Could these top prospects give the Cardinals a new big league battery by next season?

By entering a period of designed upheaval, the St. Louis Cardinals are gambling that an updated player development process will benefit not only the players who will be added to the organization in the coming months and years, but also those who are already at some point in their development curves.

Whatever developments come from technological innovations or updated methods, the human factor that arises from playing and learning together as teammates is difficult if not impossible to replicate.

Minor league pitcher of the year Quinn Mathews and player of the year Jimmy Crooks, a pitcher-catcher battery for a big part of the season at Double-A Springfield, appear to be well on the way to solidifying that part of their respective games.

“The good games are cool, but I don’t really remember them all that well,” Mathews said. “The bad ones, though, I could talk about those forever. They still [tick] me off.”

“It’s all bull [crud] to him,” Crooks chimed in. “I know him. I know him too well…When he first got up [to Springfield], he made a joke to me. He’s like, oh, it’s the worst day of the week. It’s like, what do you mean by that, Quinn? He’s like, it’s start day. It’s like, oh my God, you’re not gonna be that type of guy.”

The type of guy Mathews was in 2024 was the type that led all of minor league baseball in strikeouts, piling up 202 in just 143 ⅓ innings. “I love catching Quinn,” Crooks emphasized. “I love talking to Quinn. He’s a homie.”

A battery rising in tandem throughout the minors makes for an intriguing proposition to the Cardinals, especially given that both players come replete with college experience and could be knocking on the door to the big leagues as soon as 2025.

Mathews will pitch next season at age 24 and with four years of college experience under his belt. Crooks, who hit .321 for Springfield, turns 24 in July and caught for two years at Oklahoma, losing one season to the pandemic.

There is never a shortage of spots for pitchers at the upper levels, and there’s very little that will stand in Mathews’ way as he accelerates through the upper minors. He pitched for all four Cardinals full-season minor league affiliates in 2024 and, with different competitive results for the big league club, may well have made his debut.

That rise has been powered by an increase in power, as his velocity has ticked up substantially since his senior season, allowing him to pair a fastball in the upper 90s with a sharp curve that mirrors a classic repertoire for the game’s most successful lefty starters.

“The joke that I would have with the people that would talk about my velocity and stuff like that was, like, I’m gonna wake up one day and it’s gonna be gone, basically,” Mathews said. “Like, I’m gonna be back to what I was, which is not a fun thought to be going to bed with every single night, but unfortunately it’s the one I dealt with for, honestly, I’m still dealing with it a little bit.”

Mathews described a throwing program last offseason which was designed to “raise [his] floor.” By building strength to eliminate fastballs in the range of 91 to 92 miles per hour, he was hoping to sit more consistently in the 94 to 95 range. Indeed, his average fastball was close to 95 MPH and he was able to dial up to touch 97, and that variation proved to make a huge difference in his arsenal.

Crooks, too, made adjustments from which he saw immediate benefits. As more and more catchers transition to a one knee down stance behind the plate, Crooks worked with Willson Contreras and Iván Herrera among others in big league camp to improve his own receiving and framing. The large number of pitchers in the early days of spring training necessitates a large number of catchers, and Crooks seized on the available facetime to pick the brains of those with the relevant experience.

“I learned a lot from Contreras with the one knee and trying to be as quick as I can, to steal strikes as much as I can,” Crooks explained. “I think that’s a big key in what they were emphasizing up there in spring training. When I went up there, it took a little bit, but I started to get a lot more comfortable with it.”

For Crooks, one of the challenges was making sure his changed footwork didn’t neutralize his arm behind the plate, which is one of his best weapons. He threw out 25 runners stealing for Springfield in 2024 after throwing out 29 for High-A Peoria in 2023. His minor league career caught stealing percentage is 30%; there are only six big league catchers who have reached that plateau when facing at least 200 stolen base attempts over a career.

His path to the big leagues is slightly more blocked. The Cardinals currently have three catchers under contract for next season who started at least 50 games in 2024. It’s possible that not all of Contreras, Herrera and Pedro Pagés will stay on the roster through the winter, but those three as well as fellow prospect Leonardo Bernal do complicate the availability of innings.

However their timelines intersect, it seems likely that a productive duo for Springfield is destined to be the same in the big leagues for the Cardinals. The two of them are well prepared to benefit from each other in the future just as they’ve already done in the past.

“The expectation is there’s still teams playing baseball,” Mathews said. “That’s the expectation for Jimmy and myself as well, I assume. It’s just preparing the body and mind for a longer haul of a year.”