It would be really, really easy, and frankly a bit cathartic in the short term, to bemoan just how poorly top-tier St. Louis Cardinals prospects over the last decade have panned out. Even setting aside the obviously outlying case of Oscar Taveras (not to mention the departure of the other former top prospect who was then traded to the Atlanta Braves in order to fill his spot in the lineup), there was the perpetual inability of Alex Reyes to stay healthy (even if it did culminate with some respectable service out of the bullpen, an underwhelming but hardly catastrophic outcome for a major prospect). There was the lack of developed offensive punch expected from Dylan Carlson and, at least so far, Jordan Walker.

The more centered perspective on the last decade or so of St. Louis Cardinals player development is that a whole bunch of the club’s more productive players were pleasant surprises. Guys like Kolten Wong and Jack Flaherty were high draft picks and low-level Top 100 guys, but their produced outcomes are better than one should reasonably expect. And that’s not even to mention the likes of Tommy Edman, Brendan Donovan, Paul DeJong, Lars Nootbaar, Giovanny Gallegos, Ryan Helsley, and Matt Carpenter if you want to push the timeline back just slightly. The Cardinals are getting roughly the results that the prospect pedigree suggests they should, but in just a completely roundabout way.

But this also adds to the frustration because all the Cardinals need to do, it seems, is convert on one or two of these can’t-miss guys and they will be living in their own glory days. Is this a fair ask, to believe that the Cardinals should simply be able to find a million diamonds in the rough without actually missing on anything? My answer to that is a very simple and eloquent “Shut up.”

What is confounding about Dylan Carlson more than anything else is that he never really was a flame-out. He didn’t have any major injuries, nor any major scandals, nor anything even remotely resembling an inflection point in his career trajectory. Dylan Carlson never “arrived” in the way that, a month into Albert Pujols’s career, everybody who saw him understood that they were witnessing something truly special. To the extent that minor leagues-as-farm analogies can possibly work, Dylan Carlson was the equivalent of a crop that got like 90% of the way to ripeness but eventually started to turn bad while still on the vine. And had the Cardinals traded Dylan Carlson, say, a couple years ago, it may have felt a little bit like they were selling low. And yet it turns out that he would simply bleed value on a steady decline for years until he would be flipped at the last minute of the 2024 trade deadline to the Tampa Bay Rays for relief pitching rental Shawn Armstrong.

(I should probably clarify that when I say that the Cardinals could have traded Dylan Carlson, I don’t mean that whole “they could’ve traded him for Juan Soto” trope. The trade, in reality, would have been something like this one suggested and found via a lazy Google search–Jordan Walker, Nolan Gorman, Matthew Liberatore, Masyn Winn, Tink Hence, and Carlson. What’s funny is that, aside from Winn and to a lesser extent Hence, this package looks a lot worse than it did two years ago. Maybe you’d even do this trade for Soto and I wouldn’t be too mad if you suggested so! But let’s just be honest about what a Soto trade was going to take.)

But things have come bizarrely full-circle for the Cardinals. In 2018, the team somewhat infamously traded Tommy Pham to the Tampa Bay Rays for prospects in a move largely meant to a clear a starting spot for Harrison Bader. Four years later, Harrison Bader was traded with an eye on giving Dylan Carlson the center field job. And now, two years later, the Cardinals trade Carlson, effectively, to give a job to…a returning Tommy Pham.

If you are like me, your memories of when Dylan Carlson arrived with the Cardinals are likely a bit fuzzy, it’s probably because it happened in 2020, a year which is not real. Before and after his MLB debut, Dylan Carlson was a central figure in countless Nolan Arenado trade rumors, back when people thought that acquiring Nolan Arenado would be hard to do. But when he arrived, much like 2020 itself, Dylan Carlson was a continuous series of disappointment. But absent a minor league team to which he could be assigned, Carlson remained with the Cardinals and while he ended the season with a lackluster .616 OPS, he was getting prime spots by the time the postseason arrived. There was little question that Dylan Carlson would begin 2021 in the big leagues, with the Cardinals, Rockies, or someone else.

Despite being a Rookie of the Year finalist–a distant third, but third nonetheless–the full package of Dylan Carlson felt a bit incomplete. He hit some home runs, but 18 over 619 plate appearances wasn’t exactly Pujolsian. He had a competent walk rate but also a rather high strikeout rate. His defense, spent primarily in right field, was…fine, the kind of product that would have felt completely adequate had his bat provided more inspiration. And that was the verdict as Carlson’s first full season in the Majors concluded.

The next year saw Carlson a mostly similar batter but with one major difference–his power was visibly diminished. Over his 488 plate appearances, he hit just eight home runs. But luckily, a seemingly new attribute came into focus–the formerly average corner outfielder was now looking solid in center field. Was this the outfield equivalent of Paul DeJong? The Cardinals seemed to believe in him, enough that Harrison Bader became expendable in order to help bolster the club’s relative weakness in the starting rotation. He even his one of his home runs in the first game the Cardinals played after Bader was traded. He concluded the season with a 99 OPS+ that would have raised more eyebrows had Carlson been still in right field.

But the next season, Carlson took another dip. Some of it could be chalked up to bad luck–his walk rate and home run rates had actually increased from the prior year while his strikeout rate had (very barely) declined–but the end result of a 78 OPS+ wasn’t exactly inspiring confidence. Meanwhile, although he began the year on the IL, his 2024 has been even worse. He hasn’t hit a single home run despite a 138 plate appearance total that isn’t exactly tiny anymore. He has five total extra bases on the season. His strikeout rate has skyrocketed while his walk rate has declined (it makes all the sense in the world that pitchers are less scared of him than ever before). On a team that isn’t exactly overflowing with great outfielders–while Alec Burleson has broken out in 2024, Lars Nootbaar has arguably been a minor disappointment, Jordan Walker is in Memphis, the team has been stuck playing infielder Brendan Donovan regularly in left field, and 2023 waiver pickup Michael Siani has been shockingly vital for the club this year–Dylan Carlson has become virtually unplayable. Despite his 2023 struggles, the Cardinals were more than content to pony up for his first year of arbitration, but his second year was looking like more and more of an open question.

What has been truly jarring about Dylan Carlson is that an organization that hasn’t been shy (see: Walker, Jordan) about demoting prospects over relatively small samples of subpar productivity did not once option Dylan Carlson to Memphis. The Cardinals had the right to demote Dylan Carlson at any point over the last several years and did not do so. He was treated as indispensable. He was untouchable. And yet by the time he was gone, the Cardinals were selling Carlson at a low that was unthinkable just a couple years ago.