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Quick Hits: In-Game Video, Calhoun, Reyes

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It was on this day in 1932 that the Reds made one of the best trades in franchise history, acquiring future Hall-of-Fame catcher Ernie Lombardi as part of a seven-player trade with the Brooklyn Dodgers.  Lombardi was coming off a solid rookie season, but since Brooklyn already had Al Lopez behind the plate, Lombardi became an expendable trade chip.  The Reds reaped the benefits as Lombardi rose to stardom over 10 seasons in Cincinnati, hitting .311/.359/.469 with 120 homers over 4288 plate appearances in a Reds uniform.  His tenure in Cincy included the 1938 NL MVP Award, five All-Star appearances, and a starring role in the Reds’ World Series victory in 1940.

Some items from the modern game…

  • Players will once again be able to access in-game video clips this season, with the Boston Globe’s Alex Speier writing that Major League Baseball’s central office will be controlling the video footage available to teams.  Players and coaches will be able to access footage of a past at-bat or pitching sequence during a game, via dugout iPads, with the league editing the footage to ensure that teams can’t use video for underhanded purposes — like stealing signals, for instance.  Prior to 2020, it had become common practice for a hitter to visit a clubhouse computer terminal to review footage from his previous plate appearance, but clubhouse terminals were banned due to COVID-19 concerns last year.  This certainly played a role in some hitters suddenly struggling at the plate, since they had gotten to used to making video-aided adjustments.
  • Willie Calhoun has been bothered by a groin injury during Spring Training, and Evan Grant of the Dallas Morning News (Twitter link) believes the Rangers could be cautious and place Calhoun on the injured list to begin the year.  An IL stint certainly wouldn’t be welcome for Calhoun considering his injury-shortened and unproductive 2020 campaign, though it might be necessary to ensure that the young slugger is both fully healthy and fully prepared for the season.  A former top-100 prospect, Calhoun seemed to taking a step forward with a solid .269/.323/.524 slash line over 337 PA in 2019.
  • Cardinals president of baseball operations John Mozeliak has already said that the team will use Alex Reyes out of the bullpen this season, but with Miles Mikolas and Kwang Hyun Kim both facing injury problems, Ben Frederickson of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wonders if the team should reverse course and install Reyes into the rotation.  While it makes sense that the Cards want to carefully manage Reyes’ workload given his own lengthy injury history, Frederickson argues that the most optimal usage of Reyes’ projected 80-100 innings would be to use him as a starter until the rotation gets healthy, and then shift him to the pen.

Miles Mikolas Shut Down For Seven To Ten Days

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March 12: Mikolas won’t throw for the next seven to ten days, Mozeliak tells Goold. An MRI taken of his right shoulder did not reveal any structural issues but did show some inflammation. Mikolas will undergo further testing in the coming days once the inflammation subsides a bit.

March 11: Cardinals right-hander Miles Mikolas has been slowed by shoulder troubles thus far this spring, but the club received generally positive results after a wave of imaging yesterday, it seems. Manager Mike Shildt told reporters this morning that Wednesday’s wave of tests did not reveal any structural damage in Mikolas’ shoulder or elsewhere in his arm (Twitter link via Rob Rains of StlSportsPage.com). Shildt described the results as “favorable,” but he’ll also be backed off his throwing program for the time being.

It’s unclear at this point just when Mikolas will be ready to return to the mound. The Post-Dispatch’s Derrick Goold wrote yesterday that the club does not expect Mikolas to be ready to begin the regular season in the rotation, which would create some uncertainty at the back of the rotation early in the year. President of baseball operations John Mozeliak has already indicated that touted but oft-injured righty Alex Reyes will be used as a multi-inning piece out of the bullpen, with a target of around 100 innings hopefully on the docket.

At present, the Cardinals’ top three options are set with Jack Flaherty, Adam Wainwright and Kwang Hyun Kim all locked in. Righty Carlos Martinez has oscillated between starter and reliever over the course of his five-year contract extension, but given this year’s $11MM salary and the growing need for starters, it seems likely he’ll open the year in the rotation as well.

