- Cardinals reliever Brett Cecil will stay out of game action until late next week as he battles mechanical issues, Jenifer Langosch of MLB.com writes. Cecil and the Cardinals insist he’s physically fine, but the southpaw noticed in his Wednesday appearance that he was leaving the mound too early and didn’t have his left arm in the correct position when he came set, Langosch writes He’ll need to fix those issues to have any chance at rebounding from a dreadful 2018 in which he logged a 6.89 ERA with 5.23 K/9 and 6.89 BB/9 in 32 2/3 innings. Cecil’s now in the third season of a four-year, $30.5MM contract that hasn’t worked out as hoped for the Cardinals thus far.
Cardinals Rumors
MLBTR Poll: Does Arenado Deal Impact Extensions For Goldschmidt, Rendon?
Though it took longer than expected, Manny Machado and Bryce Harper got their big deals – Machado for a decade, Harper for a baker’s dozen. In the time between their signings, next winter’s top free agent got his big payday as well – the Rockies locked up Nolan Arenado for 8 years, $260MM. Free agency’s treatment of this winter’s big fish was always going to somewhat inform Arenado’s path, but the ramifications of all three superstars having planted their respective flags extends beyond San Diego, Philadelphia, and Colorado.
With Arenado’s abdication of his position atop 2019’s free agent class, Paul Goldschmidt inherits the throne. The Cardinals are now pressed with increased urgency to sign their new first baseman to an extension, writes Ben Frederickson of the St.Louis Post-Dispatch. Though Machado and Harper were both presumptive fits on the Cardinals roster, they never really approached the bidder’s circle. Of course, as Frederickson points out, signing top free agents hasn’t been the Cardinal modus operandi. What is very much in their DNA is trading for superstars and extending (or re-signing) them, two prime examples being Mark McGwire in 1997 and Matt Holliday in 2009.
Frederickson urges the Cards to dive headlong into their partnership with Goldy, who might prove amenable to a long-term guarantee after watching Machado, Harper, and so many others tread water in free agency. An extension won’t come cheap for one of the more more accomplished hitters of his generation, who boasts an absurd 144 career wRC+, six consecutive All-Star games, four Silver Sluggers, three Gold Gloves, plus two silver medals and a bronze for MVP. And yet, there’s no ignoring the uncertainty created these past two frigid winters.
Still, the top free agents continue to make bank, and the same should be true for Goldschmidt. It was only a year ago this time that Scott Boras coaxed the Padres into giving Eric Hosmer, a far inferior player, $144MM over eight years. Frederickson cites his Post-Dispatch colleague Derrick Goold in putting forth five years, $150MM ($30MM AAV) as a potential framework for a Goldschmidt extension.
The biggest differentiator between the Machado/Harper/Hosmer trio and Goldschmidt, of course, is age. The ISE Baseball client can claim one of the most well-rounded skill sets in the league – but he will be entering his age-32 season as a free agent. Still, the smart play for the Cardinals here, Frederickson suggests, is locking in the .297/.398/.532 career hitter as soon as possible he is willing.
The Nationals have a similar conundrum on their hands with Scott Boras client Anthony Rendon. For most Boras clients, there would be little hope for an extension this close to free agency, but Boras and the Nationals have made this work before – just not in every case. The two sides have remained in contact about a Rendon extension for most of the last year, per MLB.com’s Jamal Collier. Similarly to Goldschmidt, the Arenado signing has an effect here, as Rendon jumps to the top spot among free agent third basemen.
Rendon’s been a foundational piece throughout the Harper/Strasburg era in DC, batting .285/.361/.469 over six seasons in DC. He creates 23% more runs than average in that span, and he’s been even more impressive lately with a 141 wRC+ in 2017 and 140 wRC+ last year. Defensively he’s as sure-handed as they come, if not quite with Arenado’s flash. If it weren’t for Arenado’s vice-grip on the gold glove award, Rendon would likely have some hardware of his own.
