St. Louis Cardinals: 7 Cardinals who were blessed by Devil Magic

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These seven St. Louis Cardinals players performed far beyond expectations with the team, whether it was for a few weeks or several seasons.

“Cardinals Devil Magic,” also known as “pixie dust,” is a phenomenon that we mortals don’t fully understand. It appears on rare occasions, dusting random players and fading away. The result is that every once in a while, a little-known St. Louis Cardinals player will emerge from obscurity and appear to be the second coming of Stan Musial or Bob Gibson.

Cardinals Devil Magic doesn’t treat all its recipients equally, though; while some players have managed to make the Devil Magic last for years during their Cardinals tenure, the dust doesn’t take as well to other players, and they fizzle out sooner than you can blink.

As there is no cut-and-dried definition for Cardinals Devil Magic, I will give it my best interpretation and apply it to the players in this list. I take it to mean a player who was never much of a prospect and massively outperformed expectations while with the Cardinals. Generally, these players weren’t drafted highly or scouted heavily.

I was originally going to make this a ranked list, because everybody loves a good ranking, but as Devil Magic manifests itself in different ways, it’s difficult to gauge whom it most affected and how to categorize the players. How much of it was the magic, and how much of it was the player’s true skill? It’s really impossible to tell.

Since I can’t come up with a good way to rank the players, this will be a chronological list of seven players who were sprinkled with the devil’s dust.

Bo Hart

Few Cardinals have played their way into the hearts of fans as quickly as second baseman Bo Hart. Drafted in 1999 in the 33rd round out of Gonzaga University, Hart spent four and half years in the Cardinals’ minor league system, and after Miguel Cairo fractured his left hand, Hart debuted with the major league club in 2003 when he was 26.

In his first 10 games, Hart hit .460, shattering Kirby Puckett’s record for batting average in a player’s first 10 games. Hart’s average didn’t fall below .300 until Aug. 8, in his 45th game. But he had a long way to fall, and that masked his quick decline. From games 11 through 77, Hart hit .240 as pitchers quickly figured him out. The culprit? The breaking ball.

Hart didn’t have much of a scouting report because of his lack of a prospect pedigree, but as a player who only stood at five feet, 10 inches, Hart looked susceptible to the hard stuff. But as he punished pitchers for trying to throw the cheese by him, they looked for alternate means, and after Hart faced an onslaught of curveballs and sliders, his average had dropped to .277 at the end of the 2003 season.

The Cardinals tried to get Hart back on track in 2004, but the pixie dust had worn off. He went 2 for 13 in April, hitting .154 and being demoted. In 2005, manager Tony La Russa suggested Hart try switch-hitting, but it didn’t take. He bounced around the league a bit after that, going to the Baltimore Orioles, Colorado Rockies, and Chicago Cubs, but he never reached the major leagues again. He signed with the independent league Kansas City T-Bones in 2008 but soon retired at age 31.

Many Cardinals fans fondly remember Hart’s brief time at the top, and while “Devil Magic” wasn’t a widely used term at this time, Hart qualifies as a recipient of the dust at its strongest.

Ryan Ludwick

As a player who was barely replacement level in his five years before joining the Cardinals, outfielder Ryan Ludwick‘s improbable breakout once the Cardinals signed him as a free agent showed that the team saw something in him — and so did the pixies.

Ludwick was riddled with injuries from 2002 to 2005, requiring four surgeries — two for the same injury. When Ludwick signed with the Cardinals in 2007, he was healthy but had a career slash line of .237/.299/.416. After playing in 29 Triple-A games with the Memphis Redbirds, Ludwick was promoted to the big league squad after an injury to outfielder Preston Wilson.

He didn’t look back, as he had a career-high 339 plate appearances in 2007 and hit .267/.339/.479. 2008 was his finest year, as Ludwick made the All-Star team for the only time in his career and won a Silver Slugger award. He had career highs in nearly every batting category, with an impressive average of .299.

Ludwick also stayed healthy for nearly all of his Cardinals tenure, only missing two weeks in 2009 with a hamstring issue. It was an impressive feat of durability for a player who had gone through so many surgeries earlier in his career.

