If the St. Louis Cardinals can’t play a full season, Dylan Carlson should stay in AAA
The way things are going in the world today because of the international COVID-19 outbreak, it seems nearly impossible that the St. Louis Cardinals and their Major League Baseball counterparts will be able to play a full schedule of 162 games in 2020.
If that’s the case, the Cardinals really need to pump the brakes on plans for their top prospects, postponing their rise to the major leagues.
Teams have a limited amount of control over players before they can hit free agency and potentially flee their drafting team. Young team ace Jack Flaherty’s free agency clock is already counting down. There’s nothing that can be done about that. But what can be managed is burning an entire season of service credit for top offensive prospect Dylan Carlson for maybe half as many games are played in a regular year.
If the goal is to try to win a World Series in 2020, St. Louis might be tempted to shoot all their bullets at once. But if playing for a championship in 2021-2028 is a more realistic goal for the team, the Cardinals would be better served to let Carlson play in the minors this year where he can take lots and lots of at-bats, preparing him as fully as possible to stick in the big leagues for good out of spring training in 2021. It would be better for his development and for the team’s plans to see Carlson play a 162-game rookie season as opposed to an 81-game schedule.
I don’t expect him to play all the games. But that’s the issue. If he’s up for a full year, he could sit here and there if he struggles or his manager could manipulate his playing time to set up favorable match-ups for a young player trying to get his feet set beneath him. It there are only 81 games available, Carlson would pretty much have to play all the time in order to make it worth the team’s while to burn a year of control.
Players these days are rushed to the big leagues, often spending very little time at the Class AAA level after proving their chops in Class AA. So why not take a bad situation and make the best of it? If the Cardinals only play half of their games, why let Carlson use up a whole season of control for half a season of experience? Besides, this year seems as if it’s going to be a make it us as you go along kind of deal. I’d prefer to see John Mozeliak and company handle their prized prospects in a more considered type of way. Hold them back and see how things go at the majoer league level. If the Cardinals are within a game or two late in the season, they could always change their minds. But if it turns out the decision to let Marcell Ozuna go and not sign any free agent firepower leaves the club eight or nine games out with six weeks to play, the team should stay the course and save their kids for the following spring.
If baseball doesn’t start until July, which seems to be the most likely scenario at this point, that leaves three months of games instead of six. If MLB just lops off half the season, that’s only 81 games. In my book, that’s not enough to justify burning a year of Carlson’s free agency clock. I wouldn’t bring him up unless the Cardinals play at least 100 games, if the decision was up to me.
Keep Nolan Gorman in the minors, too
One big benefit from keeping Carlson in the minors is that it would give fellow top prospect Nolan Gorman a chance to catch up. It would be something if Carlson and Gorman made it to the major leagues in the same season, getting the maximum amount of controllable years out of a young core of the team. For Cardinals fans, 2021 could be the year they’ve been waiting for — the season when the team moves on from Dexter Fowler and Matt Carpenter who would move into the last seasons of their ill-advised, cripplingly expensive contracts to make room for up and coming talent.
Hopefully, I’m wrong. But it looks more and more like 2020 might be a mess of a season. And I’m starting to become concerned that there is going to be no major league baseball at all this year. At some point it doesn’t make sense to play a handful of games and cheapen the value of the World Series trophy by awarding it to a team that had to pass half the tests of the teams that came before it.
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Scott Wuerz is a lifelong St. Louis Cardinals fan. The Cheap Seats blog is written from his perspective as a fan and is designed to spark discussion among fans of the Cardinals and other MLB teams. Sources supporting his views and opinions are linked. If you’re looking for Cardinals news and features, check out the BND’s Cardinals section.
