St. Louis Cardinals: Analyzing Dylan Carlson’s way-too-small-sample size

Some St. Louis Cardinals fans have been deterred by Dylan Carlson’s debut with the club. Looking deeper, we can really see how he’s been doing.

Contrary to what way too many fans believed, Dylan Carlson is not and has not been the immediate savior for the St. Louis Cardinals’ offensive woes.

The 21-year-old switch hitter is a census top 20 prospect in baseball and has a bright future in the MLB, but nobody said he’d be an All-Star at first though.

Carlson was called up last weekend ahead of the Cardinals’ return to action against the Chicago White Sox. Through 33 plate appearances at the MLB level, he’s batting just .129 with zero homers and one stolen base. His .343 OPS is the lowest of any regular on the team as well.

Let’s first get it out of the way that 33 plate appearances is not enough time to make any fair judgment on any player. But for right now, it’s all we have. Lucky for us, we also have deeper statistics that tell a better story about just how Carlson has been doing.

Let’s start here. This tweet was sent on August 18, just before the Cardinals started their third game out of the five they played against the Cubs this week.

Carlson had gotten his first hit out of the way against the White Sox but had done very little since then. Thanks to Baseball Savant, we could see at the time that Carlson was hitting way below what he should’ve been. He was hitting the ball very hard, but because baseball is baseball, he was still getting out.

Looking at this list, all of Dylan Carlson’s top seven hardest-hit balls have gone for outs. All of those balls were hit above 95.7 mph.

After his first weekend in the bigs saw a lot of hard-hit balls but few results, it became clear that Carlson was pressing at the plate. Looking at some extremely crude analysis, Carlson had 11 plate appearances in the three games against the White Sox. In those 11 plate appearances, he faced 49 pitches, an average of 4.45 pitches per plate appearance.

In the five games against the Cubs and in Thursday’s game against the Reds, Carlson has had 22 total plate appearances. In those, he has faced 75 pitches or 3.41 pitches per plate appearance. All of this just proves what we could see by watching the games. He was swinging at almost everything and not waiting to get his pitch.

This brings me to my next point. Carlson has yet to take an inning off since he was called up. In the last six days, the Cardinals have played nine games and Carlson has started and played every inning.

When you combine the playing time, the lack of results, and the expectations that come with being a top prospect, it’s no surprise that he’s pressing. The mental stress on Carlson has to be enormous right now.

It also doesn’t help that he hasn’t done anything in the big spots that he’s come up in. So far, 11 of Carlson’s 33 plate appearances have come with runners in scoring position. He has no hits and no RBI in those spots. He’s come up with the bases loaded four times, still no hits or RBI.

Through his continued struggles to get good outcomes at the plate, his expected numbers still show he should be performing much better than he is.

For fans not familiar with wOBA, the scale can be found here, and a .329 wOBA lands in the “slightly above average” range.

I’m sure that nobody is more frustrated than Dylan Carlson is with how his season has started. However, this is a great time for him to learn how to struggle, and to learn how to pull himself out of it.

In a normal year, Carlson would’ve gotten more development at AAA before he even made it to the bigs. We have no idea how he would’ve been when or even if he finally debuted.

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In the current landscape of the MLB, going back down to the alternate site won’t help Carlson much. In my eyes, it certainly won’t help him more than continuing to see MLB pitching will.

It’s almost alarming how Mike Shildt hasn’t given him a day off as well. In the past, we’ve seen Shildt not play Lane Thomas or not play Randy Arozarena when they were hot prospects coming up. I applaud the team for remaining true to their word that when Carlson came up, he was going to play. I just don’t think anyone thought that playing too much would be an issue for Carlson.

Letting him sit for just a day could do wonders for his performance. Even when Lane Thomas and Austin Dean come off the COVID-19 IL, Carlson should continue to play five or six days of the week.

If he’s going to struggle and have growing pains, I think we’d all rather they happen in 2020 than the beginning of next year.

Some fans are super down on Carlson. He’s come up in some big spots and looked pretty bad a few times. At the end of the day, the guy just needs a mental day off and a larger sample size. No major decisions will be made about him based on 33 plate appearances but running him out there until he’s mentally and physically exhausted helps nobody.