The ex-Cards bump is alive and well.
These days, nothing seems to propel an overlooked prospect or stalled major leaguer into a new opportunity elsewhere like a departure from the ºüÀêÊÓƵ Cardinals.
Departing Cardinals don’t board airplanes to their new destinations. They climb aboard spaceships. Even rocket man Elon Musk must be impressed by their launch angles.
This time it’s Dylan Carlson, who has averaged .293 with a .383 on-base percentage and a .537 slugging percentage for the Rays since the stalled former first-round pick was swapped to Tampa for reliever Shawn Armstrong. Carlson’s homered three times. One of his 12 hits in 41 at-bats was of the walk-off variety, hit in the 12th inning on Sunday to secure a sweep of the Diamondbacks, right around the time Nolan Arenado was grounding into a double play to secure a series loss to the Dodgers.
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Sure, the Rays could be naively chasing a fading postseason shot, but their small chance entering their game Monday night was as good if not better than that of the Cardinals.
When Carlson left the Cardinals, he was slashing .198/.275/.240 while starting a career-low number of games. Now, this. Maybe it won’t last. Maybe it will. But no one should be shocked if it does, because this kind of stuff keeps happening to the Cardinals.
And no, it doesn’t mean the Cardinals were wrong to trade Carlson, because there was a big body of work that suggested the Cardinals, for reasons that continue to mystify, could not get this kind of play out of Carlson.
Like an onion, the ex-Cards bump has layers. All of them make your eyes burn.
As the Cardinals keep fading from the postseason-bound pack and begin contemplating the significant changes they must make, it’s beyond time for the organization to audit the ex-Cards bump. Legitimate answers, not excuses, are needed. If this proud organization is going to reclaim its abandoned status as a draft-and-develop group, there is no time to wait.
Once upon a time, the Cardinals letting a player go was the equivalent of a baseball death sentence. The likelihood that a traded-away prospect or major leaguer would go on to do something significant elsewhere was so small, it was almost crazy. And that’s how you would generally describe teams that tried to win trades with the Cardinals — crazy.
As other teams got better, it was unlikely this trend would continue. A lot of those teams copied the Cardinals, out of respect for how they operated. Smart.
But what’s happened lately is not just an example of other teams catching up to the Cardinals. There is a growing body of evidence that suggests other teams are seeing more in Cardinals players than the Cardinals do and feeling confident they can get more production out of Cardinals players than the Cardinals can — and then they do.
Two troublesome buckets have developed under the gradual decline of Cardinals baseball on president of baseball operations John Mozeliak’s watch. He hasn’t stopped it. It doesn’t seem he can.
One bucket is reserved for players who didn’t really get a chance to define their ceiling with the Cardinals at the major league level before they were viewed as either tradable or replaceable. That’s where names like Randy Arozarena, Adolis Garcia, Sandy Alcantara, Zac Gallen, Luke Voit, Lane Thomas and Patrick Wisdom belong. With these players, the Cardinals either didn’t accurately project their talents, didn’t get as much for them as they perhaps could have based on their eventual production or some combination of the two. Some were glancing blows. Others, like Alcantara, continue to hurt and will for a long time.
The other bucket belongs to players who got plenty of chances with the Cardinals but could not capture sustained success. If they found it in the short term here, they lost it. Until they went somewhere else. This would become Carlson’s bucket, if he keeps this up. Warning: He’s not 26 until October. And he’s not a free agent until 2027.
Genesis Cabrera has managed to do it in Toronto, where he’s been far better than a league-average reliever after his frustration with his role caused the Cardinals to eject him from their plans. Tyler O’Neill has pulled it off in Boston, where during a contract season he’s shown increased interest in staying on the field while producing the best offensive numbers he’s posted since his lone sensational season with the Cardinals back in 2021. Jack Flaherty did it with Detroit, turning himself into a prized Dodgers trade-deadline acquisition.
Some will hammer the Cardinals for moving on from guys in the second bucket. Not me. You only get so many chances with a player before it’s time for a player and a team to part, especially when a player and team perform under intense pressure to win. Some places, you don’t win, and the pressure actually fades. Here, you don’t win, and the pressure only builds.
For the guys in the second bucket, the Cardinals shouldn’t be wondering if they were wrong to turn the page. They should be wondering why guys spun out so badly the page had to be turned. And they should be asking why, for some, a ticket out becomes the best thing that’s happened to them.
Poorly projecting your organization’s own talent is a crippling condition for a draft-and-develop approach. Failing to maximize your talent is another one. The Cardinals have too many examples of both during their era of erosion.