Cards' prospect battery scoops up Player, Pitcher of the Year honors

This story was excerpted from John Denton’s Cardinals Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

It didn’t take catcher Jimmy Crooks long into his successful battery with Quinn Mathews at Double-A Springfield to realize that he had to ignore the sarcastic -- and occasionally doom-and-gloom -- sense of humor that the left-handed pitcher wields.

For as long as baseball has been played lefty pitchers have been known to sometimes be quirky, and Mathews certainly embraces that side of personality. Often, the 24-year-old Southern California native downplays his own accomplishments, talks trash about himself and can even come off as sour and uncaring.

It’s all quite the ruse, Crooks said.

“It’s all [mess] with him because I know him too well, and I picked him up pretty quickly,” said Crooks. “When we first got there [to Springfield], he made a joke to me saying, ‘Ahhhh, it’s the worst day of the week!’

“I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Well, it’s start day!’ I was like, ‘Oh my, you’re not going to be that type of guy, are you?’ … He’s just funny and I know he’s still going to go out there and dominate and he’s just full of [mess]. But he’s a robot on the mound because he’s going to pitch at a steady pace, he’s not going to show any emotion and then he’s going to pitch his ass off.”

Mathews did that this past season, becoming just the second Cardinals pitcher in 20 years to pitch at four levels of Minor League Baseball in a season. That earned Mathews, 24, the Cardinals Minor League Pitcher of the Year Award after striking out 202 batters over 143 1/3 innings with Single-A Palm Beach, High-A Peoria, Springfield and Triple-A Memphis.

Asked about his best performances from a season that saw him rise to MLB Pipeline’s No. 3 Cardinals prospect -- namely the Aug. 24 outing where he fanned 12 batters and took a perfect game into the seventh inning -- Mathews’ perfectionist tendencies arose, and he instead pointed to his warts.

“It was just a start, and the good [starts] are whatever, but if you want to talk about the bad [starts], we can talk about those,” said Mathews, who finished 8-5 with a 2.76 ERA. “With the baseball highs and lows, the good games are cool, but I don’t remember them all that well. But the bad ones, I could talk about those forever because they still piss me off.”

Like the climb made this season by Mathews, the 23-year-old Crooks shined with the steadiness off his left-handed bat. After slashing .321/.410/.498 with a .908 OPS, with 11 home runs, 19 doubles and 62 RBIs in just 90 games with Springfield, Crooks was named the Cardinals Minor League Player of the Year. His production pushed him to No. 5 on the Cardinals Top 30 prospects list, and set him up for a possible promotion to the big leagues by 2025.

Out for two stints last season with a hamstring injury and a broken finger, Crooks is more concerned about the games that he missed than the ones he played in. The 2022 fourth-round Draft pick out of the University of Oklahoma hit .300 or better in every month but one (.266 in May) and coaxed 43 walks in 315 at-bats, but he said there is plenty of work to be done this offseason.

“I need to be more explosive, and I need to be working on my hammies a lot,” Crooks said. “I want to get stronger, more explosive and have more torque with my swing and then keep my legs healthy for the long season that is ahead.”

For Mathews, rest is on the horizon after easily topping his career most for innings pitched. Of course, Mathews is no stranger to large amounts of work after he made national sports news in 2022 when he threw 156 pitches in a 16-strikeout performance as Stanford beat Texas in an NCAA Super Regional game.

Incredibly, he threw 2,291 pitches this past season. The worst ones, in his eyes at least, came at Triple-A Memphis where he went 0-2 with a 6.48 ERA in four starts. He’ll be fresher and better prepared for that level of hitting come Spring Training, he said.

“The curveball was really cool -- until it wasn’t,” Mathews said of his stuff deteriorating as his season wore on. “Like anything great in life, it falls apart eventually. I’m not going to lie -- it fell apart on me.

“For me, the offseason will look pretty different because the workload was so different. … This year the emphasis will be on building up to start earlier and hopefully pitch later. It’s just about preparing the body for a longer haul of a year.”