Minor-league free agency is intriguing because, from the outside, it’s often unclear why players change teams.
In some cases, when a prospect has spent years in one organization without much success, it’s easy to see why both the player and the club might want a fresh start. But that clearly wasn’t the situation with former St. Louis Cardinals farmhand Ricardo Velez.
Velez joined the Cardinals last April after being released by the Minnesota Twins, and he was outstanding. Across 65 innings—mostly at Double-A—he posted a miserly 1.80 ERA for St. Louis’s minor-league affiliates. And then, almost suddenly, he was gone.
Can Velez capitalize on success as a Cardinal?
According to the transactions log on his official roster page, Velez signed with the Texas Rangers on Tuesday. It took at least a few additional days for the move to show up on his page, which is not uncommon when involving players who haven’t appeared in the big leagues.
Velez, who stands 6-foot-1, 180 pounds, was a 2021 free-agent signing for the Twins out of the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. He generally posted strong stats along the way through the minors, but a rough 16-game stint in Double-A at the end of the 2024 season was evidently reason enough for the Twins to cut bait.
That could have been the Cardinals’ long-term gain, but with Velez off to Texas, it now appears that if the 27-year-old winds up in the big leagues someday, it will be due at least partially to the adjustments he made as a St. Louis farmhand. He’s almost exclusively become a reliever, an area where the Rangers are much weaker than in the rotation at the major league level.
If there’s one positive, though, it’s that the Cardinals seem to be improving at pitching development, which can only bode well for this club moving forward. Velez, however, could be a real loss if he maintains his upward trajectory.
