St. Louis Cardinals: Everyone Loves Alex Reyes (and Tyler Lyons!)

St. Louis Cardinals top prospect Alex Reyes’ first couple months of the season may be up in smoke thanks to his 50-game suspension, but the accolades keep coming.

Minorleagueball.com is the latest to join the chorus. In a fan post that went live on Monday, a sabermetrics vigilanti did some serious mathematics jujitsu (sorry, I wasn’t great at math in high school) via his special “Fielding- and Ballpark-Independent Outcomes (FaBIO) statistical evaluation system.”

But all FaBIO does is pretty much confirm that the pitchers most of us know are really awesome ARE indeed really awesome. Those are X number of hours that dude will never get back.

Nevertheless, St. Louis Cardinals fans will be interested to know that Reyes was one of the 25 best

pitchers in minor league baseball last year, joining high-caliber prospects such as Lucas Giolito (Washington Nationals) and Blake Snell (Tampa Bay Rays), the latter of whom rated as the number-one pitcher according to FaBIO.

Here’s a snippet from that piece:

"Blake Snell held off Jose De Leon for the top spot thanks to a better and likely more sustainable batted ball profile. Andy Ferguson (99 Overall) is a righthanded upper 80s 4-seamer and changeup tosser who saw his K Rating spike upward in AA and AAA to 99 from 50 in 2014; a very high LD Avoid Rating helped cover up his repertoire-related vulnerability to the pulled OFFB. Alex Reyes clearly killed it at the K at a beyond 100 level given how low his CTL and Batted Ball Ratings were. Lucas Giolito (99 Overall) and Steven Matz (98 Overall) were 2 of just 9 MiLB pitchers who rated in the green on both K Rating and GB Rating out of the 914 who faced at least 300 batters."

For the record, FaBIO also ranked St. Louis Cardinals righthander Tyler Lyons among the 25 best pitchers in the minors, for his work at triple-A Memphis. Which is nice.

The only other St. Louis Cardinals pitcher to break into FaBIO’s top 50 minor league pitchers from last year is lefthander Austin Gomber, who led the St. Louis Cardinals organization with 15 wins in his first full season in pro ball.

Next: Pining for Freddie Freeman

Gomber improved as the season went along, peaking in August. The 22-year-old southpaw held Midwest League hitters to two runs — one earned — on 14 hits and seven walks while striking out 32 over 25 2/3 innings in four starts for the month. Consider the 2014 4th-round pick out of Florida Atlantic on the fast track now.

Everyone has eyes on righthander Tim Cooney, who FaBIO put somewhere in the top 100. But if FaBIO is right, Gomber could make a quantum leap next year. Maybe even to the big leagues.