St. Louis Cardinals Get Bad News on Top Prospect

The St. Louis Cardinals won their season opener on Thursday, defeating the Minnesota Twins by a score of 5-3. However, it hasn’t been all good news for the Cardinals to start the 2025 campaign.

On Friday, it was revealed that St. Louis’ top pitching prospect Tink Hence has been diagnosed with a rib cage strain and will begin the season on the injured list, via Jeff Jones of the Belleville News-Democrat.

Hence has entered 2025 ranked as the 38th-best prospect in all of the league by Baseball Prospectus and was slated to begin the year at Triple-A Memphis. He made 20 starts at Double-A Springfield last season, going 4-3 with a 2.71 ERA while allowing 59 hits and racking up 109 strikeouts over 79.2 innings.

The 22-year-old was originally selected by the Cardinals in the second round of the 2020 MLB Draft and has put together a very impressive track record in St. Louis’ minor-league system, registering a 3.28 ERA while averaging 11.6 strikeouts per nine innings.

Hence made two starts for the Redbirds in spring training, surrendering seven runs (six earned) on seven hits across 3.1 innings of work.

The Cardinals certainly have an interesting starting pitching staff heading into 2025, although they certainly have question marks at the back end of the rotation with Miles Mikolas and converted reliever Matthew Liberatore filling out the last two slots.

St. Louis has missed the playoffs each of the last two years, most recently going 83-79 in 2024. We’ll see if the Cards can make a push to return to October this season. Hopefully, Hence can get healthy and potentially make an impact for the big-league club sometime down the line.