TOWER GROVE — The final spot on this year’s Bird Land Community Top 21 has not been reserved for the prospect readers believe is the 21st-best prospect in the St. Louis Cardinals minor-league system. Instead, its for the player who could emerge, when 2010 is all said and done, as the next Eduardo Sanchez, the prospect who jets out of the ether and easily into the rankings.

Since no poll can really capture the pool of…

TOWER GROVE — Fresh from an unexpectedly abrupt ending to a remarkable season, the St. Louis Cardinals made a flurry of moves in the first week of December 2004. They signed Matt Morris, they lost Tony Womack and they offered arbitration to catcher Mike Matheny and Edgar Renteria. The rules were different back then, and teams had to offer their players arbitration or lose the right to sign them until May. Then general manager Walt…

TOWER GROVE — In the four years of compiling a top-whatnot list of St. Louis Cardinals’ prospects as voted on by readers here at Bird Land this year’s was by far the closest vote at every spot. That could be because the timing was off for the annual Bird Land Community Top 21 (too early in the winter, methinks) and because the number of votes was lacking from poll to poll.

But another factor was in…

TOWER GROVE — There was a time about midway through the 2009 season when St. Louis Cardinals rookie Colby Rasmus was the National League leader in homers, RBIs and a few other telling stats among first-year players. It didn’t last long.

An injury. The wear of the long season and significant weight loss. Tag-team playing time. The arrival of a fresh wave of rookies. All of that combined to erode Rasmus’ spot atop his class.

At the…

TOWER GROVE — On the eve of Thanksgiving, we can say this about the monthlong process of putting together the Bird Land Community Top 21: We know who the first 20 players are. We just don’t know the final order.

In a prospect poll loaded with close votes, recurring debates and a bunch of a new names and new looks, it is fitting that it would finish with a runoff. Especially a runoff pitting these two…

TOWER GROVE — A year has passed but the conversation remains strikingly similar.

About 12 months ago, the Bird Land Community Top 30 reached No. 19 in its poll, and the discussion hinged around two righthanded starters: the recently drafted Lance Lynn and the rising changeup artist P.J. Walters. Lynn edged Walters in the voting for No. 18, and Walters then claimed a win at No. 19. Scroll forward to today and Lynn has surged to…

TOWER GROVE — The final results of a radical re-write of the prospect rankings for St. Louis Cardinals’ minor-league system just slid through the mail slot here at the home office.

The current issue of Baseball America ranks the top 10 prospects for each team in the National League Central, and you’ll hardly recognize the top 10 for the local nine. There are only two players from last year’s top 10 who remain in this year’s….

TOWER GROVE — Now we have encountered a problem with the polling, one not to different from the the quandary facing the St. Louis Cardinals or the one that all prospect ranking lists are bound to encounter when mining the Cardinals’ system for potential.

At some point, it becomes difficult to distinguish one prospect from the other and tricky to rank one first baseman against a reliever ahead of, say, a starting pitcher.

That’s what the Bird…

TOWER GROVE — The numerical bounty (especially when it comes to types of pitches) available at Fan Graphs has made that Web site increasingly valuable when it comes to using and exploring some of the — what’s the phrase we learned yesterday? — nouveau riche’s statistics that are out there.

But Fan Graphs, like so many sites these days, are also in the prospect-ranking business.

Marc Hulet, a writer at Fan Graphs, posted his St. Louis Cardinals…

TOWER GROVE — It seems that St. Louis Cardinals’ first-round pick and shortstop prospect Pete Kozma is often judged for the player he isn’t and never will be as opposed to the player he is or could be.

Kozma is not Rick Porcello. No news there.

Yet, that fact seems to bludgeon Kozma’s chances in prospects polls like this one, the Bird Land Community Top 21. He’s dismissed because of something he had no role in and…

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Not even the prom was enough to keep Robert Stock out of college.

Three years before his preference to play catcher helped make him a draft pick for the St. Louis Cardinals, Stock’s preference to get his baseball career started led to a pretty good line for a 17-year-old college freshman: Guess, he wasn’t going to the prom.

He said that in this television news report from his early days on campus:

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TOWER GROVE — The St. Louis Cardinals admittedly don’t have the level of prospects out in the Arizona Fall League that they’ve had in the past. There is no Brett Wallace out there this season, for example. There are a few players auditioning for a spot on the 40-man roster — like Tyler Greene did last fall — but they aren’t expected to use that roster spot to vault into a major-league debut, as Greene…

TOWER GROVE — After a brief hiatus to artificially inflate the click totals on the previous poll — or so that I could play father for a few days, whichever — the Bird Land Community Top 21 returns today and will continue each weekday until it’s finished. There are seven spots remaining in the top 20, and then the 21st spot in the poll will be reserved for the Community Sleeper — the player that…

CREVE COEUR — They are at very different stages in their careers, at very different positions and they were talking about two very different subjects, but St. Louis Cardinals ace Chris Carpenter and minor-league outfielder Tyler Henley hit on the same theme during interviews I had with them Wednesday.

In discussing how his career changed when he won the Cy Young Award back in 2005, Carpenter described how expectations changed around him. He wasn’t just the…

TOWER GROVE — As many as seven of the St. Louis Cardinals better prospects must be added to the 40-man roster in the near future or the team will risk losing them through the Rule 5 draft in December. The process of clearing space on the 40-man roster has already begun.

Jarrett Hoffpauir, a Class AAA second baseman, was picked up off waivers late last night by the Toronto Blue Jays. (See the Toronto take on…