TOWER GROVE — After taking him in 39th round of the most recent draft, the St. Louis Cardinals couldn’t get Curt Smith into the rookie-level lineup because of a visa issue. Once the paperwork snarl was loosened, they couldn’t keep him out of the lineup.

Smith, fresh from Curacao by way of the University of Maine, got a hit in his debut and didn’t stop hitting until he had earned a promotion to Low-A Quad Cities. The day after he arrived at the full-season club, he was named Player of the Year in the Appalachian League. On his way to the award, he hit .378/.418/.585 with 49 RBIs and 23 extra-base hits in just 47 games with Johnson City. He had more production in fewer games and fewer at-bats than his rivals for the award, many of whom were drafted higher from bigger-name programs with bigger-fame profiles.

Not too bad for the 1,175th pick.

“He never stopped hitting,” Johnson City manager Joe Almaraz told me late in the season for an article in Baseball America. “He got a hit in the first game. He got a few more in the next. He missed a week there, five games with a hand (injury). Imagine if he had those games back. He just kept hitting.”

As we near the end of our (neverending) Bird Land Community Top 30 — hey, it will only take us two months to get through (top 20 next year?) — we reach No. 25 and face a creeping reality about the next six polls. A lot of the names are starting to look the same.

Third baseman Robert De La Cruz, the Cardinals big-bonus international signing from July, led the No. 24 spot in the poll with 24 percent when I first started writing this morning … and now RHP Francisco Samuel has pulled ahead with 25 percent of the vote. So Samuel is No. 24.

That is too, too low for Samuel, in my opinion. He strikes me as a surefire top-20 prospect, and I have heard an argument from a reliable source that he should be aggressively ranked in the top 15. His potential to climb through the system has been compared to Kyle McClellan’s by the same source who said McClellan would zoom ahead as a reliever. But that’s the thing when we get this deep into the Top 30. Opinions change, sure. So does criteria. One person wants potential. Another wants production. Yet another wants a certain profile. Another values promotion.

We’re deep into the lower third of the poll and that means weighing potential against production, and many of the names start to feel the same. How do you distinguish between the exceptional debut of, say, Smith this past summer and Arnoldi “Tony” Cruz, who did the same thing, only better, back in 2008? Oh, and Cruz is playing catcher. But if you like Cruz at No. 25, what about Steven Hill? He hit .303/.330/.505 in Double-A this past season, and like Cruz is improving at catcher.

He also hit .304 in the Arizona Fall League, while Cruz hit .323 out in Hawaii.

There could be a dozen names that deserve consideration for the final six spots in the Comm Top 30, and that is part of the reason the Cardinals have climbed to No. 8 in the organizational rankings. Consider any of the following and where they could fit in the remaining spots:

• OF Ryde Rodriguez … Cast in the mold of an athletic prospect, hit .324/.370/.387 in GCL.
• 1B Curt Smith … Mentioned above. Hitting did stop when at Low-A.
• OF Amaury Cazana Marti … Remember The Legend? All he’s doing is hitting .314/.390/.535 with seven home runs and 34 RBIs in the Dominican Winter League.
• RHP Deryk Hooker … An intriguing talent who topped out at Low-A last season with a combined 73 Ks and 20 walks in 65 innings.
• OF Jon Edwards … A former Top-30 pick who really has not done anything to fall out of the rankings other than being surpassed by recently signed/drafted prospects. Has the best outfield arm in the system.
• SS Yunier Castillo … The infielder who wowed coaches in his GCL debut, and was described in more detail back in this blog entry.
• RHP Luke Gregerson … Well, all he does is advance. After a hiccup last season in the AFL, Gregerson is throwing well in Venezuela this winter — 3-1, 0.82 in 22 innings with 18 strikeouts. Want the next McClellan? Could be.
• ETC.

Any and all of the above minor leaguers — especially that ETC. guy; he can flat rake — have a claim on one of the remaining six spots. But it becomes difficult to sort one from the other. I’ll try to do my part to mix in new names and answer questions and respond to write-ins. I’m also going to allow a few days for each poll here as we reach the last swing of the holiday season.

Here is the poll for No. 25:

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A Happy New Year to you reliable readers out there. This has been a year of considerable change, especially in the amount and type of coverage here, online at StlToday.com and specifically in this blog. Eager to see where 2009 takes it. I apologize if my entries have been scattershot here this week as I’m chiming in from vacation and while working on other projects. Hopefully you will see some of those in 2009 as well …

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