Ranking the St. Louis Cardinals' 10 most important young players and prospects

#10 - Quinn Mathews

Easily the biggest riser within the organization this year, Quinn Mathews was drafted by the Cardinals in the fourth round of the 2023 MLB Draft but has blown away both the club and national talent evaluators with his breakout performance this year.

Mathews went from the guy people only really knew for throwing 156 pitches in a super regional game for Stanford to a legit top-100 prospect. One of the biggest reasons for his rise this year has been a major uptick in velocity. At Stanford, his fastball mostly sat in the 90-92 MPH range, but he's comfortably sitting between 94-96 MPH just one year later in his first pro-ball experience.

After dominating at Palm Beach to the tune of a 1.47 ERA with 52 SO in 30.2 innings pitched, he received a promotion to High-A Peoria, where opponents are still batting just .151 against him and he's struck out 32 batters in 25 innings of work

You could swap out Mathews on this list with Roby or Hjerpe and I wouldn't have a problem with that, but the point here is the Cardinals desperately need a few starting pitching prospects to pop and impact the MLB roster as soon as humanly possible, and there is just one pitcher in the Cardinals' organization you can rank above Mathews without any hesitation right now.

Mathews looks like a real dude right now. It would be too aggressive to call him a future front-line starter, but with his much-improved fastball and having two other potential plus pitches in his slider and change-up, he could be a very valuable southpaw in the Cardinals' rotation, sooner rather than later. Yes, he is in High-A right now, but after just 10 professional starts thus far, don't be surprised if he continues to be a fast riser in this farm system.