Evaluating the St. Louis Cardinals’ draft classes (2005-2014)

This final article in the series will cover the St. Louis Cardinals’ draft results from 2005 to 2014.

The Major League Baseball drafts continued to become more refined as the years went on. Statcast wouldn’t be implemented in baseball until 2015, but even before that, teams were continuing to shift away from traditional stats and were looking at more advanced numbers to gauge players’ potential. Batting average had largely gone by the wayside in favor of stats such as OPS and wOBA.

While the St. Louis Cardinals hit the jackpot in the 1999 and 2000 drafts when they grabbed Albert Pujols and Yadier Molina, the drafts from 2005 to 2014 saw fewer superstars but a larger number of players who made it to the big leagues and had solid careers.

This is the final article in the St. Louis Cardinals draft retrospective series; you can find the 1965-1984 article here and the 1985-2004 article here. As I mentioned in the first article, I stopped after 2014 partially because it’s a pleasantly round number to end on, but mostly because I wanted to focus on drafts where the outcomes have been more or less decided. The players picked in the drafts from 2015 onward still have the potential to go in several different directions.