the time was right to squeeze every last potential nickel from their potential value.
The problem was that many other boys got the exact same present from many other uncles, and so by the time that potential value was appreciated, it had evaporated into a flooded market, and the cards were barely worth their weight in cardboard. What started as a thoughtful gesture became merely a temptation on the front end and a disappointment on the back end.
The St. Louis Cardinals face roughly the same dilemma with pitcher Alex Reyes.
There certainly aren’t countless copies of Reyes available on the marketplace, but the risk of leaving him on the shelf too long leaves the club attempting to strike a delicate balance between building strength and allowing him to let it fly.
And yet despite the club’s acknowledgement this week that lingering soreness in Miles Mikolas’s throwing shoulder will prevent him from being part of the starting rotation to begin the season, the Cardinals announced this week Reyes will open the 2021 season in the bullpen, placing perhaps the club’s most talented pitcher on a track for conservative contributions.
“It just makes a lot of sense based on his workload prior to this,” manager Mike Shildt said. “It does make some sense to get him up in innings, which will be used in a multi inning situation. We’ve got a good bullpen, but he’ll be a big part of it.”
Reyes, still just 26, has been the victim of three lost seasons following Tommy John surgery in 2017, a lat muscle strain in 2018, and a broken hand in 2019. Once considered the top pitching prospect in all of baseball, Reyes simply aged out rather than performed out of that designation.
His 111.1 innings pitched split between the Cardinals and Triple-A Memphis in 2016 remain his career high in any season, and as the club aims to maximize Reyes’s utility with 80 to 100 innings targeted for 2021, they find themselves working from, essentially, a blank slate.
“If you look at the times where (pitchers) had their Tommy John and what they did in their return from it, it seems like they were able to get back to where they were after about two years,” pitching coach Mike Maddux said. “In Alex’s case, he didn’t quite have that track record. So we’re starting him as a young guy again, which he is.
“He had three years without really pitching. So he’s a guy that has a bright future ahead. Will he be a starter in the future? Probably. Is that going to happen this year? Maybe. But we do have a build up that we have to do.”
Maddux explained the club’s preference for player development is to use a “Plus 30” program — each year, ideally, a starting pitcher would add 30 innings of workload to his previous year’s total in order to incrementally build arm strength and prepare for the big league rotation.
Reyes has recorded a total of 84 innings pitched in competition since 2016.
Gant a rotation possibility?
Still, perhaps the biggest challenge of parceling out those valuable innings is the temptation represented by a pitcher whose stuff has been electric in his early spring outings. In his first appearance of spring, Reyes’s fastball reached 97 miles per hour as his curveball swerved and dipped down to 79.
In three spring appearances, he’s faced a total of 14 hitters — two have hits and 12 have made outs, six of which have come by strikeout. Spring statistics don’t matter unless they do, and in Reyes’s case, the numbers and the eye test combine to reveal a pitcher hungry to prove he’s capable of dominating.
The club’s caution is to the benefit of John Gant, who seems to be clearly in the lead of the derby for the vacant rotation spot and who has himself been vocal in his desire to start. And Gant, to his credit, has been a reliable arm for four seasons in St. Louis, including during 19 respectable starts in the 2018 season.
Gant, though, for all his stability, is not Alex Reyes, who holds a career 2.48 earned run average in 72 2/3 tantalizing major league innings, having allowed only three home runs.
‘I feel healthy’
“I feel healthy, I feel healthy enough to start,” Reyes said after an outing last week, prior to being informed Tuesday of his bullpen assignment. “I would love to start. It’s what I’ve done as a minor leaguer, what I’ve done my whole career, you know?
“The fun part about spring training is coming out here and competing and, you know, however it ends up it ends up. All I want to do is be on that 25 man roster.”
Assuming his health holds, Reyes won’t have to wonder about the roster. He’ll be prominently displayed in the Cardinals bullpen, prudently encased in protection, an investment the Cardinals are sure will pay off in some undefined future.
They’d do well to take him off the shelf before too much dust settles.