Take a stacked positional class that includes Arenado, Kris Bryant, Matt Carpenter, Justin Turner, Eugenio Suarez, add to it superstar contemporaries in Stephen Strasburg, Max Scherzer, and Harper, plus a flourishing next generation of Nats stars like Trea Turner, Victor Robles, and Juan Soto – and Rendon’s excellence gets lost in the shuffle. Epitomizing Rendon’s place in the current canon is this: he has zero All-Star appearances despite three top-12 finishes in MVP voting. He did, however, win a Silver Slugger in 2014 and the NL Comeback Player of the Year award in 2016.
Rendon, who turns 29 in June, is set to earn $18.8MM in 2019, his last year before hitting the open market. With Arenado securing a $32.5MM AAV, what is Rendon’s value? He’s a year older and less decorated than Arenado, but Rendon’s 25.8 career fWAR compares favorably to Arenado’s 25.3 fWAR. Turning to a rate metric, Arenado’s put forth a 127 OPS+ over the past five seasons versus Rendon’s 122 OPS+ in the same span. Still, Arenado is pretty much universally regarded as the superior player.
Given their ages, neither Goldschmidt nor Rendon are likely to surpass Arenado’s contract in terms of length, but they could reach higher AAVs if their incumbent clubs take Frederickson’s advice: “Pour on the money. Scale back the years.”
Goldschmidt poll link for app users.
Rendon poll link for app users.
Cards Were Only Team To Extend Offer To Matt Wieters
- The Cardinals were the only team that made Matt Wieters an offer this winter, MLB.com’s Jenifer Langosch tweets, which is why the veteran catcher signed on with St. Louis on a minor league deal. Wieters is far from the only veteran who had a tough time finding work in the quiet free agent market, and the former four-time All-Star’s value took a severe hit following three consecutive subpar years with the Orioles and Nationals. While Wieters had to settle for a non-guaranteed deal, he at least has a solid shot at winning the job as Yadier Molina’s backup.
Cardinals Sign Matt Wieters
FEB. 28: Wieters would earn $1.5MM in the majors and can opt out on March 22nd, per Mark Saxon of The Athletic (via Twitter).
FEB. 27: The signing has been announced. It includes an invitation to MLB camp.
FEB. 26: The Cardinals have agreed to a minor-league deal with veteran catcher Matt Wieters, per Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (via Twitter). Salary terms are not yet known.
While he held out in hopes of securing a MLB commitment, the 32-year-old Wieters will settle instead for a chance to serve as a backup to Yadier Molina. The competition is fairly limited. Francisco Pena seemingly held the edge at the outset of camp after re-joining the organization on a minors pact. Joe Hudson is the only other backstop in camp with MLB experience.
Wieters can still put the ball over the fence, and posted career-best plate discipline marks in 2018, but he has not been very productive with the bat of late. Since the start of the 2016 season, he’s producing at only a .235/.303/.376 rate through 1,200 trips to the plate. That’s a far cry from the .254/.317/.436 output that Wieters managed over the prior half-decade.
Wieters isn’t generally regarded as a high-quality overall defender at this stage of his career, and fares poorly in particular in pitch-framing metrics, but does still block, throw, and manage a staff well. It’s possible there’s still some hope that he’ll restore some of his lost luster with the bat, making this a nice low-risk move for the St. Louis organization.
For the Cards, the addition deepens the catching unit as Molina closes in on his 37th birthday and works to recover from an offseason knee procedure. The switch-hitting Wieters has historically performed better against right-handed pitching, as has Molina, but neither carries significant career platoon splits. If Wieters can beat out Pena for the job, he seems like a potentially solid mate for Molina.
