2/19/2023 0 Comments Kodi whitleySeptember hit, it was time to call up everyone they could from Memphis, which naturally led to call-ups at every level, if only for a series. The Cardinals brought him up to Palm Beach at the very end of the year. He had a 1.84 ERA with an above average groundball rate and a ridiculous. He pitched 14.2 innings, struck out 19 of them, and walked just 3 batters. He dominated 17 and 18-year-olds primarily, but he made them look like, well, inexperienced teenagers I guess. There’s no way the Cardinals had any faith in this guy.īut then he dominated. He’s a 27th rounder, he’s old for a draftee, and we don’t even really know if he’s good. From the Cardinals perspective, this guy is not high priority. So what do we have here? We have a 22-year-old pitcher who you’re still not totally sure has completely recovered from Tommy John. 813 MLB players got drafted without Whitley’s name being called, but in the 27th round, the Cardinals took him off the board. And he may very well have not even expected to be drafted. A Freshman of the Year in a Division II school, a not all that great sophomore year (4.41 ERA), and an All-Star nod in a summer league just doesn’t seem likely to have suitors fighting for you when it comes to draft time. Understandably, he was not in high demand when the 2017 MLB Draft started. He missed his entire junior season and pitched five total innings his senior year. In the summer between his sophomore and junior years, he earned All-Star honors in the CPL. Whitley joined the Fayetville Swampdogs, who have existed since 2001 and have had eight former MLB players, including Mark Reynolds, David Aardsma, and Carter Capps. Alumni of this league include Ryan Zimmerman, Chris Taylor, Greg Holland, Todd Wellemeyer, and current Cardinal Tyler Webb. The CPL is a wood bat league that recruits college players. The Cardinals do their homework and certainly pay attention to the Mount Olives of the college baseball world, but I believe he was actually noticed in the summer league he played in for his first two summers in college, the Coastal Plain League. He was not particularly likely to catch the Cardinals attention with this team though. In his freshman year of college, he earned Conference Carolinas Freshman of the Year, starting 10 games with a 2.74 ERA. The University of Mount Olive was and is a Division II level baseball school, so he was not much of a prospect coming out of high school. Whitley was born in North Carolina, attended a North Carolina high school, and went to college at the University of Mount Olive, which is located in North Carolina. I probably won’t be the last person to talk about Whitley this season, so I’d like to start a refresher course of sorts. Schafer mentioned him just last week as a likely bullpen option for 2020. The since departed from VEB Ben Clemens talked about him way back in November, Blake Newberry announced him as a sleeper in February, and A.E. He was talked about a lot over the offseason, and during spring training. I am entering well-trod territory at this point. But we’ve all seen Junior Fernandez pitch already and we haven’t seen Whitley, at least against MLB competition during the regular season, so Whitley gets the nod. Well that’s a bit unfair to Junior Fernandez, who had a virtually identical pitching line to Whitley, right down to the pitches and strikes thrown. So I thought I’d spend the first post in the 2020 MLB season talking about the one bright side of yesterday’s game: Kodi Whitley. These things usually lead to a loss, and spoiler alert, that did in fact happen. It was an all-around disappointment: bad offense, bad starting pitching, a not super impressive outing by the bullpen. I feel like this has been ingrained in me since I first became a fan, but the goal is to win series, and the Cardinals did that, so the first weekend was a success. Yesterday, the Cardinals proved once and for all that they will not go 60-0, which is surely a shocking development to all. And yet here I sit, a few days later, and the season has officially started. Clearly the MLB seemed to be running the show by the seat of their pants and with no actual plan, which increased the chances of it getting unceremoniously cancelled. The last time I wrote for this site, the season was likely, but still speculative.
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