Ranking the 10 worst and most inexplicable Cardinals sagas under John Mozeliak

9. Top prospects consistently flaming out

Player development is the name of the game in baseball, but it's also the thing that is so messy and unlinear and not as simple as some make it out to be. Top prospects flaming out happens all the time. But it is a problem that the Cardinals have seen what seems to be a high percentage of them fall flat on their face compared to other organizations.

The Cardinals have done a really nice job of consistently developing average to good big leaguers. Tommy Edman, Brendan Donovan, Lars Nootbaar, Kolten Wong, Tyler O'Neill, Harrison Bader, Paul DeJong, Carson Kelly, Luke Weaver, Jordan Hicks, Ryan Helsley, Jack Flaherty, and so many more. Some of those players have even been great at times (Donovan, Edman, Helsley, O'Neill, Flaherty, etc.), but for the most part, the Cardinals really don't develop stars.

Something each of those players has in common is that they weren't top-end prospects. Some were top 100 guys for sure, but none of them were top 20 prospects in all of baseball. But whenever the Cardinals have had their hands on top prospects since the death of Oscar Taveras, it has gone poorly.

Jordan Walker, Dylan Carlson, Nolan Gorman, Alex Reyes, and at least to some extent for now, Matthew Liberatore have failed to live up to the promise that they had. Sure, injuries played a role for many of them, but ultimately, their performance never lived up to what it needed to be. There's still story to be written when it comes to guys like Walker, Carlson, Gorman, and Liberatore, but time and time again, the Cardinals have failed to see their top prospects become the players many thought they could be.

Again, some of that is the nature of baseball, but if you look around at pretty much every organization, they have been able to develop a star in the last decade. St. Louis has not. Not from their top prospects, and not from even their lesser-known young guys. Ivan Herrera may be that guy, and so could JJ Wetherholt, but as John Mozeliak's tenure comes to a close, he's going to have to look in the mirror and realize that the last star the club internally developed came back in the early 2010s in the form of Matt Carpenter.

Sure, he's gone out and acquired some via trade over the decade, but being unable to pair that with elite homegrown talent has been a major point of concern for the Cardinals over the years.