Despite Shoulder Issue, Martinez Eyes Rotation Spot
Carlos Martinez’s right shoulder is a major source of uncertainty for the Cardinals right now, as the righty was in camp with his arm in a sling yesterday following a platelet-rich plasma injection. Martinez was already halfway through a two-week shutdown when he received the injection, and the Cardinals indicated yesterday that said injection could push his timeline for throwing back another week. There’s been ample talk of Martinez pitching in a relief capacity this season, but Rick Hummel of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch quotes Martinez as plainly and confidently stating, “I’m going to start, man.” Because Martinez won’t resume throwing until mid-March, it seems virtually impossible for him to build up to a starter’s workload by the team’s season opener on March 28. As such, if there is indeed a plan for Martinez to work in the rotation, he’d need to start the season on the injured list. As Hummel writes, that’d open the door for one of Dakota Hudson or Austin Gomber to step into the starting five to begin the season. Manager Mike Shildt praised both Hudson and Gomber when discussing potential rotation options with Hummel.
Cardinals To Extend Miles Mikolas
4:25pm: Mikolas will receive a $5MM signing bonus and $15.75MM annual salaries, Bob Nightengale of USA Today tweets. The deal also includes $2MM in escalators and full no-trade protection, Heyman reports (Twitter links).
12:55pm: The contract does not overwrite Mikolas’ 2019 salary but runs from 2020-23, per The Athetic’s Ken Rosenthal (on Twitter). That’ll give the Cardinals control of Mikolas through his age-34 season.
12:50pm: MLB Network’s Jon Heyman tweets that Mikolas will be guaranteed a hefty $68MM over a four-year term on his new contract. That deal lines up identically with the four-year pact inked by postseason hero Nathan Eovaldi with the Red Sox earlier this winter. The deal, Heyman adds, can reach a total of $70MM in value.
12:45pm: The Cardinals and right-hander Miles Mikolas have agreed to terms on a contract extension, reports Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (via Twitter). The two sides had expressed mutual interest in completing such an arrangement back in January. Mikolas is represented by Octagon.
This time one year ago, Cardinals fans were unsure what to think of Mikolas, the team’s primary rotation addition last winter. At the time, Mikolas was a 29-year-old who’d never established himself in the Majors but put himself firmly on MLB radars with a brilliant three-year run for the Yomiuri Giants of Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball. Adding Mikolas on a two-year contract worth a guaranteed $15.5MM was met with a fair bit of skepticism.
Mikolas, however, proved his doubters wrong in emphatic fashion. In 32 starts for St. Louis, he totaled 200 2/3 innings with a pristine 2.83 ERA, 6.5 K/9, 1.3 BB/9, 0.72 HR/9 and a 49.3 percent ground-ball rate. Among qualified MLB starters, only Patrick Corbin and Jacob deGrom induced swings on pitches out of the strike zone at a higher clip than Mikolas’ brilliant 36.6 percent mark. Statcast pegged Mikolas in the 92nd and 90th percentiles, respectively, in terms of opponents’ exit velocity and hard contact allowed on a league-wide basis. Furthermore, no pitcher in baseball posted a better BB/9 mark than Mikolas, whose 3.28 FIP and 3.67 xFIP largely supported the notion that he was a quality big league starter.
Mikolas doesn’t need to replicate last season’s showing to the decimal point in order to justify the organization’s considerable expenditure — the value he provided was worth far more than $17MM last season — but he’ll need to settle in as a viable mid-rotation piece for the next few years in order to make good on the commitment. There’s little reason to doubt his ability to do so, however; as noted previously, virtually any metric agreed that Mikolas was a legitimate big league starter, and he finished the year as strongly as he started — if not more so.
For the Cardinals, locking up Mikolas now gives them some long-term solidity in a rotation that had previously stood to lose not only Mikolas but also Michael Wacha and Adam Wainwright at season’s end. Between those impending departures, ongoing concerns surrounding Carlos Martinez’s shoulder and the perennial lack of durability from wunderkind Alex Reyes, the Cardinals had a deceptively uncertain long-term outlook in terms of starting pitching. Mikolas will now team with Jack Flaherty in comprising the St. Louis rotation for years to come, and the organization certainly has hopes that some combination of Martinez, Reyes and Dakota Hudson can work to round out the starting staff in the foreseeable future.