The Cards have plenty of depth options in their ranks. Righty Daniel Ponce de Leon has fared better as a reliever in his limited big league career to this point, but he does have 20 serviceable MLB starts under his belt. Fellow right-hander John Gant was used exclusively out of the ’pen in 2019-20 but also made 19 starts for the Cardinals in 2018 and threw well in that showing. Lefty Genesis Cabrera has been used primarily as a reliever in the Majors over the past two seasons but has almost exclusively started as a minor leaguer. Prospects Johan Oviedo and Jake Woodford both made their Major League debuts in 2020 as well.

It wouldn’t be a shock if the Cardinals looked into some additional starting options — they reportedly had some degree of interest in Jake Odorizzi — though the in-house depth they have should be able to hold things down as long as Mikolas isn’t in line for a significant absence. If the Cardinals do want to add some veteran depth, there are still a few free agents of note on the market, including Rick Porcello, Trevor Cahill and Homer Bailey. Others could hit the market in the coming weeks as veterans exercise opt-out provisions in non-roster deals around the league, and at least a handful of depth options figure to hit waivers as teams continue to inch closer to setting Opening Day rosters.

Players Avoiding Arbitration: 1/15/21

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The deadline to exchange arbitration figures is today at 1pm ET. As of this morning, there were 125 arbitration-eligible players who’d yet to agree to terms on their contract for the upcoming 2021 season. Arbitration is muddier than ever before thanks to the shortened 2020 schedule, which most believe will lead to record number of arb hearings this winter. Be that as it may, it’s still reasonable to expect dozens of contractual agreements to filter in over the next couple of hours.

We’ll highlight some of the more high-profile cases in separate posts with more in-depth breakdowns, but the majority of today’s dealings will be smaller-scale increases that don’t radically alter a team’s payroll or a player’s trade candidacy. As such, we’ll just run through most of today’s agreements in this post.

I’ve embedded MLBTR’s 2021 Arbitration Tracker in the post (those in the mobile app or viewing on mobile web will want to turn their phones sideways). Our tracker can be sorted by team, by service time and/or by Super Two status, allowing users to check the status on whichever groups of players they like. You can also check out Matt Swartz’s projected arbitration salaries for this year’s class, and we’ll do a quick sentence on each player’s agreement at the bottom of this post as well, with the most recent agreements sitting atop the list.

Today’s Agreements (chronologically, newest to oldest)

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Cardinals Purchase Contracts Of Max Schrock, Roel Ramirez

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The Cardinals announced four new additions to the active roster. Two of those players, infielder Max Schrock and righty Roel Ramirez, first had to be selected to the 40-man roster. Also coming up are righty Alex Reyes and southpaw Genesis Cabrera.

Each of these moves, excepting that of Ramirez, was already known to be in the works. Some had hoped the team was also plotting the arrival of top prospect Dylan Carlson, but it seems that’ll have to wait a while longer.

Ramirez, 25, came to the Cards with Cabrera in the Tommy Pham swap. He worked to a 4.78 ERA in 75 1/3 upper-minors innings last year, carrying 10.2 K/9 against 3.6 BB/9. Ramirez went on to have a nice run in the Arizona Fall League, allowing only three earned runs with a 16:3 K/BB ratio over 13 1/3 frames.

Latest On Cardinals’ Potential Roster Additions

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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.

COVID News & Notes: Freeman, Paredes, Cardinals

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COVID-19 has taken its toll on the baseball world, with Freddie Freeman being one of the most prominent names to test positive for the virus.  Now recovered and back at the Braves’ camp, Freeman told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Gabriel Burns and other reporters about his experience, which included a week of symptoms that even left Freeman fearful for his life on the evening of July 3 when he ran a fever of 104.5 degrees.  “I said a little prayer that night.  I’ve never been that hot before.  My body was really, really hot,” Freeman explained.  “So I said, ’Please don’t take me.’  I wasn’t ready.  It got a little worrisome that night for me.”

Fortunately, Freeman’s decreased to 101 degrees the following morning, and three days of fever gave way to four days where “it almost felt like I had a sinus problem.  I’d stand up, get dizzy and I’d have to sit back down.”  After that, however, Freeman went nine days without any other symptoms.  After getting word yesterday that he had tested negative on two consecutive coronavirus tests, Freeman received full clearance at a local hospital and was at training camp that same afternoon.  While “we’re going to take it day by day” in terms of getting into game shape, Freeman will try to pack as much work as possible over what remains of training camp: “That’s the whole goal, for me to be ready Opening Day.”