The Cardinals traded Ludwick to the San Diego Padres during the 2010 season for pitcher Jake Westbrook. Ludwick played for four more years but never reached the heights of his Cardinals days. Ludwick’s career Wins Above Replacement stat is 11.2, and 10.7 of that was with the Cardinals. His story shows that even if the Cardinals didn’t develop a player from draft to MLB debut, they can still coax productivity out of another team’s castoff.

Allen Craig

If you like watching clutch hitting, 2013 was the year for you. The Cardinals broke the record for batting average with runners in scoring position by hitting .330 as a team. The leader of the pack was Allen Craig.

The Cardinals drafted Craig in the eighth round of the 2006 amateur draft, and he was called up to the Cardinals in 2010 as a bench bat. He didn’t set the world on fire in his first season, but as his role grew, he steadily improved in 2011 and 2012, showing himself to be a good regular and the potential heir at first base to the recently departed Albert Pujols.

Craig reached historic heights in 2013, hitting a ridiculous .454 with runners in scoring position after hitting .400 in that category in 2012. This streak had to end soon; it defied all of baseball’s norms. But Craig just kept hitting; Cardinals Devil Magic was as potent as ever. Unfortunately, on Sept. 4, as the season neared its conclusion, Craig suffered a Lisfranc fracture while rounding first base and trying to avoid the umpire. The injury ended his season.

Jeremy Hazelbaker

Spring Training is a time for lesser-known players or career minor-leaguers to show that they can hang with more proven veterans. Few players made as much of an impact in Spring Training as outfielder Jeremy Hazelbaker.

The Boston Red Sox drafted Hazelbaker in the fourth round in 2009, but he languished in the minor leagues with the team for five seasons until he was traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers for Alex Castellanos. The Dodger released Hazelbaker on May 1, 2015, and he signed with the Cardinals on May 13 with an invitation to Spring Training.

There’s a bit of a bias to Spring Training: If you’re a star like Paul Goldschmidt and don’t have a great spring, you’re still going to make the team. It takes a truly eye-opening performance for an unheralded minor-leaguer to crack the major league team, but that’s just what Hazelbaker did.

After clobbering his way onto the roster in 2016, Hazelbaker hit the ground running. After 10 games, he was hitting .419/.444/.871 and he soon earned the online moniker “Hazelraker.” His peak was a 4-for-4 effort on April 11. It appeared the St. Louis Cardinals had found a diamond in the rough once again.

While he spent most of the year in the major leagues and ended the season on the big club, his finishing stats weren’t impressive. His .235/.295./480 line led to the Arizona Diamondbacks claiming him off waivers, and while he performed well during his big-league stint with them, the Diamondbacks traded Hazelbaker to the Tampa Bay Rays for cash in 2018.

Hazelbaker never reached the major leagues with the Rays or the Minnesota Twins, to whom he was traded later in 2018, and he underperformed in the minor leagues as well, just barely hitting over the Mendoza Line at .204.

But Hazelbaker wasn’t finished playing baseball. He traveled to Australia and South Korea to play in leagues overseas, but he couldn’t find his groove, failing to hit even .200. In 2019, Hazelbaker joined the Sioux City Explorers of the American Association. The pandemic wiped out his chance at playing in 2020, and 2021 still seems to be up in the air.

Hazelbaker might be the closest comparison to Bo Hart as a flash-in-the-pan player whom few people knew about. Baseball might not be over for him yet, but the odds of his returning to the major leagues appear slim.

Aledmys Diaz

Unlike Hazelbaker, Aledmys Diaz impressed throughout the entirety of 2016 and seemed to be the shortstop of the future. Diaz played in the Cuban National Series from 2007 to 2012 and hit .307 over those years, although he struggled in the field.

He was initially promoted to the major leagues to keep the seat warm until the return of Ruben Tejada from an injury he sustained in Spring Training, and Tejada was planned to ultimately give way to the injured Jhonny Peralta, who would reclaim his starting role.

Diaz punted all those expectations by the wayside with his performance, however. When Peralta returned, he switched to third base to let Diaz man shortstop full time. In his 404 at-bats in 2016, Diaz hit an even .300, including setting a record by being the first rookie to hit .500 in his first 50 at-bats. While his defense was originally subpar, he eventually became decent at the position.

Diaz replaced an injured Matt Carpenter on the 2016 National League All-Star team, earning his first and so far only All-Star nod and finishing fifth in Rookie of the Year voting. He also hit a grand slam on Sept. 27 and honored his recently deceased friend, former Miami Marlins pitcher Jose Fernandez, in an emotional celebration.

