The Cardinals may have stumbled again on the field, but one of baseball’s most respected prospect voices thinks the organization is moving in the right direction where it matters most.
Keith Law of The Athletic, who covers MLB prospects, recently joined 101espn’s BK and Ferrario and said the Cardinals’ farm system is making real progress under POBO Chaim Bloom. Law pointed to the kind of player-development engine that separates strong organizations from the rest, using the Dodgers as the standard.
“The Dodgers’ system is full of guys they drafted, but also guys they brought in from organizations and made them better,” Law said. “Their previous organizations weren’t able to help them in the same way, and the Dodgers could.
For them, it’s a lot of velocity gains, and it’s a lot of swing adjustments. Those are their core competencies in terms of player development.
…
“It just opens everything up. You can draft different guys, you can target different guys in trades.
Majors and minors when you know you have these kinds of capabilities. And so it [also] opens the Cardinals up to do all kinds of different things!”
Law didn’t stop there. He said the Cardinals’ system belongs among the best in the sport and could keep climbing as more recent draft picks get evaluated.
“The Cardinals farm system is clearly in the top ten in baseball, probably trending toward the top five. I’d like to see what some of these recently drafted guys look like…Once I get some reports on those guys, I’ll feel a little bit more confident.
But I generally liked what they did in the draft, and I liked what they did at the trade deadline. …
“I think the system has taken a really nice step forward. Between those two things, and the advancement of all these players…I was always a Chaim Bloom fan.
I’ve known the guy forever. Frankly, I think he got a really raw deal in Boston, and part of why the Red Sox are better now, his fingerprints are on some of that, too.”
That’s the real takeaway here: Law isn’t framing the Cardinals’ strength as one breakout player or one shiny name. For him, the bigger story is the infrastructure behind the roster - the development pipeline that turns raw talent into usable major league pieces.
That matters because “draft and develop” is easy to say and hard to pull off. Plenty of clubs talk like they’ve got it figured out.
Far fewer actually do. When a system breaks down, the organization has to patch holes elsewhere, and that usually means leaning on short-term fixes.
If Law is right, though, the Cardinals may finally have a foundation sturdy enough to support what comes next. The challenge now is simple to say and hard to maintain: keep it from slipping.
Law’s point is that this is not a finished product, just a promising one. He sees the Cardinals as an organization that has taken a meaningful step forward, even if more proof is still coming from the newest wave of draftees and the players already in the system.
That’s where the optimism lives. Not in a single game, and not in one night’s offense going quiet, but in the idea that St. Louis may have built something it can actually trust down on the farm.
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