With this deal in place, the Cardinals now have more than $101MM committed to their 2020 roster (assuming even distribution of the salary) — though that number will drop substantially in 2021 when the contracts of Yadier Molina, Matt Carpenter and Brett Cecil come off the books. The deal shouldn’t have any bearing on St. Louis’ 2019 payroll, which currently projects at just under $162MM — a slight increase over last year’s franchise-record Opening Day payroll of $159.7MM.
Carlos Martinez Receives PRP Injection, Still Two Weeks From Throwing
Cardinals right-hander Carlos Martinez is wearing a sling on his right arm in camp this morning, and manager Mike Shildt revealed to reporters that the right-hander received a platelet-rich plasma injection yesterday and is still two weeks from throwing (Twitter links via Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch). Goold reported overnight that Martinez was headed for a second opinion on his right shoulder and now adds that if Martinez is ready for Opening Day — which is not a certainty — he’ll be in a relief role.
Shoulder troubles in 2018 also sent Martinez to a bullpen role late in the year, and he’ll apparently reprise that role for at least some of the 2019 season. Subtracting him from the early rotation mix would give the Cards a group of Miles Mikolas, Jack Flaherty, Michael Wacha, Adam Wainwright and one of Alex Reyes, John Gant, Dakota Hudson, Austin Gomber and Daniel Ponce de Leon — barring an addition from outside the organization, of course. Left-handers Dallas Keuchel and Gio Gonzalez are the top two unsigned starters on the market, while other depth options include Clay Buchholz and old friend Edwin Jackson.
Goold noted within his column that Reyes’ early work in spring is thrusting him into the conversation for an Opening Day rotation spot. But, it should be noted that the right-hander only threw a combined 27 innings between the Majors and Minors in 2017-18 combined as he rehabbed from Tommy John surgery and then underwent shoulder to repair a torn tendon in his lat last June. Reyes has never reached 120 innings in a professional season, and the Cards will surely want to monitor his workload in 2019. In other words, if he does open the year as a starter, it seems unlikely that he’d be expected to hold that role all season. Even if that is the organization’s hope, his injury history suggests that he can’t be penciled in for that type of workload.
Moving Martinez to the bullpen may not be ideal, but when he’s eventually healthy, he should make for a high-quality pairing with offseason signee Andrew Miller and flamethrowing sophomore Jordan Hicks. That trio would be joined by some combination of Luke Gregerson, Brett Cecil, Dominic Leone, Chasen Shreve and perhaps some of the aforementioned rotation candidates who don’t ultimately claim a starting role. For now, the more immediate focus is on the strength and overall health of Martinez’s shoulder, as there’s an increasing chance that the Cardinals’ 2018 Opening Day starter will now open the 2019 season on the injured list rather than anywhere on the active roster.
Inside The Jose Martinez Extension
- Jose Martinez’s two-year, $3.25MM extension was “something beyond a business decision” for the Cardinals, president of baseball operations John Mozeliak told reporters, including Rick Hummel of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The unusual deal only covers this season (a pre-arbitration year for Martinez) and the slugger’s first year of arbitration of eligibility, so there technically wasn’t any urgency on the team’s part to get a deal done. In fact, Martinez was the subject of trade rumors for much of the winter, both from MLB teams and in Japan. Not wanting to either sell Martinez to the Japanese team or deprive the player of some added financial security, the extension served as a means to satisfy both Martinez and the Cardinals. (Not to mention the clubhouse as a whole, as other Cardinals players were happy to hear that their popular teammate had a new contract.) For Martinez, he cashes in his first big professional payday, which he said will go to help his family in Venezuela.