That concluded the Devil Magic’s effects on Diaz, as his 2017 season was much less impressive. He lost his position to rookie Paul DeJong, and after the season, he was traded to the Toronto Blue Jays for minor league outfielder J.B. Woodman.

Diaz hasn’t completely fallen off the face of the earth the way some other players on this list have, but he hasn’t come close to emulating his rookie performance. He played for the Houston Astros in 2019 and 2020, hitting a line of .265/.337/.470. While the magic has clearly worn off, Diaz has shown that he can remain a decent if unspectacular major league player.

Kevin Siegrist

The lone pitcher on this list, Kevin Siegrist was drafted in the 41st round in 2008 — a round that doesn’t even exist anymore. A scout discovered him by chance while watching a game at Palm Beach Community College, and the Cardinals took a low-risk shot at him late in the draft. He paid off handsomely for the team from 2013 through 2016, other than 2014, where a forearm injury stunted his effectiveness.

Players taken in the 41st round aren’t expected to do much, and Siegrist is an example of the St. Louis Cardinals’ scouts digging deep to find gold. He pitched well throughout much of his time in the minors despite being dogged by injuries, and he was added to the 40-man roster before the 2012 season.

Siegrist was one of the pitchers the Cardinals became known for possessing: a fireballer who could clock it up to the high 90s, which wasn’t as common then as it is now. Batters hit only .128 against him in his first year, where he pitched 39.2 innings and had an ERA of 0.45.

After an ineffective year in 2014, he led the major leagues in appearances in 2015, with 81. He struck out 90 batters in 74.2 innings and pitched to an ERA+ of 181. He spent much of his time in 2015 and 2016 in a setup role for closer Trevor Rosenthal.

The injury bug bit Siegrist again later in 2016 and in 2017, and those injuries, along with waning effectiveness, led the Cardinals to designate him for assignment on Aug. 31, 2017. The Philadelphia Phillies claimed him, but he only pitched in seven games for them, amounting to five innings. The Pirates signed him in 2018 and released him later than year after he refused to report to Triple-A Indianapolis.

Siegrist’s career doesn’t seem to have much left, even though he’s only 31. But his performance for a few years while with the Cardinals shows that the Devil Magic can work wonders on pitchers too. But let’s also give some credit to the Cardinals’ scouts for unearthing a player who made some real contributions to his team.

Tommy Edman

Devil Magic remains alive and well in St. Louis, as the versatile Tommy Edman came onto the scene in 2019 looking like a man on a mission. Edman was drafted in the sixth round in 2016 and debuted with the St. Louis Cardinals on June 8, 2019, and while he hit increasingly well in the minor leagues as he ascended the ranks, few could have foreseen his outburst in the major leagues.

Edman’s 2019 was likely somewhat of an aberration: His barrel percentage was in the 24th percentile, and his exit velocity was in the 18th percentile. Still, the results speak for themselves: A line of .304/.350/.500 had opponents once again grumbling about the Devil Magic and the pixies aiding the Cardinals.

Edman even displayed power that had never been seen before. He hit 11 home runs in 326 at-bats, eclipsing his high of seven with Memphis in 2018. He also hit seven home runs during his time with Memphis in 2019, but that was likely because of Triple-A’s status as an experimental launching pad.

Edman predictably came back to normal in 2020. All the usual caveats for the abridged 2020 season apply, but his passiveness at the plate was worth noting, as he tended to take too many good pitches for strikes, an observation confirmed by Baseball Savant. If Edman can also have a better eye for pitches outside the zone, he could improve his low walk rate as well.

But unlike the other players on this list, Edman’s tale is not yet over: He remains a Cardinal, and if he can adjust to pitchers, he can have a fruitful career. Devil Magic isn’t meant to be an insult, after all; it simply speaks to the Cardinals’ ability to find that extra gear in players. Only time will tell if Edman will be a sprint like Bo Hart or a marathon like Ryan Ludwick.

Next. Predicting the 26-man roster at the start of spring. dark

The Cardinals have been able to help overlooked players serve as key pieces. Fans of opposing teams can prattle on about the Cardinals’ dumb luck, but the team’s ability to draft, develop and deploy players has few parallels in baseball. And it’s always nice to have a little pixie around to help them out.

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