WASHINGTON — They all took off the St. Louis Cardinals uniform for the final time a few years before he was born in 2001. Yet Victor Scott II keeps their legacies close at hand.
Scott, one of the major leagues’ fastest players, harkens back to an even more distant era, when artificial turf covered original Busch Stadium, contact hitters would shoot the gaps and run until tomorrow, and walks became almost automatic doubles.
“As I studied the game more,” Scott told USA TODAY Sports on Sunday, “past Cardinals – Willie McGee, Vince Coleman, Ozzie Smith, Lou Brock – those are all guys I started studying as I came up through the organization.
“Those guys put in a ton of work and left a remarkable path for guys with my playing style, to be able to come up through and learn about. Those guys left a remarkable impression on the organization.
“I only hope to leave that kind of impact, as well.”
Scott, the Cardinals’ 24-year-old center fielder, is helping lead a St. Louis retooling that is probably going better than the club anticipated to start the season: They’ve now won eight games in a row, putting them firmly above .500 at 22-19 and, as the season passes the one-quarter mark, well within contention, perched one game out of first place in the National League Central.
It’s an odd time: The club moved on from former MVP Paul Goldschmidt, tried in vain to trade slugging third baseman Nolan Arenado and, with each passing year, the powerful legacy left by two-time World Series champion Albert Pujols fades further away.
Yet as Scott begins to emerge, the Cardinals as a whole are coalescing.
They did next to nothing during the offseason and their aggressive shopping of Arenado – who rejected a trade to the Houston Astros – signaled a drawing down, financially if not competitively.
Yet guess who’s just a game behind the front-running Brewers?
“We’re excited to come to the ballpark,” says Arenado, who slammed his fourth home run Sunday and whose .778 OPS is higher than each of his past two seasons. “I think that’s the first time in a couple years it feels like we’re coming to the ballpark ready to win a ballgame instead of coming to the ballpark hoping something good happens.
“It’s just a different vibe, for sure.”
It is improvement by increments at its finest – a large and versatile group of players each getting just a little bit better – some by leaps and bounds.
Enter Scott.
‘He was dialed in’
Scott has paired his elite sprint speed – at 30 feet per second, he trails only Byron Buxton and Bobby Witt Jr. among big leaguers – with key mechanical and approach adjustments at the plate.
He’s batting .290 with a pair of home runs and a .357 on-base percentage, numbers that in a vacuum don’t scream impact. It is when they are paired with Scott’s speed that this hint of offensive viability can create explosive results for the Cardinals.
Scott’s now 11-for-12 in stolen bases and can be counted on for a more than occasional game-breaking feat, such as when he scored from first on a single in a win over Pittsburgh last week.
Yet those feats of footspeed are no good unless paired with a sound offensive approach. And so it’s moments like an at-bat on Saturday when Scott fell into an 0-2 hole, only to work the count full and rip a rally-keying double that are even more crucial.
They crystallize just how far Scott came from last season, when he broke camp with the club, then proceeded to bat .085 (5 for 59) before getting dispatched to the minors. He spent the final two months with the big club, faring a little better (.244 with a .278 OBP), but it was clear a different guy needed to show up to Jupiter, Fla. come winter.
Scott made it happen.
“He was dialed in coming into spring training,” says Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol. “He was on a mission and you could tell there was a difference in not just how he approached the game but his work.
“He was very detailed in his preparation and you knew it would carry over at some point – thankfully sooner than later.”
For Scott, it was simply a matter of learning that locking in comes just as much in November and January as it does when he steps in the batter’s box.
‘I didn’t want to repeat that’
Though it might not yet rival the big three of California, Texas and Florida, Georgia has become perhaps as efficient in churning out – and nurturing – big leaguers. And so when Scott returned home to Powder Springs after his first, failed attempt to stick in the major leagues, he had a readymade working group at his disposal.
Mornings were spent at Champfit Grindhouse, a facility where several big league speed demons also got their work in. Tampa Bay Rays rookie Chandler Simpson, veteran Taylor Trammell and Athletics slugger Lawrence Butler spent their mornings there under the staff’s tutelage.
Yet for Scott, it was time in the lab that was important: From 8 to 10 a.m. on weekdays he’d study film and learn his swing inside out, then jump in the cage and aim to implement more efficient moves to the ball or tweaks to his set-up.
His father would then accompany him to a nearby football or baseball field – “Anywhere to have room to run,” says Scott – for speed and defensive work.
“He’d hit balls off the tee, no matter the weather, because we knew we had to prepare for different elements. We trained for all those things,” he says.
If a taste of the big leagues taught Scott anything, it’s that comfort is perhaps as important as preparation. Scott reported to the Cardinals’ Jupiter, Florida, spring training site on Jan. 10, the better to acclimate.
In a spring training with several moving roster parts and roles up for grabs – with the man who didn’t move, Arenado, commanding much of the attention – Scott won the center field job.
“After the season ended last year, I knew I didn’t want to repeat that,” says Scott. “I wanted to learn as much as I could about the game and be able to implement those things in the offseason in my training.
“Just being very direct in what I was looking for out of my training. And coming into spring training I got there earlier, to become comfortable with the environment and work with the staff that was here to implement those things I wanted to work on.”
The results have been tough to miss. Defensively, his six outs above average are tied for fifth among all major leaguers and tied for second among center fielders.
At the plate, Scott has more than doubled his walk rate, to 10.1%, and increased his line drive percentage from 21.9 to 29.7.
“There’s a big difference in how he’s coming in and preparing for a game and how he’s making adjustments based on the results,” says Marmol. “The biggest difference with Victor compared to when he first got here and didn’t have success when he broke camp with us last year is he understands what the league is trying to do to him.
“And he’s actually answering back.”
The ceiling is the proof
It’s a little hard to tell what all this means for 2025. Sunday, veterans Arenado, Lars Nootbar and Willson Contreras homered in a 6-1 victory that capped a three-game sweep of the Washington Nationals.
The Cardinals’ much-ballyhooed “organizational reset” is still ongoing. Longtime baseball operations head John Mozeliak is stepping aside after this season, making way for former Red Sox GM Chaim Bloom.
Yet the mix of versatile mid-career pieces, veteran stalwarts and emerging players such as Scott and shortstop Masyn Winn are melding. The pitching staff’s ERA, 19th in the majors, might portend unluckier days ahead.
For his part, Scott is getting his feet down in the foundation. He was teammates at West Virginia with infielder J.J. Wetherholt, whom the Cardinals selected seventh overall last season; Wetherholt, now at Class AA, is off to a strong start in his first 50 professional games, with a .403 career OBP.
He and Scott would represent a very athletic future core of the club, one that might recall, just a bit, those hit-and-run Cardinals of the 1980s, and those red-coated St. Louis hall of famers Scott calls to mind so easily.
And even those guys – Coleman stole 110 bases as a 23-year-old rookie – didn’t have the liberal base-stealing rules of today’s big leagues. Scott actually has a higher major league success rate on steals – 16 for 18, 89% – as he did at West Virginia (62 for 72, 86%).
“They help out my game a lot,” he says of MLB’s new rules. “So I appreciate them.”
And the Cardinals are gaining a greater appreciation for Scott, leading the way into a new era – even as this current one is going better than almost any imaginable reset.
“That’s the exciting part of the team – we don’t exactly know what the ceiling is,” says Nootbar.
Says Arenado: “We know what we have. We’re getting some guys playing really good baseball. It’s not something we didn’t expect; we just needed them to do it, right?
“We needed Victor Scott – he’s playing better than we thought.”