Some more on other pending and cleared COVID-19 cases from around baseball…

  • A positive coronavirus test delayed Isaac Paredes’ arrival at the Tigers’ camp until yesterday, but the prospect is now feeling healthy, he told MLB.com’s Jason Beck.  Paredes wasn’t asymptomatic, though he was feeling better even before traveling to the United States from his home in Mexico.  One of the top prospects in Detroit’s farm system, Paredes is only 21 years old and has yet to play any Triple-A ball, though he could have potentially been a candidate for the Tigers’ Opening Day roster had he been healthy.  Instead, Paredes will be assigned to the taxi squad and is “ready and willing to do whatever the staff and the manager want me to do.  I’m ready to play whatever position they want me to.“
  • The Cardinals provided updates on some of their COVID-positive players (MLB.com’s Anne Rogers and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Derrick Goold were among those to report the news.)  Left-handers Genesis Cabrera and Ricardo Sanchez were both cleared to participate in training, and Cabrera was at Busch Stadium today to play catch while Sanchez will join the Cards’ taxi squad at their minor league training site.  Alex Reyes, meanwhile, confirmed that his delayed arrival to training camp was indeed due to the coronavirus, though Reyes was asymptomatic.  Once one of baseball’s top pitching prospects, Reyes has been limited to only seven MLB innings over the last three seasons due to various injuries, so the Cardinals weren’t likely to rush him to the Opening Day roster even had he been healthy.  It isn’t out of the question that Reyes will emerge at some point in the 2020 season as a hard-throwing relief option.

Cardinals Option 4 Players To Triple-A

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St. Louis is among many teams that has trimmed down its roster Thursday. The team announced that it has optioned four players – right-handers Alex Reyes and Junior Fernandez, lefty Genesis Cabrera and catcher Andrew Knizner – to Triple-A Memphis.

Reyes, once among the highest-rated prospects in the game, is the most recognizable name in the group. Thanks in large part to a variety of injuries, the 25-year-old hasn’t been able to live up to the vast hype he generated in his younger days. As of a couple months ago, the hope was that he’d at least emerge as a quality bullpen piece this season for the Cardinals. Perhaps that will indeed happen, but he’ll have to work his way back from the minors first. Thus far, Reyes has endured his fair share of difficulty in Triple-A, including during a 2019 showing in which he stumbled to a 7.39 ERA with 12.2 K/9 and 7.7 BB/9 in 28 innings.

The hard-throwing Cabrera, 23, wasn’t a great deal more successful at preventing runs than Reyes last year in Memphis, where he put up a 5.91 ERA with 9.64 K/9 and 3.55 BB/9 over 99 innings. But Cabrera, like Reyes, still counts as one of the Cardinals’ most promising young arms. Baseball America ranked Cabrera as the Cardinals’ No. 4 prospect after last season, when he totaled 20 1/3 major league innings with a 4.87 ERA and 8.41 K/9 against 4.87 BB/9.

BA also has favorable opinions of Fernandez (the Cardinals’ No. 13 prospect) and Knizner (No. 8). The 23-year-old Fernandez debuted at both the Triple-A and major league levels last season. He was especially strong in 24 1/3 frames as a member of Memphis, with which he logged a 1.48 ERA, induced grounders at a 61.7 percent clip and struck out 9.99 batters per nine with 4.07 BB/9.

Knizner batted .276/.357/.463 with 12 home runs in 280 Triple-A plate appearances a year ago, though the .226/.293/.377 line he registered in his first 58 PA in the majors fell well short. He’ll continue to remain behind Yadier Molina and Matt Wieters in the Cardinals’ pecking order at catcher.

