Projecting the St. Louis Cardinals’ 2017 Non-Roster Invitees

The St. Louis Cardinals will likely announce the non-roster players that they’re bringing to spring training in the coming days. Let’s take a guess at who those players will be.

MLB clubs are beginning to announce their non-roster invitees for major-league spring training, which gets underway in just over a month for most teams. The St. Louis Cardinals have yet to release a complete list of NRIs, though they’ve announced the names of a few players who will be attending camp as they’ve signed them to minor-league contracts this offseason.

The Cardinals tend to bring a smaller group of non-roster invitees to big-league camp than most other teams do. This trend could be partially affected by the fact that the Cardinals’ major-league and minor-league training facilities are on the same campus, so players can easily be shuffled back and forth. Since many of the Cards’ road destinations during the spring are several hours away from their facility in Jupiter, they often bring along large groups of players from minor-league camp to play in away games rather than making their veteran players travel. In other words, just because a player isn’t on the list of non-roster invitees doesn’t mean that he won’t get a chance to prove himself in major-league spring training.

With only a short amount of time remaining until the Cardinals announce their list of non-roster players, let’s take a guess at who will have the honor of participating in the Cardinals’ major-league camp and possibly follow in the footsteps of players such as Jeremy Hazelbaker, Eric Fryer, and Carlos Villanueva to make the big-league roster out of spring training.

We’ll start off with the pitching contingent: