With each passing week, the 2024 Cardinals season becomes more about 2025 and beyond.
Each loss diminishes the team’s already-slim hopes of earning a wild card playoff berth. So the focus must shift to what’s next.
The Cardinals got a head start on revamping their starting rotation for ’25 by acquiring Erick Fedde from the Chicago White Sox. The encouraging development of Andre Pallante creates another option that didn’t exist at the start of the season.
And while pitching prospects Michael McGreevy and Gordon Graceffo also took a step this year, fast-rising left-hander Quinn Mathews has emerged as one of the organization’s biggest success stories in recent years.
Just one year out of Stanford University, the fourth-round draft pick has raced up the organizational latter from Palm Beach, Peoria to Springfield. He has struck out 168 batters – the most in all the minor leagues this season – in 119 innings.
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He showed well at the Futures Game, throwing a scoreless inning with two strikeouts. He climbed past fellow Cardinals prospect Tink Hence on Kiley McDaniel’s midseason Top 100 prospect list on .
Over at Baseball America, a survey of minor league managers named Mathews as the top pitching prospect in the Midwest League. At , Mathews earned honorable mention for “best changeup” among the Top 100 prospects – an honor that went to Hence.
On Saturday Mathews struck out 11 batters in seven scoreless innings at Frisco, drawing attention from national media types who cover baseball prospects.
Writing for Baseball Prospectus, Grant Schiller had this assessment:
One of the best pitching prospects I’ve seen since I started as a regular in Frisco in 2014, full stop. Mathews is a big presence on the mound at 6-foot-5, and intense, appropriately utilizing the Pettite glove-over-the-face technique pre-pitch, and using his frame to get down the mound well in his dive-and-drive delivery. In his motion, he contorts his body to hide the ball and then aggressively rotates home—a deceptive look from his low-three-quarters arm slot that he repeats well.
Mathews has three legit big-league offerings in his fastball: 93-95 mph with an ever-so-slight cut that plays up due to his extension; his slider: a sharp 2-to-8 mover that plays against lefties and righties; and his changeup: a parachute change with significant velo differentiation that missed bats even as he struggled to keep it down. I jotted down grades of 55 on the heater, 60 on the slide-piece, and 65 on the cambio. It’s a quality arsenal that is only buoyed by projected above-average command and deception.
It all should add up to a high-quality mid-rotation starter, with further right-tail outcomes if Mathews tacks on more strength onto his lower half and any added velocity comes with it.Â
After recovering from his heavy usage in college and adding more strength, Mathews, 23, came into this season with more fastball zip. And unlike fellow Cardinals prospects Hence, Tekoah Roby and Sem Robberse, he remained healthy this season and stacked up innings.
“People talk about progressing and leveling up and getting into the higher and higher ranks, but my pro journey started a little later,” Mathews told . “The hope and the intent going into the season was how quickly can I work up into the system and what opportunities will I give myself to put myself in a position to move up.”
Moving from a pitching-friendly environment at the Cardinals’ Jupiter complex to Peoria was an adjustment. Stepping up to the Double-A level at Springfield was an even bigger step, given the higher talent level.
“I’ve had to adjust quite a bit,†Mathews said. “These guys are definitely older and better and more selective. They don’t really chase as much, which can be frustrating at times when you’re making what used to be a quality pitch and now it’s an easy take.â€
Mathews’ maturity and polish will make him a candidate to pitch in the big leagues next season, adding another option as the Cardinals try to regain their standing in the National League Central.
TALKIN’ BASEBALL
Here is what folks are writing about Our National Pastime:
Will Leitch, : “The Brewers are now 20 games over .500 for the first time all year. This team, in case you forgot, lost its manager, Craig Counsell, and its ace, Corbin Burnes, and has been ravaged by injuries, most painfully to Christian Yelich, who is now out for the year. And remember last year’s 92-win NL Central-winning team, the one that had all those players? This one is clearly better.”
