The drumbeat of expected acquisitions by the St. Louis Cardinals was consistent throughout the winter.
President of baseball operations Chaim Bloom and his staff hunted starting pitching depth, and Dustin May arrived as a free agent.
He was supplemented by Hunter Dobbins and Richard Fitts in trades, and the innings protection increased. A right-handed bat — preferably for the outfield, preferably with some thump — was the other consistent item on the menu, and the wait grew somewhat anxious.
A couple of weeks into camp, the signing of Ramón Urías seemingly put an end to the hunt. As a glove-first infielder, the veteran presence didn’t quite fit the need, but his arrival allowed José Fermín and Thomas Saggese to shift more significantly to the outfield, so with a strong squint the picture arguably came into focus. By then, though, something else was obscuring the view — and so far, for the better.
Nelson Velázquez didn’t sign with the Cardinals to any fanfare, or even much notice. The first hint that he would be in camp came with the unceremonious distribution of a spring training roster on which he was listed as a nonroster invitee, and there were less expectations than open-ended possibilities. He was, in every sense, a standard spring training lottery ticket. At 27 years old and with 31 big league homers, a team starved for power could do worse than to let him swing away.
Throughout camp, he has been the team’s most productive hitter, and his spot on the opening-day roster — indeed, in the middle of the opening-day lineup — is all but guaranteed.
Velázquez leads the team with four homers and nine RBIs and, perhaps most importantly, has struck out just three times in his first 33 at-bats. For a hitter with a career 28.8% strikeout rate, dropping that number below 10% is certainly not sustainable, but it shows marked improvement in what would otherwise be the one glaring flaw in his offensive profile.
Baseball-Reference carries a useful tool in its kit of measurements for spring training accomplishments, tracking the average quality of pitcher faced by a hitter in exhibition play. It’s useful in establishing a rough sense of which results are real and which are the product of crushing inferior competition; Velázquez holds a 7.5 out of 10 on their scale, placing his average opposing pitcher halfway on the continuum between Double-A and Triple-A.
Still, that number is fairly representative of an average big league starter’s spring training experience. Alec Burleson is set to start north of 140 games for the Cardinals at first base, and he’s also at a 7.5 on the same scale. Pedro Pagés, the starting catcher, is also a 7.5.
Masyn Winn is a tick higher, coming in at 7.9. That’s the nature of spring training: You can only judge a player by how he competes against the guys on the other side of the field, and Velázquez hasn’t just been coming into the back halves of games and beating up on teenagers. Sunday’s homer against former Cardinal Miles Mikolas — whatever Mikolas’ own woes at keeping the ball in the park — is a perfect illustration of Velázquez’s ability to pounce when the opportunity is presented.
While the Cardinals continue to dither on Nootbaar’s availability for opening day — even as there is, as yet, no evidence he has been able to run at full speed while supporting all of his own weight — there is little question there’s an opening in left field. Meanwhile, while Team Italy’s run at the World Baseball Classic has been a fun story throughout the sport, the major influence on Cardinals camp is that it has kept Saggese away from hands-on instruction and quiet because of a paucity of at-bats.
Given his sparse playing time, it’s difficult to make an argument for his inclusion on the opening-day roster, especially since he has minor league options remaining and Fermín does not.
Velázquez spent last season performing poorly for Kansas City’s Triple-A team and well for Pittsburgh’s in limited stints before tearing the cover off the ball in the Mexican League. Frustrated by being blocked at his position in both spots, it was clear that getting out of the system and getting a chance to show off his tools for interested suitors was his best path back to the big leagues. The Cardinals, unable to guarantee a full season’s worth of playing time to veteran outfielders given Nootbaar’s eventual return, struggled to find a match for their temporary vacancy until Velázquez’s impressive set of tools fell into their lap.
It is more likely than not that he will revert to the strikeout-heavy, low-average, sporadic power threat that defined his time with the Royals and Chicago Cubs. Not many players barnstorm baseball after a year away in Mexico to become a team’s driving offensive force, and the legacy of spring training stats will always be that they are meaningless up until the very arbitrary second at which they are declared meaningful.
Still, there’s very little harm in trying. The vacancy that dragged through the winter is one Velázquez has more than earned the right to fill. In a season in which the Cardinals are attempting to rewrite their own story, he fits neatly into that narrative. The not-so-shocking truth, of course, is that stories like his don’t often end neatly. In the meantime, they get to watch him sock a few dingers in the big leagues.
Belleville News-Democrat
Jeff Jones is a freelance sports writer and member of the Baseball Writers Association of America. He is a frequent contributor to the Belleville News-Democrat, mlb.com and other sports websites.