The Cardinals placed six players on the injured list yesterday following the team’s Covid-19 outbreak, and they’ll likely be adding infielder Rangel Ravelo to the IL as well. The team confirmed yesterday that he is also among the current players to have tested positive (but did not formally place him on the injured list).
That drops the Cardinals’ roster to 23 players, meaning they’ll still need to make five additions between now and Friday. (Rosters reduce from 30 to 28 players for the remainder of the season tomorrow.) To this point, only one spot has been formally filled: infielder/outfielder Brad Miller was activated from the injured list yesterday. Four more players will still need to be added to the roster between now and Friday.
Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch runs through many of the possibilities, reporting within his morning column that infielder Max Schrock will likely be selected to the active roster. Jeff Jones of the Belleville News points out on Twitter that lefty Genesis Cabrera has already revealed via Instagram that he’s in St. Louis, so he’ll fill another of the spots. Alex Reyes will also be called up, per Goold. Jones adds that Cabrera and Reyes are likely to be the only two pitchers added to the roster. Those additions have not yet been announced by the club.
The Cards’ final open roster spot figures to be of particular intrigue among fans — and with good reason. Top prospect Dylan Carlson is among the names available within the 60-man player pool for St. Louis, and at this point in the season, the Cardinals have already delayed his path to free agency by a year. He’d need to be added to the 40-man roster, but the team can easily accommodate some additions due to the fact that players on the Covid-19 injured list don’t count against the 40-man.
Carlson has been widely expected to debut at some point in 2020, and considering that the Cardinals were struggling to score runs even before losing Paul DeJong and Yadier Molina, there is (on paper, at least) some extra incentive to get his bat into the lineup. It’s a small sample, clearly, but St. Louis has batted just .217/.281/.382 as a team through five games. Carlson, meanwhile, raked at a .292/.372/.542 clip with 26 homers, 28 doubles, eight triples and 20 steals in 562 plate appearances between Double-A and Triple-A last year.
Jones tweets that the final spot could well come down to Carlson, fellow outfielder Justin Williams and infield prospect Elehuris Montero. Both Williams and Montero have been ranked among the organization’s top 20 or so farmhands for the past couple seasons, though neither has generated the expectations associated with Carlson, who entered the season as a consensus Top 25 league-wide prospect. It’d be the first real look in the Majors for any of that trio, and all three would be controllable all the way through the 2026 season should the stick in the Majors following their promotion. Carlson and Montero have yet to appear in the big leagues, while Williams received just a single plate appearance with the 2018 Rays.
Are we past the Service Time threshold for Carlson at this point with the amount of games they’ve played this season?
If you’re talking Super Two status, no. If you’re talking about the extra year of control…
“Top prospect Dylan Carlson is among the names available within the 60-man player pool for St. Louis, and at this point in the season, the Cardinals have already delayed his path to free agency by a year.”
I did mean Super Two. Thanks for clarifying that!
I doubt Super Two will be much of a factor. The Cards, broadly speaking, haven’t played many service time games at all prior to this year with Carlson. And in a short season, keeping him down another 10-14 days (that’s a rough estimate) to avoid Super Two status could prove rather costly — particularly with some doubleheaders likely on the schedule soon.
If they think he’s one of their nine best hitters, he should be called up this weekend.
Ok, but what if they view 2020 as a lost cause and decide it’s better to hold him down for a month next year instead and control him until 2027? It’s not likely, but not impossible.
Bring on Carlson!
id like to see Schrock get a chance
I can already see the excuse as “Williams/Montero were already on the 40 man roster.”
mo being mo. mo’s still pulling strings while someone else pulls his
You guys have the wrong Dylan Carlson linked. You have a guy that is a pitcher at Florida A/M university linked.
Thanks. It is bizarre that B-Ref’s automatic linking script grabbed that Dylan Carlson, ha. I just updated it.
It’d be nice to finally see Alex Reyes put it together.
Just bring up Carlson.
Enough already, Cardinals.
I smell a Ravelo cut coming. Seems likely considering he was the only one not added to the IL with the rest of them. Hard to be a position and split limited guy these days.
Will the real Alex Reyes finally show what he got. Cards need the show card version of Reyes. But I wish the kid well.