The Cardinals allowed Victor Scott and Jordan Walker to skip Triple-A but that worked to the detriment of the organization and perhaps the players too.
Originally this article was going to be about Victor Scott and just Victor Scott, going something along the lines of “Victor Scott is a talented prospect who isn’t ready for the majors yet because of x, y, and z”. But as I was writing this article, I realized I couldn’t talk about Victor Scott without talking about Jordan Walker.
And then I realized that I couldn’t talk about Victor Scott and Jordan Walker without talking about player development and prospect timelines as a whole.
So here we are.
Anyways, since I just wrote about player development from a pitching perspective, it’s only fitting that we take a look at the hitting side of things today.
I want to start getting into what Victor Scott showed us in his first 20 major league games.
Victor Scott’s First MLB Stint
Victor Scott was almost exactly what I thought he would be in his first major league stint. This isn’t me trying to trying to say “I told you so”, though, becuase, even with my low expectations, Scott was actually much worse than I thought he would be.
Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t expect him to be good but I certainly didn’t expect him to be the third worst player in baseball according to fWAR (-0.9).
Yes, that was a painful intro to write and no I don’t mean to rip into Scott with this article. I actually like Victor Scott. A lot. I’m simply calling things as they happened.
I didn’t expect Scott to hit. And, well, saying he didn’t hit is quite an understatement. I thought he would be flat out bad at the plate but he was flat out terrible instead. 20 games isn’t a particularly large sample size but there is simply no defending a -19 wRC+ .
What I did expect Scott to do well was play center field. And that’s where I was wrong again. Scott made some great plays but he was also inconsistent defensively and the numbers bear this out.
The speedster ended his first stint with 0 defensive runs saved and -1 outs above average and that seems fair to me, despite the limitations of small sample size defensive stats.
I don’t mean to say that Victor Scott is a bad defender but I do mean to say that Scott still needs some refinement with the glove too.
For somebody with his speed, athleticism, and defensive talent, he was often limited by poor reads that gave him less time to get to the ball. That’s how an 80 grade speedster grades out negatively per OAA.
It was obvious to my eye when Scott got a bad read on the ball and froze or went the wrong direction with his first step but Baseball Savant’s jump metric helps quantify what we saw.
Scott’s jump grade from Baseball Savant ranks in the bottom 40 of major league outfielders (-1.1 feet vs avg) but we can break this down even further. Savant breaks down jump into 3 components – reaction, burst, and route. Those 3 are pretty self-explanatory. Reaction is a player’s reaction time, the burst is a measure of his speed off the jump, and route is a measure of how efficient his route to the ball is.
This is helpful because it lets us know just where Scott struggles. And the answer is clearly his reaction time. The speedster had the 6th worst outfield reaction time in the league and that really limited him. He simply didn’t look comfortable reading the ball off the bat at times.
So take the second worst offensive player in league by wRC+ (min 60 PAs) and give him average to below average center field defense and you end up with a -0.9 fWAR player.
This isn’t how anyone wanted Scott’s debut to go but this is why Scott shouldn’t have been on the team in the first place.
And this isn’t me being reactionary. In fact, I wrote a series of Spring Training notebooks this spring and in almost every one of them I argued against Scott making the team and for starting Michael Siani in centerfield, which seems to be the outfield alignment that the Cardinals have finally settled on.
I’m not willing to give the Cardinals a pass on this either. I’ve heard the argument that the Cardinals had to put Victor Scott on the team because of the Dylan Carlson and Tommy Edman injuries. The thinking behind that is “who else is going to start at center field”. My answer is Michael Siani. And if not him, the Cardinals had a full offseason with which to acquire players that could play up the middle instead of a bunch of OBP-oriented corner guys.
There were simply too many red flags in Victor Scott’s profile to let an exciting spring training full of singles wash that away.
His minor league numbers show this.
Scott didn’t show a ton of power in the minor leagues and he also showed himself to be something of a free swinger. That was true in Double-A, so why would we expect that to change in the majors?
His .051 ISO and 3.3% walk rate in the majors show both of those things to still be true at the highest level and that makes sense for a couple of reasons. The first is that we shouldn’t expect a player with no more than half a season of Double-A experience under his belt to suddenly blossom into a patient slugger or anything resembling one.
But the second reason is because those things are connected. Scott isn’t a particularly dangerous hitter and pitchers know that so they were willing to pound the zone at a 54.2% rate. That’s 6 percentage points higher than the league average. Factor in a higher than average chase rate and we’ve got a recipe for a speedster who can’t get on base via walk or hit.
Factor in the defensive inconsistencies and the Cardinals didn’t just risk Scott’s development by throwing him into the deep end when he wasn’t prepared for it, they also sacrificed major league production.
And while both of those things are bad, the worst thing is that the Cardinals fell into the same trap that they fell into in 2023 with Jordan Walker.
The Importance of a Normal Development Pace
In both instances the organization rushed the promising prospect to fill a perceived need at the major league level without regard for caution or hierarchical development.
There are two main problems with this, which I alluded to above. The first problem, which I’ll cover second is that it risks hurting a player’s development. The second problem is that it risks playing a worse player at the expense of a better one.
This second problem is what I want to focus on first and I’ll start by asking a question.
