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Alcantara is the sort of thing that a team SHOULDN'T miss on. They should've been able to identify that sort of thing better than we could. And it wasn't as though it took 5 years in the minors for Alcantara to hit. He raced through our system and we gave up on him far too early. He was immediately in the bigs in Miami and showing signs of breaking out even as a rookie. In that rookie season you could tell that if you could just harness his command a bit and find more snap on a breaker to miss bats, he was going to be an awfully good pitcher. Those are guys a good organization who has brought him along just cannot miss.
And honestly, given our track record over the last 10 years, do you really have any confidence at all that he'd have amounted to anything here? Gallen probably would've - we like that sort of profile. Alcantara would've been lost in relief just like Hicks and Rosenthal before him.
Taveras wasn't going to be very good anyway, IMO. Swing was too long. He was never as advertised. He was going to be another in the long line of Cardinal player development failures. Him dying gave Mozeliak an out that he wouldn't have had.
As for Piscotty - do you recall what put Piscotty on the prospect map to begin with? It wasn't the Cardinals - kid went to Driveline and rebuilt his swing after 2 years of circling the drain in the minors. That we got any sort of prospect value from him at all wasn't even a result of the Cardinal player development system. But/for his own initiative, he'd have never been in the big leagues anyway.
And Allen Craig was a late arriving rookie who got hurt at 29 years old. He wasn't ever going to have some long and productive career. He wasn't an 'old man skill' player - he was a poor mans Arenado. See ball, hit ball. The injury was a brick wall that brought him to a screeching halt, but he was going to start downhill soon anyway. That's just the aging curve for players like him.
These issues that people use to justify a decade of Cardinal malaise just don't check out for me. Garcia's the only one that really qualifies as bad luck but again - with a broad track record of ALWAYS moving on from the wrong guy, are we really all that confident that it wasn't the Cardinals that were the reason he was stalled out in the first place? Certainly seems to be the case.
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