In a season-long search for answers, the Cardinals appear to have some offensive pieces emerging. Ivan Herrera, Alec Burleson, rookie JJ Wetherholt, and (hopefully) Jordan Walker can continue to do what he’s done through the first 3 weeks of the season. Between Walker, Nolan Gorman, and Victor Scott II, there existed the biggest questions about their offensive futures on this team. Walker, undoubtedly, has earned himself a lot longer leash with his start. Gorman is doing his Gorman thing, showing
flashes of offensive upside, and then stretches where he can’t even touch the baseball.
The St. Louis Centerfielder Victor Scott II spent the offseason with a biomechanical specialist at West Virginia (his alma mater), and he worked to make his swing more efficient. The results early on this season have not shown a tangible improvement.
According to Statcast, Scott’s swing path still appears to be mostly unchanged, if only a minor tweak that Scott is trying to take the ball back up the middle more often than pulling it, which could allow him to leg out of a few more infield hits.
Victor Scott has also moved back in the box slightly on his setup and the stance he has closed himself off more, likely in an effort to keep himself more direct and up the middle with his approach.
What about when he’s putting the ball in play? Looking at his batted ball profile, it appears he is still struggling with pulled groundballs. Scott has cut his “AIR%” in half from 56% down to 33.3%, which is an okay trade-off for a player of Scott’s skill set. The problem is that Scott is not able to do any damage; he is not pulling the ball in the air, only at a putrid 2.4% so far in 2026.
When you look at what Scott has done against individual pitches to try to understand what has given him the most trouble, it’s pretty much everything that’s not a Sinker or Cutter.
Oddly enough, when you go over to Fangraphs, Victor Scott has a 123 wRC+ against LHP. Normally, you don’t see a player perform that well against same-handed pitching. The other unfortunate end of that is that his wRC+ against RHP is 10.
The bottom of the zone with those offspeed/breaking balls is the area of greatest need. Ordinarily, players will have a tough time if there is a spot or two that is tough to cover. When it’s the entire bottom 1/3 of the zone and underneath the zone that can be exploited by the opposition, especially the best in the world at that, it can almost be untenable.
Okay, what about his speed and defense?
Scott is a little bit slower in his reads, but he seems to process the flight of the ball really well, and has above-average to plus closing speed, and is great with closing speed and getting to the baseball once he has an idea of where it might land.
Scott’s 29.6 ft/s is in the 98th percentile in all of baseball. These are the two things that Scott does best. Impacting the baseball and providing any kind of offensive value is not. Which is unfortunate, with nearly 700 MLB PA in his career already, it doesn’t seem like, projecting forward at least, that Scott will be anything more than a 4th OF in MLB long term. Which would prove my initial evaluation of him wrong. I thought he could be someone with 10-15 HR power annually and play gold glove defense in CF, and that could be a nice above-average player on a competitive team.
ESPN’s Kiley McDaniel recently posted his first 2026 MLB mock draft, and included in that piece was the Cardinals at number 13. For that spot, one name that McDaniel talked about was Trevor Condon, who is a prep outfielder from the state of Georgia. McDaniel mentioned that some evaluators around the game whisper the name “McGonigle” when talking about Condon, and that caught my attention QUICKLY. MLB dot com drew comparisons to Brett Gardner or Sal Frelick, which are definitely different profiles, but that was released back in December, and we now have this spring’s results and performance to include in that evaluation. The overall purpose of this blurb in this article is that this years draft class is particularly loaded with some young exciting outfield prospects and while you dont draft for need, if the evaluations are close, position could be a tie breaker, lest we not forget the lurking emergence of Tai Peete or Ryan Mitchell, both of whom could project to play CF long term if their development continue in a positve way, both with considerable more offensive upside than Scott has displayed in his 2+ seasons at the big league level thus far.
Could Scott change something and unlock more offensive ability down the road? Sure. But, at this point, he hasn’t shown anything to convince us otherwise, and those asking the question about what Scott is long-term. It would be hard to argue anything other than a 4th outfielder at this point.
What are your thoughts on Victor Scott? Let me know, and let’s talk about it!
-Thanks for reading