How much fWAR have the Cardinals gotten from Victor Scott and Jordan Walker?
The answer is -0.1. That is heavily weighed down by Victor Scott’s -0.9 fWAR but even Jordan Walker, despite the impressive offensive season he had last year, finished 2023 with just 1 fWAR. And this year he is showing some of the same problems that he had in 2023.
And that’s my point. Development is important but so too is winning. Winning at the major league level is the point of player development. By promoting prospects too aggressively without regard for the difficulties of jumping from Triple-A to the majors, the Cardinals are sacrificing production at the highest level.
We tend to overrate the shiny new toy who has never struggled at the major league level and underrate the guy who has been there and done that but not shown anything special but the high ceiling of the shiny new toy tends to have an equally low floor.
That’s because refinement matters. And patience helps.
Baseball is very much a game of tools and in the age of modern metrics those tools have become more easily quantifiable. That’s a great thing. But baseball is also a game of refinement. It’s ideal if prospects for contending teams do most of their refinement in the minors (which isn’t to say that the refinement stops once they get promoted).
Skipping the highest level of the minors tends to shorten that refinement process.
We all knew prior to Jordan Walker debuting that the guy could hit the ball hard. In fact, we knew he could hit the ball salivatingly hard. But the holes in his game, such as his inability to elevate the low pitch or play right field, were ignored. The same is true of Victor Scott.
We knew he could fly and make spectacular plays and his multitude of singles in spring training caused people to overlook his lack of power, questionable plate approach, and overall lack of defensive refinement.
Neither player was ready to be in the majors and yet the Cardinals became enamored with the shine of these prospects and their impressive spring campaigns and became blinded to their faults and the development that they still needed.
That hurt the product on the field. And that’s an undeniable statement. We can quantify player impact with a number of metrics like fWAR, wRC+, and OAA. We know that these players didn’t fare well.
What we can’t measure is the impact that rushed major league assignments have on their developmental process. Because of that it’s hard to say whether a rushed assignment to the majors has a negligible, negative, or positive impact on the player.
There’s a reason I’m not spending much time on this point.
But I will say that the major league production (or lack thereof) provided by the player himself is not worth the risk to that player’s development. Baseball is a mental game after all, no matter all the statistics we have to measure physical performance. And sometimes people struggle in the face of failure. Especially when that failure is as public as it is at the major league level.
That’s just human nature.
I don’t know what this looks like for professional athletes. That’s why I usually stick to quantifiable realms when I write articles but is important to consider the human element here.
So all I’ll say is that Triple-A exists for a reason. In 99% of cases it’s necessary for a player to reach Triple-A and face the incrementally better pitching that comes from Triple-A pitchers. It’s a big jump from Triple-A to the majors and an even bigger one from Double-A to the majors.
That’s why it’s important to have other guys on the 40-man roster who can play an bridge role when a big-name prospect still needs some more seasoning. The Cardinals had that to an extent this year with Michael Siani and they could have done more in the offseason to add guys who can play up the middle. Last year there was even more outfield depth on Opening Day.
Neither player had to be on the Opening Day roster but by adding them to the team the Cardinals not only sacrificed the product on the field but they also disrupted the normal flow of development for a prospect. That second issue is something that we won’t be able to measure the effects of but it’s still important, and perhaps even more important than the first issue.
Final Thoughts
This has been more of a stream of consciousness article than my usual analytical articles and that’s kind of the point because it’s hard, if not impossible, to quantify the mental and developmental aspect of the game. I wish I could do more but it’s impossible to know how premature promotions affected Victor Scott and Jordan Walker without getting into their heads.
But my main point here is that prospects shouldn’t be rushed to the majors no matter how loud their tools are. Triple-A exists for a reason and the vast majority of prospects need to have some Triple-A developmental experience before they’re ready for the majors. In fact, even Masyn Winn had a standout Spring Training last year, didn’t make the team, went to Triple-A, and then struggled upon his first exposure to the majors leagues.
The gap between Triple-A and the majors is large and that fact shouldn’t be glossed over. Player development isn’t something that should be rushed barring extreme circumstances and Triple-A is a key level for continued development.
This goes for pitchers too. Andre Pallante practically skipped Triple-A (he pitched just 5 innings there before debuting) and while his time in the majors has been up and down (and mostly down recently), he has consistently struggled with the same things – his command and his breaking balls.
But because success matters in the majors, Pallante has prioritized throwing his good pitches over his bad ones. That means 70-80% fastball usage and a lack of in-game development with the pitches that really need to develop (his curveball and his slider).
Keeping him as a starter in Triple-A instead of rushing him to the majors could have helped him learn effective pitch sequencing, better command, and better breaking ball feel.
And then there’s Jordan Hicks. The flamethrower skipped Double-A and Triple-A to come straight to the majors and while he was an effective reliever with the Cardinals, his role was also limited by the premature promotion.
In the bullpen we didn’t see him rely on his splitter and his command came and went. More seasoning in a starter’s role in the minors may have helped both of those things.
So my main point here is that we have seen the St. Louis Cardinals become more willing to skip the highest level of the minors in recent years and I’m hoping to see that change in the future, both for the organization’s and the player’s sake.
Thanks for reading.