With No. 5 overall pick, Cardinals’ draft selection could echo for a decade
A major benefit of observing decisions without having to make them is knowing there will always be an opening for criticism. Entire shallow analysis ecosystems are premised on the idea that one decision, any decision, is self-evidently incorrect, and that every path not chosen must be superior to that which was simply virtue of the impossibility of proving a negative.
Sunday evening will bring one of the most consequential decisions in the last and next decade of St. Louis Cardinals baseball, and whoever the team selects fifth overall in the MLB Draft will become, in an instant, one of the franchise’s most important figures.
It will be years before it’s possible to determine whether they made the right selection or not, but that doesn’t change the fundamental truth of the moment – they cannot possibly afford to get it wrong.
It’s undeniable that over the last year, the Cardinals have had great fortune when it comes to their top picks.
Despite a gentle slide down the lottery order in 2024, JJ Wetherholt was there waiting for them to pick at seventh overall after missing a chunk of his junior season at West Virginia with a strained hamstring. A fully healthy Wetherholt might have gone first overall. Instead, he hit his first Triple-A triple and first Triple-A homer on Wednesday night in his first Triple-A game, and he is bound to be knocking – pounding – on the door of the big league roster by next spring.
When the 2024 Cardinals posted a winning record, it seemed certain that they were once again pointed toward the middle of the first round. Instead, with only a 0.8% chance of the lottery balls bouncing their way, they secured the fifth overall pick. It will be their highest selection since drafting JD Drew in that same position in 1998, and all the Drew pick did was become the centerpiece of a trade that brought in Adam Wainwright to headline the team’s rotation for a decade and a half.
That bar of expectations may be unfair, but it’s also realistic.
While the incoming Cardinals front office has been diligently mum about their plans for the near and intermediate future, the advertised shift back to a strong player development emphasis does a degree of giving away the game. Teams who intend to unload their finances into free agency and shuffle off their top prospects for established players are somewhat less inclined to talk up the quality of those players before they send them out the door.
If the Cardinals do move in the direction that all of their setup suggests – a direction where homegrown talent has to bring wins until they start to bring in real money – then cost-controlled elite talent is an essential, not an option.
The MLB draft is unlike that of the other major sports, especially basketball and football, in that the talent selected at its top may not be expected to make an impact until several years down the road. That trend has shifted somewhat in recent years; Paul Skenes was drafted first overall by Pittsburgh less than two years ago and has already made two All-Star games. Absent a true generational talent, though, there is required patience, and there is never a need to draft for need.
The weeks ahead of the draft are an outstanding time to hear discussion of how “the industry” is thinking or feeling about certain teams and their preferred draft order, which generally comes from a percolating brew of the same half dozen trusted opinions being tossed around and mulled over for weeks or months on end. There are simply too many baseball games being played on too many fields for too many people to have too informed an opinion on any of the top prospects without having dedicated significant chunks of lives and livelihoods to doing so.
As industry consensus goes, the two players to whom the Cardinals have been most frequently connected are Florida State lefty Jamie Arnold and California high school shortstop Eli Willits.
The timelines for the two are drastically different. Arnold, 21, has 278 strikeouts in 190 ⅓ innings pitched for FSU over the last two seasons, and could well factor into the team’s rotation decisions by the middle of next season. Willits, 17, is the youngest player eligible for this year’s draft, and is a high upside, strong tools infielder who might not make a real impact in the big leagues until 2028, if not later.
There are financial considerations that come along with each pick. A player who signs for less allows a team to reallocate some of their draft pool money to later slots, creating an opportunity to pick up a greater quantity of strong picks. Even picking fifth, the draft board ahead of them could shift. Matt Holliday’s son, Ethan, is not expected to fall any further than the Colorado Rockies, who draft fourth overall. But then, it’s the Rockies, and if they behave characteristically bizarrely, it would be a shock if St. Louis let Holliday slip past.
Sunday night will be an essential tentpole in the future of the Cardinals, even if those putting the tent up at the moment may not be around to eventually party beneath it.
There’s no reason to assume they’ll miss, and there will be no way to know any time soon. But there’s no denying how much it matters, and no sense in pretending otherwise.
