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发帖数: 10208 | 1 The ascension of Kolten Wong to buoy the Cardinals flailing late season
efforts in 2013 wasn't supposed to happen this way. It's an odd set of
circumstances preceded by an odd set of circumstances. It's also impossible
to tell whether the Cardinals are genius in their ingenuity or just crazy
enough to get lucky. See Kolten Wong's arrival is because two other players
couldn't man the field. Not at second base. But rather at third. And now
that the player who was the starting third baseman is struggling ... well,
it starts 6 years ago.
In 2007, David Freese was a nobody. Some kid who was (spoiler alert) from St
. Louis but was old for his league playing in A-ball in the San Diego Padres
system. Jim Edmonds was a folk-hero and borderline hall of fame candidate
depending on how you view peak performance. Edmonds was well past his prime
and the Cardinals had Rick Ankiel and Colby Rasmus in the system ready and
willing to take over for the veteran. Rasmus was, afterall, the next great
player in St. Louis but that is a story of it's own.
So the Cardinals traded Jim Edmonds in a rare veteran for prospect play. It
was a ballsy move for a GM still new to his role. John Mozeliak was sending
a beloved, if rapidly aging, veteran to a team for a no name prospect. It
looked -- and was to some extent -- a salary dump.
David Freese was a Cardinal now.
He immediately leapfrogged the better hitting Allen Craig upon entering the
Cardinals system. The bat wasn't in question for Craig but where the bat
would stick defensively. The organization didn't like his arm defensively at
third but Craig was a consistent offensive performer. Instead, David Freese
came to lead the third base depth chart a year after being acquired.
Suddenly he mattered in a big way to the organization.
There's a torrid history for Freese that's worth recounting but not worth
recounting in detail. Battles with alcohol abuse, drunk driving and a series
of injuries would cloud his future after having finally made the big
leagues for the Cardinals. In short, Freese was fucking this up. In what
still seems like an under-reported relationship, Matt Holliday took not-that
-young David Freese under his wing giant forearms. Freese turned things
around.
Then 2011 happened. With a crack of the bat, David Freese wasn't just that
kid from St. Louis anymore. He was that folk hero from St. Louis. The guy
who saved the Cardinals in the World Series. He was David Freese, World
Series MVP. No one remembers that Freese missed over a third of the season
due to injuries in 2011. They remember a home run. THAT home run. Freese had
100% name recognition in St. Louis overnight. Even from people who don't
care much about baseball. He had done it. He had cemented his legacy. Now he
could look forward to a blissful career in his hometown for at least the
next few years.
Meanwhile, making his way through the system was another player. Matt
Carpenter was an odd duck. He was an unheralded draftee with an odd
offensive profile. Watching Carpenter come up and be treated as a second
tier prospect now evokes comparisons to Kevin Youkilis in Moneyball. How
could everyone have missed on this player so badly? Even when he was in
professional baseball they doubted. He rarely swung at pitches instead
preferring to walk or drive "his" pitch when it finally came.
Carpenter suffered from the same lack of an obvious offensive position that
Allen Craig did. David Freese was firmly entrenched at 3B and Carpenter was
an average defender but not on Freese's level. Eventually the offense
forced the issue and the Cardinals managed to come up with 340 PAs in 2012
for Carpenter. Some of those came as rest for David Freese. World Series MVP
David Freese who walked on two glass ankles ceded time to Matt Carpenter.
Entering 2013, David Freese was bothered by a nagging back issue. When that
subsided and he joined the big league club, he was bothered by a nagging
lack of power and performance. The batting average on balls in play fell
enough to exacerbate the issue. World Series MVP David Freese wasn't around
anymore. Now it was underperforming David Freese. The same hitter who a
year earlier had posted his best major league performance. That hitter was
now scuffling ... badly at times.
So now Kolten Wong, comes up. Kolten Wong doesn't displace players like
Allen Craig or Matt Carpenter. He doesn't replace the players whose bats had
to find a home by default. Instead he displaces David Freese, former World
Series MVP. A year ago, Wong was scuffling through his own middling
performance in Springfield. A haven for left handed hitters, Wong's power
was unremarkable and he wore down as the season wore on. Now he's starting
at second base and David Freese is riding pine.
Baseball is a fickle thing. Allen Craig, Matt Carpenter and Kolten Wong will
all tell you that. But, more than anyone else right now, I suspect that
David Freese will tell you that. At 30 years old and headed into his second
year of arbitration, Freese is still a few years removed from that big, life
-altering payday. Performance matters now maybe more than it did a year or
two ago when he was available on the cheap. Freese is watching the crush of
talent make it's way through the system. The rising tide of prospects that
has crested in the last year.
The Cardinals are a loyal team and David Freese certainly has bought himself
some time with that one at bat. It was a glorious at bat and critical to
cementing the Cardinals as the "it" franchise with GM John Mozeliak as the "
it" front office personnel. But big moments doesn't buy as much time as it
used to. Now that the Cardinals have judged Kolten Wong ready for the big
show, David Freese is working with borrowed time. World Series MVP David
Freese could easily become former Cardinal David Freese.
Baseball, you see, is fickle. |
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