St. Louis Cardinals: Breaking down the official 30-man roster

The St. Louis Cardinals have released the official 30-man roster for the beginning of the 2020 season. What surprises were there?

Just one day away from the start of the St. Louis Cardinals 2020 season, the team has announced their initial 30-man roster.

Well, a 29-man roster to start.

Presumably, the team is waiting to see what happens with reliever Giovanny Gallegos before announcing the final name, but we have a starting point to break down.

Pitchers

The five starters have long been set. There has been some debate though with the bottom of the bullpen depth chart with the release of Brett Cecil and the unknowns surrounding Giovanny Gallegos and Alex Reyes.

Beyond the starting five, John Gant, Austin Gomber, Daniel Ponce de Leon, Andrew Miller, Kwang Hyun Kim, Ryan Helsley, and Tyler Webb were all locks to make the bullpen. This week’s announcement that Kodi Whitley would be making the club was great news, and for lack of better options, the team is keeping Junior Fernandez on the big club even with his control issues recently.

Gallegos is getting up to speed quickly and should join the team soon. Alex Reyes was cleared this week and is doing the same. If the team doesn’t decide to play with 29 men on Friday night, Jake Woodford is an easy choice to fill out the last of the pitchers.

For those of you wondering about Johan Oviedo, he probably will make his debut at some point this year, but given that he isn’t on the 40-man roster yet, the Cardinals chose to keep him off the roster.

Position players

Just like the starting pitching, the starting fielders were set as well. Interestingly, the team decided to go with a full 15 position players rather than 14. On that crowded bench is going to be Austin Dean, Lane Thomas, Matt Wieters, and Rangel Ravelo.

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Beyond those three, the team (true to word) is carrying a third catcher in Andrew Knizner as well as Edmundo Sosa. Sosa is taking the place of Brad Miller who will hopefully return before too long.

I like the group that is going to make up that bench, I just worry about at-bats for Knizner. We know Yadi is going to start the vast majority of the games at catcher, leaving Wieters and Knizner a couple of starts a week maximum to split.

With no pitcher batting, pinch-hitting is going to become less common. I can’t wait to see how Mike Shildt utilizes all of these guys; it’s going to be hard to spread out the playing time to keep all of these guys sharp.

Unsurprisingly, Dylan Carlson has been sent to Springfield. While that will anger some of you, just know that he’s the first one up if anyone goes down with an injury/sickness.

We don’t know how the team will utilize the taxi squad just yet as well.

In all, there weren’t too many surprises with the first 29 names on the 30-man roster. There are a lot of young guys to get excited about seeing, including the MLB debuts of Whitley and Kim.