Why the Cardinals refuse to call up the hottest prospect in baseball

The St. Louis Cardinals lineup has been one of the pleasant surprises of this season, with one glaring exception: The team's gotten next to nothing from its center fielders. Victor Scott II was so bad at the plate that he was eventually demoted to Triple-A, but replacement Nathan Church and his 94 OPS+ haven't exactly set the world on fire.

What luck, then, that one of the team's best prospects just happens to play the outfield — and he also happens to be possibly the hottest hitter on the planet at the moment.

Joshua Baez launched a whopping four homers on Tuesday night for Memphis. He's now got seven homers already in June, raising his OPS for the month to an eye-watering 1.322. A second-round pick back in 2021, Baez entered the year with sky-high expectations after a breakout 2025 campaign. He's made good on that hype and then some, to the point where he's among the most tantalizing offensive prospects in the sport.

And yet, despite tearing the cover off the ball for weeks now — and despite a team that's ready to contend, and could use an outfield boost — St. Louis seems no closer to giving him a promotion. Which begs the question: What gives?

Joshua Baez is one of the most tantalizing prospects in MLB

Let's start with the good. As the above highlight reel suggests, Baez can hit the absolute tar out of the baseball: He's built like a linebacker at 6-foot-3 and 220 pounds, and he gets every bit of that frame into his swing. Baez currently ranks in the 99th percentile in both average and 90th-percentile exit velocity, and he pulls the ball in the air more frequently than just about anyone else in the high Minors. Translation: when he gets the barrel on one, it goes a long, long way.

He's also a better athlete than you think. While we don't have sprint speed data in Triple-A, Baez has spent plenty of time in center field for Memphis this season, and he's stolen 12 bases while being caught just once. A player with top-of-the-scale power, who also adds value in other ways? What are we missing here? Well, to paraphrase the meme: His defect is that no one's actually sure whether he can hit the ball.

Why Cardinals haven't called Joshua Baez up yet — and why a promotion might not be coming any time soon

To say that Baez has contact issues would be like saying Bartolo Colon had speed issues. He struck out a whopping 236 times combined across 2023 and 2024, and the problem got so bad that it seemed like he might wash out of St. Louis for good. That's what made the 2025 turnaround so surprising: With a new player development team in tow and a new stance and swing, he made double-digit gains in both his whiff and K rates, allowing that progidious pop to get into games far more often.

In his first taste of Triple-A, though, that old problem has come creeping back. Baez swings at everything — his swing rate is in the 88th percentile, his chase rate in the 6th — and he doesn't make contact nearly enough for such an aggressive approach to be viable. His contact rate on balls in the zone is a tick below 75 percent. That places him in the third percentile; for context, the MLB average zone contact rate is 82.6 percent.

Granted, those numbers are still better than where he was a couple of years ago, and he's gotten away with it by doing incredible amounts of damage in the instances in which he does make contact. But if he's having a hard time with whiffs in Triple-A, what happens when he starts facing the best pitchers on the planet on a regular basis — pitchers with organizations who have scouted his weaknesses? It's not hard to see the contact profile getting even worse, and unlike someone like, say, Munetaka Murakami, Baez doesn't have the discipline to draw walks and force pitchers to throw him strikes.

All of which makes him the most boom-or-bust player in the Minors right now, if not the entire sport. Clearly the Cardinals are aware of the red flags here, which is why they haven't trusted him enough to call him up to the big-league club. It's hard to blame them, but eventually the clamoring — and Baez's production — will get so loud that it can no longer be ignored.

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