The win-win scenarios of Jason Heyward and the St. Louis Cardinals

This is the Year of the Young Superstar, as you’ve been told over and over again. There are some rookie classes that end with Chris Coghlan and Andrew Bailey winning Rookie of the Year, and then there are rookie classes like this. Kris Bryant! Carlos Correa! Joc Pederson! Addison Russell! Joey Gallo! Francisco Lindor! Byron Buxton! And those are just the hitters. It’s like an issue of Baseball America threw up at a wild party, and it’s awesome.

These are the players who will help define baseball for the next decade, and we’re watching their comic-book origin stories. Which means it’s a fantastic time to remind everyone that Jason Heyward is still just 25, and we still have no idea what kind of ceiling he has.

We’re starting to get an idea, a very good idea, of what Heyward can become. That is, we’ve already seen it. For the last four seasons, he’s been somewhere between slightly above-average and solidly above-average at the plate, with various nicks and scrapes along the way. He complements that with otherworldly outfield defense, making him one of the more underrated players in the game. Since 2010, just 11 players have a higher WAR. If this is as good as he gets, you still want him on your team.

For some reason, Heyward’s early success at a ridiculously young age works against him when it comes to the ol’ ceiling debate. If he raked at UCLA in 2010, tore up Class A in 2011, shot through the upper minors to get a cup of coffee in 2012, and had a pleasant first full season in majors in 2013, he wouldn’t be a mild disappointment. He would still be a dormant volcano of untapped baseball potential, and everyone would be giddy with anticipation. But because he was merely successful in the majors, it’s almost as if he’s a known quantity, and what we see is what we get.

We’re all weird, is what I’m getting at. We’re all weird and we should appreciate Jason Heyward a little more before he explodes. And the explosion might be happening already. After an atrocious start, Heyward is hitting .351/.385/.567 over the last 30 days, with five homers -- almost half his season total from last year. He talked to Derrick Goold about what’s different, and his explanation is compelling:

“When a hitter looks like he’s tied up at times it’s not because the swing is changing, it’s just not consistent,” Heyward said this past week in Miami during a lengthy discussion about his swing. “It’s not as consistent because you’re not allowing yourself to have good timing with the swing. Absolutely when you’re chopping ground balls like that, it’s rough. I felt like I was doing a lot of things on the way to the ball that I didn’t want to and limited my ability to hit line drives somewhere. Being late to the spot is a huge part of that. You want to make them pay for their mistakes and at the time I wasn’t able to make them pay for their mistakes.

There’s a lot more talk about his swing at the above link, and it’s recommended reading. If anything, it makes you remember that he’s still a young player, still a work in progress, still a player with untapped potential locked in a closet and the tools to saw through the lock. And this brings us to the win-win situation of the St. Louis Cardinals right now.

It’s not smart to just ignore the first month of the season now that Heyward’s hot. Those regularly awful at-bats still happened. They still count. When you add the bad stretches with the good, you get the player that Heyward has been for the last three seasons, give or take. His adjusted OPS for the season is 108. It was 107 last year and it’s 113 for his career. It’s bad science to ignore those larger samples just because of some nice talk about a young player’s improved swing.

Heyward settling into a familiar routine, with his standard ups and downs, would still be a win for the Cardinals, who almost certainly want to retain him. When he’s a free agent at the end of the season, there will still be teams lining up to pay him if he has a standard Heyward season, but it’s not like he would get a Robinson Cano-sized deal. He wouldn’t be able to point to the Giancarlo Stanton extension and claim that’s what a talented 26-year-old free agent should get. He would get an untapped-potential premium, certainly, pushing his deal into the nine figures. But he wouldn’t get the mega-deal that we were all guessing he was going to get just a few years ago.

That would suit the Cardinals just fine. Think about what players like Yoan Moncada are getting on the international free agent. What if teams were practically guaranteed that he had a two- or three-win floor, that he was almost certain to be a solid major league regular immediately, but still have superstar potential? Instead of a $63 million outlay from the Red Sox, Moncada might have doubled that. That’s the chance the Cardinals would be thrilled to take with Heyward, to hope for the superstar potential without handing out the superstar contract, with a high floor to go with the high ceiling.

If Heyward is the player we’re used to, the Cardinals win.

He sure looks like a different hitter over the last month, a more comfortable player with a slightly different approach. The defense is still amazing, and the power looks like it’s on an upward trajectory back to its 2012 peak. Heyward with that kind of power is most certainly a star and one of the more well-rounded players in baseball. He’ll get the goofy money.

In this scenario, the Cardinals win because ... well, they’ll win. A lot. And even though the Cardinals are essentially the 1998 Yankees right now and completely laying waste to the National League, they’ll still need some help to keep going. Matt Adams is gone. The ugly stats (seven walks, 46 strikeouts in 152 plate appearances) underneath Randal Grichuk’s surprising success suggest a minor correction is coming. Jon Jay has been awful, and even though Matt Holliday is coming back, it’s worth remembering that he’s a well-worn 35.

This isn’t to say that the Cardinals are hosed. Just a note that things don’t have to continue working this smoothly for the Cardinals’ lineup. They can use another slugger in the middle of the order because every team can, but also because there are more than a couple of questions when it comes to how they’ll keep scoring their runs. They’re still in the bottom-third in home runs, for example. A suddenly slugging Heyward would be a fantastic plot twist.

If Heyward’s the same player, the Cardinals will be happy to make the effort to sign him to a reasonable deal. If he’s about to turn into a star, the Cardinals will be happy with their super-team heading into the postseason, and they’ll figure the rest out later. Either way, the Cardinals are going to win. I know that most of you were really worried about that.

Considering what the Heyward/Miller trade looked like just last month, it’s impressive that we’re back where we started at the beginning of the season. Heyward is still what he’s been for a while -- a young, productive player with a chance to get much, much better. Teams that employ those sorts of players usually do end up winning, after all.

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