Cardinals must solve young hitters 'riddle' for top prospects' sake, with Bernie Miklasz

Best Podcast in Baseball

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Sports, Baseball

4.8 • 673 Ratings

🗓️ 24 August 2024

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Within the span of only a few hours, the Cardinals demoted two of their top prospects from the past decade, sending in separate moves their top left-handed slugging prospect and one of the top right-handed hitting prospects in all of the minors. What gives and what does it mean for the Cardinals ongoing, completely confounding "riddle" when it comes to developing young hitters? To explore this defining question for the current era of Cardinals baseball, the Best Podcast in Baseball turns to a Hall of Famer. BPIB co-founder and former Post-Dispatch sports columnist Bernie Miklasz joins podcast host Derrick Goold to discuss a week that featured Nolan Gorman and Jordan Walker returning to Class AAA Memphis just a few months after they were supposed to emerge as the next core contributors in the Cardinals' lineup. Urgency rules as the Cardinals try to capture magic from a series win against Milwaukee and turn it into a last-gasp run for a playoff spot. But is that same urgency, that same pressure to produce and perform and contend every day also contributing to a cycle the Cardinals cannot escape? The opportunity gap persists and now two of the most highly prized young prospects the Cardinals have had in the past decade are caught in the conversation on whether they must go elsewhere to thrive. Young hitters arrive. Some young hitters struggle. Some young hitters are traded. Those young hitters thrive elsewhere. Miklasz describes the conversations he's had with MLB sources about where and how the Cardinals' infrastructure is lacking, and Goold details where the answers might come from the young hitters, like Masyn Winn or Alec Burleson, who have thrived after alterations to their approach or swing encouraged by the Cardinals. The Best Podcast in Baseball, sponsored by Closets by Design of St. Louis, is a production of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, StlToday.com, and Derrick Goold.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The best podcast in baseball is brought to you by Closets by Design.
0:05.6	Update your closet, garage, office, pantry, and more.
0:09.0	Imagine your home totally organized with closets by design.
0:12.6	Call 1-800 by design.
0:14.4	That's 1-800-by-design.
0:17.1	Making some calls around Major League Baseball, some of the front office types that I know
0:22.3	who I trust to give me a straight opinion on this I said like what do you in the industry
0:27.7	when you guys look at the Cardinals like what do you what do you see like what what is what
0:31.7	what's what's the riddle here what and the one thing that came up with the two or three guys that I talked to,
0:38.8	they just said, look, their infrastructure is really lacking. And again, you've written about
0:43.9	this. They have good instructors in their system. They don't have enough of them. One gentleman
0:49.0	said, you know, I kind of feel sorry for the major league staff only because the guys that they're getting coming up through the system have not had the luxury of having so many tools that most organizations give their young hitters.
1:18.5	Hello. Hello everybody and welcome to the best podcast in baseball brought to you by closet by design of St. Louis.
1:24.1	I'm St. Louis Post Dispatch baseball writer Derek Gould, and you definitely recognize the voice from the teaser up ahead.
1:32.4	It is, of course, the original co-founder of this podcast, the BPIB-O-Chi, if you will.
1:40.2	Bernie McClice. Bernie, welcome. How are you? I'm great. My day is even better now that you and I get a chance to do a little gabbing, just like old time. So thanks for invite me. What a pleasure.
1:47.2	You bet. Bernie's there in St. Louis. I have in Minneapolis after a brief sojourn out to
1:52.2	Los Angeles for the Grand College move in. I didn't miss anything with the Cardinals. Did I? Holy cow.
1:59.9	My colleagues, Lynn Worthy and Daniel Guerrero, were all over some roster upheaval.
2:05.8	Jordan Walker optioned out something that we saw coming.
2:09.4	We knew it was coming almost as soon as they uttered the word platoon.
2:13.1	Nolan Gorman out.
	...

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