Cardinals Likely To Use Alex Reyes In Bullpen Role

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It wasn’t that long ago that Alex Reyes was arguably baseball’s best pitching prospect — a power right-hander heralded as the Cardinals’ ace of the future, Injuries, however, have decimated Reyes’ past few years. Tommy John surgery plus lat and pectoral strains have limited him to a combined 195 2/3 innings in the past four seasons (despite working almost exclusively as a starter in that time). Still just 25 years of age, Reyes tells Rick Hummel of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he hopes to continue as a starter now that he’s healthy, but president of baseball operations John Mozeliak suggests that’s not likely — at least this season.

“It’s going to be tough for him to break our rotation given the talent and the names we have in it,” Mozeliak tells Hummel. “We are going to bring him to camp and stretch him out the best we can. But I think the likelihood of how he most likely contributes to the Cardinals in 2020 is in the bullpen.”

The Cardinals’ rotation consists of Jack Flaherty, Miles Mikolas, Dakota Hudson and Adam Wainwright. Fifth-starter candidates include Carlos Martinez (who was forced into a relief role by injuries in 2019) and winter pickup Kwang-Hyun Kim, who could work in either the rotation or the ’pen. Right-hander Daniel Ponce de Leon and lefties Genesis Cabrera and Austin Gomber are depth options on the 40-man roster. One would imagine that a healthy Martinez is the best option, but he did excel in a relief capacity in 2019 (3.17 ERA, 2.86 FIP, 9.9 K/9, 3.4 BB/9, 0.37 HR/9, 56.5 percent ground-ball rate).

Turning back to Reyes, it’s indeed difficult to see how the club could expect him to function as a starter in the short term. He’s thrown just 84 1/3 innings in the past three seasons, including just 40 1/3 frames in 2019. Dropping him back into a starter’s workload would necessitate an enormous increase in his total innings and pitches thrown — and that’s particularly problematic for a pitcher who has never even tossed 120 frames in a single season; Reyes’ career-high innings total is 115 1/3 all the way back in 2015.

That’s not to say that the talented righty doesn’t have any sort of future in the rotation, but between the organization’s pitching depth and Reyes’ injury history, it’s easy to see why the club has its sights set on a relief role in 2020. Looking down the line, Wainwright is only playing on a one-year deal, while Kim is being paid $4MM in both 2020 and 2021. A strong relief effort for Reyes this coming season could well lead to a look as a starter in 2021, but he’ll first need to prove his arm can hold up. The Cardinals control Reyes through the 2023 season.

Cardinals Notes: Ozuna, Ravelo, Wieters, CarMar, Reyes

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Some tidbits from the Cardinals as the team holds its Winter Warm-Up fan event this weekend…

