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….

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:

***

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/C8LSeLbwP4A" width="425"...

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 — Some members of the St. Louis Cardinals brass, including VP/farm director Jeff Luhnow and assistant general manager John Abbamondi, traveled west this week to see the Arizona Fall League and the prospects there in person. They were greeted with a marquee start — against their players.

Stephen Strasburg, the Washington Nationals’ No. 1 overall pick in last year’s draft and widely billed as the best pitching prospect to reach the draft in years,…

TOWER GROVE — The Bird Land Community Top 21’s top 10 is completed, and we’re just about halfway through the annual ranking of St. Louis Cardinals prospects by readers here at the blog. The overarching lessons of the first 10 are two-fold: Voters have adopted the perceived franchise emphasis on winning now/contributing now and the Cardinals system, as a whole, is significantly diluted, even lacking.

Second baseman Daniel Descalso, who had one of a handful of…

DOWNTOWN — The St. Louis Cardinals finalized the fine print on a contract with their second-round pick Robert Stock, a catcher (and could-be pitcher) from Southern Cal, and the club announced his deal and contracts with two other picks Wednesday afternoon.

The Cardinals also finished deals with righthanded reliever Joe Kelly (UC-Riverside), the team’s third-round pick (98th overall), and shortstop Ryan Jackson (Miami), the team’s fifth-round pick.

As reported in the Post-Dispatch over the weekend, the Cardinals had an agreement…

DOWNTOWN — Comfortable with the depth and swift-moving current of players in their system, the St. Louis Cardinals appear to be using the 2009 draft as a chance to take some risky picks with perceived upside.

The Cardinals concluded Day 1 of the first-year player draft with two picks that don’t fit the profile the club has carved out in recent years for most of their picks — sturdy, college-seasoned, solid statistics players. With the 67th…