A new story from Baseball Tonight with Buster Olney

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Don't have any doubt about that. I think you got a new catcher in there and Contreras. And I want to be new as far as Ricky, but with the organization, there's going to be some growing pains between pitching staff, Contreras, once we remove a stabilizer like Molina, but Goldschmidt aron auto, the young players who maybe need to kind of become more consistent and there's a lot of same players on that team, but I'm preaching patients. I think it's, you know, we've seen them win World Series, you know, entering as a wildcard. The Cardinals always seem to be good. And I don't sense that this season is the year they're going to be bad, but I am concerned about their pitching. They're starting pitching in particular. I'm going to go panic on the Cardinals because that's what it feels like the front office is doing. Like to me, if you're going to start the year with Jordan walker in the big leagues, you are committing to, hey, you know what? We're going to start this guy's service time clock because we believe in him and we believe that if he struggles early in his career, he's going to weather that and he's going to move forward. And I starts off as to where it gets hit in every game for two weeks. And then we start hearing, well, he doesn't hit the ball in the air enough. Well, you know what? He still has been that's who he's been in the past. He's never been a big home run hitter. I think everybody anticipates that eventually that he'll get to that. But we knew all that about Jordan walker coming in. And we knew, you know, a guy 20 years old first month in the big leagues that he probably was going to have veteran pitchers adjust to him and he was going to have to make adjustments. What this feels like to me is that the team's not playing well and they're trying to figure out how to shuffle the chairs on the Titanic early in the season. And you know what? It's just easier to move a young player than it is in older guy and I don't get it. Like either if you were going to start the year with Jordan walker in the big leagues, you were going to commit to him for a good long time and instead they're sending him down to the marginal league because I don't get it. And I would say that given the cardinals and some of the star players they have there, Jordan walker shouldn't be looked on to be the guy that kind of carries this group. I mean, if you were going to hit Charles, that's my point. He shouldn't be the guy that we're going to zero in on and be like, well, we're going to replace that person because he's the three hitter. He's the two hitter, you know? That's not the case. So I hear you. We all, you know, we all got a chance to see with him and interact with Jordan during spring training. He said, hell of a kid, he's got all sorts of talent. Yeah, but how many times we've seen players come up get sent down? They working on some things. They realize, you know what? I don't belong here down here. I do belong up there. Maybe there's some mechanical things he can do to but he knows he knows where he belongs and let's hope he gets called back up and they do well, but to your point, he's not the guy that you should be looking at on that team to say, well, if he's not producing we're in trouble, I also think that they are in a situation now where you and I have talked to a lot the last two years about this great volume of position player prospects that they have. You know what? They have to go and find a deal in which they begin to turn over some of those resources and use some of those guys. Maybe to go overpay for a young starting pitcher, not only to help the rotation, but if you continue to handle these guys in this way, Tyler O'Neill, et cetera, you're going to lose value when that group. It feels like they're going day to day. Well, let's go with this guy because he had a good day yesterday. And then you put a Tyler O'Neill on the bench, you've got to be more aggressive than that, I think. I don't think you can just hold on to 8 guys for three spots and expect that you're going to have something necessarily great come out of that because your hemorrhaging value every day you don't make choices. I would agree. I mean, there is such thing as having too much of the same thing when none of them are really allowed to get a footing and excel. You look at certain teams and you're looking and you're like, boy, they have a lot of the same player. And that's versatility. That's offensive upside. You know, that's some speed. There's athleticism. There's youth, but there's a whole group of them. And an ideally you'd like to have some of those separators. And that's hard to do when, as you said, you know, you're kind of moving them between playing and sitting, sitting and playing very hard in this game to get consistency. As everybody knows, that's why we have the minor leagues. We got to get guys consistent playing consistent at bats and see what can happen. Panic patients are party, Ronald lacuna junior so far this year, Carl batting three 52, but these are the numbers that really jump out to me. 16 walks, 17 strikeouts. 9 doubles, four homers, 13 steals. This is the best case scenario for me. I'm party and if I'm the braves seeing what I'm seeing at a Ronald Cooney junior. I mean, I'm not even sure I understand the question. Like, how are we framing him and patience or panic in any way? You heard me last week when you sort of said, all right, so what's the most likely least likely thing to happen? I was worried about his legs and why are we going to get close to 50 steals? He may steal 7 bases the way that he's running around and feeling so good about himself. Of course we're party and I think again we are often reminded when a guy gets hurt and then comes back and it's a little bit slow to come back

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