Cardinals hope to find another JJ Wetherholt in this year’s MLB Draft
When the St. Louis Cardinals were leapt over by the Cleveland Guardians and Cincinnati Reds in the lottery for picks in the 2024 MLB Draft, it was seemingly the final ignominious nail in a season of indignities.
The 2023 Cardinals were the franchise’s first team to finish in last place in more than three decades, and their reward was slipping from fifth overall to seventh just days after forfeiting their second-highest selection as a result of signing Sonny Gray away from the Minnesota Twins.
Still, luck in the draft can shift rapidly.
The Cardinals caught a good break when JJ Wetherholt caught a bad one. A significant hamstring injury caused the then-West Virginia shortstop to slide from the presumptive No. 1 overall pick, and the financial wranglings that accompany a static pool of draft bonus money allowed him to fall all the way into St. Louis’s lap.
Now, he’s the Cardinals’ top prospect, the 18th-best in the game as ranked by MLB Pipeline, and their highest draft selection since they picked JD Drew fifth overall in 1998. That accomplishment, at least, is soon to fall from Wetherholt’s resume, as Tuesday night’s lottery results saw the Cardinals jump from the 13th-best odds at the number one pick – and a less than ten percent chance to climb into the top six – to the fifth slot.
It was a welcome surprise, and for a team which has never picked in the top 10 in consecutive years since the draft was initiated in 1965, represents an unprecedented opportunity.
“Now you have a chance to pause and think of the historical aspect of it,” said Randy Flores, Cardinals assistant general manager and director of amateur scouting.
The pause will be temporary.
Flores and his lieutenants are soon to hit the road, and the experience they gathered last year will be invaluable as they find themselves navigating a now-familiar landscape among the game’s highest tier young talent.
“Last year, there was so much newness in prepping for it,” Flores said. “Cross checking, scheduling, meetings, discussion. The way we interacted with our baseball development group, knowing that usually…the board clears itself sometimes when you draft at 23. But at seven, there’s more options. So the depth and length of discussions, we’re able to adopt a similar approach in meetings.”
What Flores described is a simple math problem. There are only so many hours in the day, and for teams drafting in the later stages of the first round, there’s an opportunity cost. Every minute spent digging in on a prospect who’s almost certainly going to be off the board by the time your team picks is a minute you didn’t spend on a player who is far more likely to be in your range.
Last year’s knowledge baseline also has the benefit of supplementing this year’s expanded process. Due to signing Gray, Wetherholt was the only Cardinals pick higher than 80th overall.
This season, they have not only their own first and second round picks, but MLB also announced last week that they would receive a competitive balance round B pick, giving them three selections inside the top 75.
The jump up in the lottery will also give the Cardinals a larger bonus pool, providing them with an opportunity to take more risks on more talented players as the draft grinds on.
For a team in the midst of remaking its player development apparatus and turning strategically inward in an attempt to not-quite-rebuild its roster, that boon of talent couldn’t possibly come at a better time. The Cardinals do not intend to languish at the bottom of the standings for a long stretch of time, and the best way to avoid that is to bring in more good players.
“Now we have those two things in our favor this year,” Flores said. “We’ll be welcoming a lengthier discussion, because the pool of players that we’re in play on is much, much larger.”
At present, the top overall ranked prospect in next year’s draft carries a familiar name and already has a history of playing ball on Cardinals fields and in Cardinals gear. Ethan Holliday, son of Matt and younger brother of Baltimore Orioles phenom Jackson, is a prep shortstop who has a chance to make the Hollidays the first set of brothers to both be drafted first overall.
One evaluator expressed a belief that Ethan Holliday could slip slightly from that position as the draft field defines itself in the spring, though the Washington Nationals secured the top pick in the lottery and have a long and involved history with super agent Scott Boras, who represented Matt in his playing career and represents Jackson now.
There’s rarely sense in drafting for positional need at the big league level in the MLB draft, and that is certainly not a recommended strategy at the top of the first round. Whichever player is judged by the Cardinals to be the best available when their turn rolls around will be their pick, and will almost certainly be immediately a peer of Wetherholt’s at the top of the team’s prospect rankings.
That was not a position the Cardinals expected themselves to be in on Tuesday afternoon, when their odds of winning the lottery were so remote that they opted not to send a representative to watch the lottery be drawn. They instead found out the results live on stage with the television audience.
Flores stood nervously at a podium as the team’s representative for the results reveal, and said that at one point, retired Red Sox pitcher Jake Peavy leaned over to whisper (in good humor) that he was rooting for him.
Peavy might’ve been the first, in this context, to wish Flores good luck, but wide swaths of the Cardinals organization as well as the fan base followed quickly behind. Some of that luck arrived with the pick itself.
The rest will spring from the hard work that accompanies sorting out the draft board, and the Cardinals finally have a foundation from which to build that process.
This story was originally published December 13, 2024 at 4:00 AM.