  • Marcell Ozuna continues to linger as a possibility to rejoin the team, though Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch hears from a source that the Cardinals will “have to up their offer for him to return.”  Ozuna recently hinted that the Cards and Rangers were his two top suitors, and reports from earlier this month suggested that the Reds were also still in the mix.  That said, there have also been rumblings that the Rangers’ top outfield (and first base) target might be Nicholas Castellanos rather than Ozuna, and it remains to be seen if Cincinnati will further add to its rather crowded outfield after signing Shogo Akiyama.  The Cardinals themselves have quite a few outfield options to juggle, of course, and between that depth and potentially the lack of a strong bidding war for Ozuna’s services, the club may not see a reason yet to offer him a larger contract.
  • Reports from last week indicated that Rangel Ravelo was receiving interest from a KBO League team, though Cardinals president John Mozeliak told Goold and other media members that a trade was apparently very close to fruition.  Trading Ravelo to South Korea would have lessened the outfield surplus, though St. Louis instead addressed that issue by dealing Jose Martinez and Randy Arozarena to the Rays as part of a swap that involved four players and two draft picks.  As Mozeliak put it, “that’s when I took the toothpaste and tried to jam it back in the tube” in terms of walking back the Ravelo trade with the unnamed KBO team.  Since Ravelo is still somewhat buried on the Cardinals’ long list of outfield candidates, one wonders if those trade talks could be revisited (assuming the Korean team is still interested) should the Cards make another addition, such as perhaps an Ozuna signing.
  • Mozeliak told reporters (including MLB.com’s Anne Rogers) that he is “hopeful” that Matt Wieters will return as the St. Louis backup catcher.  As of last week, the Athletics were also known to have interest in Wieters’ services, though Mozeliak said that “I’m hoping we’ll get Wieters done, I really am.  Still need to dot i’s and cross the t’s on that.”  Wieters hit .214/.268/.435 with 11 home runs over 183 plate appearances for the Cards last season, with positive grades as a pitch-blocker from Baseball Prospectus even while ranking near the bottom of the league in framing.  The fact that Mozeliak directly mentioned Wieters perhaps hints at a deal being close, Rogers noted, as the executive rarely names specific targets.
  • “It feels great to be a starter again,” Carlos Martinez told reporters (including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Rick Hummel) at the Winter Warm-Up event.  Martinez has pitched well as the Cardinals’ closer in each of the last two seasons, and the right-hander said he prefers to start, though he likes both starting and relieving — “Whatever situation they put me in, I’m going to help the team.”  Shoulder problems necessitated Martinez’s shift to the bullpen, though he is now eager to get back to the rotation after claiming “100 percent” health following a minor shoulder surgery and a PRP injection in October.  The St. Louis rotation already features Jack Flaherty, Miles Mikolas, Adam Wainwright, Dakota Hudson, and newly-signed Kwang-Hyun Kim, though needless to say, Martinez won’t have any trouble regaining a slot if he returns to his 2015-17 form.
  • Alex Reyes is another Cardinals pitcher that sees himself eventually as a starter, though for now, the young righty is just happy to finally be healthy.  “Mentally, I think what helped the most is just not being around rehab, rehab, rehab. It’s been three years of strictly rehab for me…I thought it was huge for me to be able to be with my family,” Reyes told Rogers and other reporters.  Once considered one of the sport’s top prospects, Reyes has been limited to just seven MLB innings over the last three seasons due to Tommy John surgery, lat muscle surgery, a broken finger on his non-throwing hand, and a pec injury.  If Reyes can finally stay on the field, he will likely be pitching out of the Cards’ bullpen as the team gets him re-acclimated to a regular pitching schedule.

Alex Reyes Headed For Additional Testing, May Not Pitch Again In 2019

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It appears that Cardinals righty Alex Reyes is once again threatened by the potential of a season-ending injury. Mark Saxon of The Athletic tweets that Reyes is heading to St. Louis for another round of imaging and examinations on his ailing right pectoral muscle, adding that it “appears as if his 2019 season is over.”

Reyes, 25 later this month, has been limited to just 40 1/3 innings in 2019 — only three of which came at the MLB level. He hasn’t pitched in a game since a June 23 outing and hasn’t appeared in the Majors since April 5. At the time of the injury, it was announced as a pectoral strain that was only expected to cost Reyes two to three starts, but manager Mike Shildt said Wednesday that Reyes’ arm didn’t respond well to a bullpen session this week (Twitter link via Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch).

If Reyes is indeed shut down for the season, it’ll mark a third straight season for Reyes that has been virtually wiped out by injury. He didn’t pitch at all in 2017 due to Tommy John surgery, was limited to 26 innings last year thanks largely to surgery to repair a tendon in his lat muscle and has now only totaled 40 1/3 frames in 2019. Reyes is among the most highly touted pitching prospects in recent memory and was at one point hailed as a potential ace in the making, but he’s never even reached a total of 115 innings in a season between the Majors and minors combined.

The latest setback for Reyes comes at a poor time, as St. Louis has dropped four consecutive games after choosing not to add to its rotation at the trade deadline. Michael Wacha is currently holding the fifth spot in the rotation, but he’s lost that job twice already in 2019 and pitched poorly in his return to a starting role in his last outing.

Among internal alternatives, lefty Genesis Cabrera has struggled in the upper minors and in a pair of MLB starts. Right-hander Daniel Ponce de Leon made a handful of solid outings earlier this season but didn’t complete four innings in any of his three most recent starts. Lefty Austin Gomber, also on the 40-man roster, has been sidelined since mid-May. Adding depth in August is harder than ever before, and the Cardinals’ record is better than that of fellow postseason hopefuls in Milwaukee, New York, Arizona, San Francisco and Cincinnati, which lessens the likelihood of a palatable option making it to St. Louis on outright waivers.

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