Cardinals Extend Jose Martinez Through 2020
Jose Martinez signed a two-year deal that will keep him in St. Louis through the 2020 season, the team announced (via Twitter). The team will pay the Octagon client $3.25MM guaranteed, plus incentives, per Fancred’s Jon Heyman (via Twitter).
Martinez, a late-bloomer, played his first full season in the big leagues in 2017 at the age of 28, so this deal, interestingly, protects Martinez against a possible non-tender next season, his first of arbitration eligibility. Martinez gets a little extra security, and the Cardinals send a message to the rest of the league that they’re not going to be giving up Martinez for free. The deal does not alter the Cardinals length of control over Martinez, who will be eligible for arbitration again in 2021 and 2022. Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch adds further context to the deal (via Twitter), as Martinez had opportunities to make more money in Japan. The deal forestalls conversations of a transfer by rewarding Martinez’s strong 2018 with some early financial security.
Since the Cardinals acquired Paul Goldschmidt from the Diamondbacks, trade winds have howled around Martinez, who has long been pegged as a future DH. Martinez figures to get a few starts at first and a few at designated hitter when interleague play allows, but his playing time will be cut a year after the big right-hander received 84 starts at first base and established himself as a regular in the St. Louis lineup. Goldschmidt, of course, is a free agent at season’s end, so keeping Martinez under lock and key provides the Cardinals future security as well.
Though not a strong defender, Martinez does provide some versatility – he started 46 games in right field in 2018 and figures to have a chance at more regular playing time this year if he can outmuscle the competition. Tyler O’Neill, 23, will take his best shot after a promising 130 at-bats in 2019, as will veteran Dexter Fowler, who figures to have first dibs if he can rebound from a tough 2018.
Still, the Cardinals clearly value Martinez for his bat, even if his primary role this season will be as a pinch-hitter. After hitting .305/.365/.457 last season, the challenge this season comes in finding at-bats. Considering Martinez was already under team control, there’s little risk involved here for St. Louis, though it does perhaps change the expectations of trade partners looking to snag Martinez on the cheap.
Is The Cardinals' Rotation Deep Enough?
Though the Cardinals have a deep mix of rotation candidates, Bernie Miklasz of The Athletic explores the uncertainty surrounding many of those arms in a call for the St. Louis organization to pursue free-agent lefty Dallas Keuchel (subscription required). The Cards can’t know what to expect from Adam Wainwright, Miklasz writes, and the recent shoulder troubles for Carlos Martinez have raised some questions as well. Michael Wacha, too, has had his share of injuries in recent seasons and made only 15 starts in 2018. And while ballyhooed prospect Alex Reyes has a sky-high ceiling, he’s pitched just four innings across the past two seasons (27 frames, including the minors) and will obviously be limited in ’19 as a result. Jack Flaherty and Miles Mikolas each have just one season of MLB success under their belt, and the depth options for the rotation are even less established.
Though the Cardinals have a deep mix of rotation candidates, Bernie Miklasz of The Athletic explores the uncertainty surrounding many of those arms in a call for the St. Louis organization to pursue free-agent lefty Dallas Keuchel (subscription required). The Cards can’t know what to expect from Adam Wainwright, Miklasz writes, and the recent shoulder troubles for Carlos Martinez have raised some questions as well. Michael Wacha, too, has had his share of injuries in recent seasons and made only 15 starts in 2018. And while ballyhooed prospect Alex Reyes has a sky-high ceiling, he’s pitched just four innings across the past two seasons (27 frames, including the minors) and will obviously be limited in ’19 as a result. Jack Flaherty and Miles Mikolas each have just one season of MLB success under their belt, and the depth options for the rotation are even less established.
Furthermore, each of Mikolas, Wacha and Wainwright are free agents next winter, creating some potential needs down the line. Miklasz does write, however, that the Cardinals are “confident” of reaching an extension with Mikolas. Both sides expressed interest in such a deal late last month.
