J.J. Wetherholt and Quinn Matthews are a sneak preview of a bright Cardinals' future
St. Louis is down at the moment, but these prospects should provide a spark.
There’s nothing better than a homegrown talent. A player who doesn’t put on your jersey and immediately makes the front office take out a loan is a godsend to a team in need of a spark or two like the St. Louis Cardinals. A team turning back the clock of their organizational development needs all the farm hands they can find in their search for a higher level of competition.
You know, the good old days of actually winning playoff games. It’s only been a little over five years since the last playoff win in St. Louis, but fans make it seem like twenty have passed. Standards are and will always be higher around here. Players like J.J. Wetherholt and Quinn Matthews are golden examples of homegrown talent looking like a silky parachute to a team in need.
Whatever hesitation their prospect status provides should be obliterated by the hopefulness of their raw ability. Each are lefties in a certain regard, either by swing or arm. Say what you want about Wetherholt’s blast on his first game in spring training this week, but he smashed the crap out of a baseball to the opposite field on a swing that didn’t require a monstrous weight shift or drop to a single knee in its follow-through.
He saw a target and swung nice and easy, like Ken Griffey Jr. was nodding nearby. It was a single at-bat but far from luck, something I am sure thousands of fans blurted out when someone near them got excited. Ladies and gentlemen, this city needs all the excitement it can get with opening day ticket sales already looking rough. Shots of baseball espresso like Masyn Winn and Wetherholt are players you build enthusiasm around, hopefully enough to spark renewed interest. The sea of red should be shirts, not just seats.
Wetherholt seemed as confident and collected during that swing as a guy who had been in Jupiter for years and wasn’t just drafted out of West Virginia in the first round last summer. At a time when players with his experience are taking swings on backfields or B-squad games, Wetherholt is bashing baseballs so far that the outfielder can simply look up slightly instead of running to the wall.
He gives the team a freshly lethal lefthanded bat to install wherever the need arises. He’ll play all over the infield except for first and could find himself in the outfield if necessary. With the new vision being “young and cheap is better than older and expensive,” let’s hope it doesn’t take long for Wetherholt to make a dent with the big club. 2025 will surely be spent flying through the minor league ranks; something tells me this kid will be using a jet for that flight.
At the age of 21 mere months after being selected, Wetherholt slashed .295/.405/.400 in 129 plate appearances with Palm Beach, Class A ball. While one would like to see more pop from the kid, you love the batting average and 40% on base mark. This is the stat you should remember: He struck out less times (15) than he walked (16). For a young kid, that’s a mint condition start.
Quinn Matthews is no slouch. The southpaw was the prospect at the Winter Warm-up who didn’t answer questions like a baseball politician and seemed more like a guy stepping into a different league with the same mindset cobbled together a decade ago. He was candid and invested in the process. His easy going follow-through on the pitching mound is as fluid as his vocal delivery on questions, including one from MLB.com reporter John Denton about an at-bat against Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
Matthews threw him a changeup that caught too much of the zone, noting the hitter’s eyes lit up at the sight of it. He made a mental note about not doing that again, instead of thinking he could get it past him again. Drafted in the fourth round in 2023, Matthews shut down the Toronto Blue Jays for two innings, striking out Guerrero Jr. for his first professional strikeout.
He gave up a pair of singles and a walk in the second inning of his work after a 1-2-3 first inning, but struck out a batter to escape the jam. Originally drafted by Tampa Bay in 2022, Matthews looked pretty smooth for a guy who only had a handful of starts at AAA Memphis last summer. Before his struggles there in just four starts, Matthews carried a 70 to 15 strikeout/walk ratio in the hitter-friendly AA ball. He touched 94 mph with the fastball and mixed in a couple of other pitches.
Matthews’ delivery is as smooth as Wetherholt’s swing is vicious, and we’re only in the beginning of the evolution of what hopefully are a couple cornerstone pieces moving forward. Both of these guys will likely begin the season at Springfield or Memphis, but they won’t be down for long.
Both are special talents. Matthews said no to Tampa and finished his senior year at Stanford, cranking out 156 pitches in a single game against Texas in the regionals. He’s added mph to his offerings since leaving college, according to MLB prospect rankings scouting report. The low release is what will confound hitters such as Guerrero Jr. whose eyes will enlarge only to find a loner stick in lumber in their hands after a cold dip in location from a pitch that seemed fast and juicy a second ago.
In 2023, he struck out 202 hitters across four leagues, stumbling in Memphis last year due to a high innings workload.
There’s a legit factor with these young gentlemen. They aren’t the typical up and coming prospects. He’s 24 and Wetherholt is 22. One is turning All Star hitters into Swiss cheese and the other is pistol-whipping baseballs for oppo-tacos. (The phrase is apparently legit, even if a taco for the hitter would suffice.)
A whole lot of words to say that these two are something else and should be swinging for the big club soon. Once again, if you’re going to cut payroll and add no new payroll in a so-called youth movement… play the damn youth!
Thanks for reading and please, be kind to each other out there. We’re all going through it.