Juan Yepez showing the signs of a natural early on with Cardinals
The rookie isn't going back to Memphis anytime soon.
I feel sorry for Juan Yepez if he happened to love anything in particular about Memphis. The food. The music. The everything rolled into one around AutoZone Park. Because the St. Louis Cardinals’ rookie slugger isn’t going back there, at least for a while.
Prospects aren’t always easy to love. They could stay or leave, thrive or dive. If they come up and fizzle, or fail to ever achieve the stardom you think they deserve, a fan can feel the impact when it doesn’t work out. So, you give them a little time before latching onto their player profile, delaying the fall.
Yepez leaves little doubt. He acts like he’s been here for a few years, but not in a cocky way. It’s like he knows how the game is supposed to work and what a player is supposed to do. The man is a coach’s dream. He doesn’t strike out a ton, makes a pitcher work extra hard, punishes mistakes, and makes hits out of good pitches.
Most of his first batch of hits after being called up on May 4 were nicely placed bloop hits. A double that ran around from home dropping down in the no man’s land between a first baseman running out blind and a right-fielder sprinting in. He would drive a hard groundball up the middle that was too hot for a shift collapse. Yepez doesn’t hit almost-there homers either.
His debut with the Cardinals reminds me of Matt Holliday’s debut with the team back in 2009. The former Colorado Rockies left-fielder hit everything National League audiences threw him after his brief stint in Oakland. Holliday wasted no time, but was a veteran player by the time he reached the Arch grounds.
Yepez is doing it as a 24-year-old rookie. He collected 12 hits in his first seven games, striking out only four times. Through 54 at-bats, the versatile fielder has three home runs and three doubles, along with a .333/.390/.556 slash line. Pitchers aren’t dealing with him quickly, either.
It’s a long at-bat more times than not with Yepez, which just shows the pitcher’s full deck of cards to the dugout. How a slider breaks and when it breaks; the particular bite a two-seam fastball will have in live action and not on an iPad. Thank Yepez for the daily scouting report.
When it comes to fielding, he’s all over already early on with the team. He’s started five games as a designated hitter, but also four games in right and left field, respectively. Yepez also logged a start at first base while Paul Goldschmidt rested his legs as the D.H.
The Cardinals couldn’t ask a five-year veteran for more than what Yepez is giving them, let alone a rookie. He’s working over pitchers while mashing them, and giving four different regulars a rest day at some point. Yepez has started every single game since being called up earlier this month. A regularity with a rookie player that is slowly becoming more common with the Cards; slowly but surely, hence the quick arrival of second baseman, Nolan Gorman.
A new look for the Cardinals involves more young, homegrown talent. It’s the card the St. Louis front office is playing at the moment, while having cornerstone players like Goldschmidt and Nolan Arenado guarding the future of the lineup and team until a steady hand arrives. It’s the reason John Mozeliak and Michael Girsch didn’t trade Gorman or the newly called up Matthew Liberatore this past offseason. Cheap talent that could surprise is a better mortgage than a veteran who may have lost his touch all together. (Corey Dickerson, ding ding!)
Yepez is looking like a sure thing faster than most prospects do, wasting no time with a barrage of hits in his first two weeks with the team. The future should include more of that, with more power showing up as he gets more comfortable and sees more of the divisional opposition.
Let’s not go sucking all the funnel cake sugar dust just yet. He won’t win the MVP next year and break the single-season batting average record. He won’t pick up the entire team and throw them on his back in 2023. And that’s completely fine, because there’s still a lot of time.
Just go ahead and take him off your trade possibility board. He’s staying put, most likely in the cleanup or fifth spot in the batting order. He could single, double, homer, or draw a walk.
The main thing is, Juan Yepez can flat out hit. It was a nice trade after all.