Bradford Doolittle, : “(Willy) Adames is a consistent performer, a veritable rock on a consistently contending team and arguably the heart of the Milwaukee clubhouse. He's also a high-strikeout, low-average hitter who even in 2024 tends to get overlooked. He's a steady-to-spectacular glove man at the most premium position on the field and has hit 96 homers at that spot over the past four years, while posting 13.8 bWAR. For all that: zero All-Star appearances.”
Jay Jaffe, FanGraphs: “On any given day in the not-too-distant past, the Yankees, Orioles, Guardians, Dodgers, and Phillies might have laid claims to the best record in their respective leagues, yet all of them have also gone through recent stretches where they’ve looked quite ordinary — and beatable. To cherrypick just a few examples, at the All-Star break the Phillies had the major’s best record at 62-34 (.646), but since then, they’re 11-17 (.393). They were briefly surpassed by the Dodgers, who themselves shirked the mantle of the NL’s top record. Over in the AL, on August 2 the Guardians were an AL-best 67-42… and then they lost seven straight. The Yankees and Orioles have been trading the AL East lead back and forth for most of the season, but over the past two months, both have sub-.500 records. And so on. At this writing, not a single team has a winning percentage of .600, a pace that equates to just over 97 wins over a full season. If that holds up, it would not only be the first time since 2014 that no team reached 100 wins in a season — excluding the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, of course — but also the first since ’07 that no team reached 97 wins.â€
Bob Nightengale, USA Today: “It was 20 months ago when the Oakland A’s traded their stud catcher, Sean Murphy, to Atlanta for five prized prospects. Well, that trade has been a colossal bust. The A’s just designated reliever Kyle Muller for assignment, who was one of the headliners in the deal. The others: Outfielder Esteury Ruiz is currently injured at Triple-A. Right-hander Freddy Tarnok was designated for assignment. Catcher Manny Pina was released after four games. And minor-league reliever Royber Salinas is out for the season after yielding a 9.95 ERA at Triple-A. Oh, and to make matters worse, the A’s actually acquired All-Star catcher William Contreras from Atlanta, only to flip him to Milwaukee for Ruiz in the three-way trade.â€
Kiri Oller, FanGraphs: “Over the course of 162 games, a team’s production settles into a reasonable representation of the squad’s true talent. But zoom in on any random seven-game stretch and the team on the field might look like a bunch of dudes in baseball player cosplay. What applies to team outcomes applies just as well to player outcomes. A player with a perfectly respectable stat line in the regular season might morph into a pumpkin as the calendar shifts to fall, or on the flip side, an unlikely hero may emerge from the ashes of a cruel summer and put the whole team on his back. With the law of averages in mind, I’d always assumed that the more consistent hitters would be better positioned to perform well in the playoffs. My thinking went like this: The natural variation in these hitters’ performances would never wander too far from their season-long average, making them the safer, more predictable options. Whereas streaky hitters — the ones with high highs, low lows, and steep transitions between the two — would be too reliant on ‘getting hot at the right time’ to be the type of hitter a front office should depend on in the postseason. Reader, I was incorrect. As it turns out, the postseason likes its hitters like it likes its microwave burritos: blazing hot one bite, ice cold the next. That’s not to say that the postseason turns its nose up at the microwave’s other offerings, but rather than sticking to foods like mac and cheese that deliver a uniform temperature through the simple act of stirring, October baseball insists on imperiling its taste buds on pizza rolls and Hot Pockets and whatever other dough-encased compilations of meat and cheese appear in the frozen food aisle. You know, the types of foods for which each bite reveals either lava straight from the depths of Hell or a substance masquerading as a discarded flavor from the Dippin’ Dots test kitchen.â€
MEGAPHONE
“You have Tommy (Edman) hitting ninth and just adding tremendous length … it's just a relentless lineup. When you’ve got Max Muncy hitting seventh in the lineup, that's saying something.â€
Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, on bringing Edman and Muncy over the injured list Monday.