JUPITER http://www.whitesoxfanproshop.com/authentic-paul-konerko-jersey , Fla. (AP) —the character of Paul Goldschmidt after the Cardinals traded for the slugging first baseman in December.“A lot of times the hyperbole doesn’t meet what’s real,” Shildt said. “In this case it’s exceeded it. He’s come in and been unbelievably engaging, thoughtful, proactive. He’s really smart and he’s really dedicated to what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. He’s exceeded expectations already, before we even got on the field.”Goldschmidt has physically been in Jupiter for about 10 days. Mentally, he’s been in a Cardinals uniform for months.Shortly after the trade, he began swapping texts with Cardinals coaches and teammates discussing the finer points of the game, like baserunning and taking leads.“They are not short conversations,” Shildt said. “And they are not forced. He loves it, is my point. He’s a baseball guy.”For Goldschmidt, those kinds of offseason chats are the norm.“Being new, I’m sure they wanted to make sure I got the lay of the land Reynaldo Lopez Jersey ,” Goldschmidt said. “Where I was probably the guy reaching out (in Arizona) when we signed the free agents or a new coach came in.”The Cardinals won 88 games last year, their third straight season missing the playoffs.“We needed just a little bit more,” Shildt said.St. Louis traded right-hander Luke Weaver, catcher Carson Kelly, minor leaguer Andy Young and a draft pick for Goldschmidt, whom Shildt called one of the “top five players in baseball.”Goldschmidt hit .290 with 33 homers and 83 RBIs in 2018. For his career, he’s a .297 hitter with 209 homers over eight seasons. The Cardinals hope Goldschmidt will add pop in the middle of the order. A three-time Gold Glove first baseman, Goldschmidt will also stabilize the Cardinals’ defense that led the majors in errors.Shildt is already smiling at thought of a lineup that features Goldschmidt, Matt Carpenter and a healthy Marcel Ozuna potentially at cleanup.“I don’t have an announcement to make, but I know he’s going to hit in the top three,” Shildt said of Goldschmidt. “And Carp will hit one, so we can do the math from there.”Goldschmidt took live batting practice with his new teammates for the first time on Monday Bruce Rondon Jersey , the first full-squad workout for the Cardinals.“He just jumped right in,” shortstop Paul DeJong said. “He’s part of this group already.”The 31-year-old Goldschmidt has one year remaining on his contract. The Cardinals have expressed interest in signing him to a longer deal.“In my career I’ve always publicly just never commented on my contract, so I’ll just keep that kind of same thing,” Goldschmidt said. There is still a lot of work to be done"The Royals not only hit rock bottom in the standings last year, but they bottomed out in farm system rankings as well. The team went from having the top-ranked farm system by Baseball America and many other experts in 2011, to having the 29th-ranked system last year. Success gave the Royals later draft picks, but the team has had a long dry spell in the draft that stretches to the days when they were picking in the top ten, depriving the minor league system of top-tier prospects.Slowly, things are improving, at least according to most experts. ESPN’s Keith Law recently ranked two Royals in his top 100 prospect list - Daniel Lynch at #53 and Khalil Lee at #55 - a year after shutting the Royals out of his list. This week he came out with his overall organizational rankings, putting the Royals #21 in all of baseball, up from #27 last year.Law admits the system is mostly Lexington’s team plus Lee and last year’s draft class http://www.whitesoxfanproshop.com/authentic-paul-konerko-jersey , but he applauds the shift in draft strategy last year. However the system is poorly ranked, due to “draft classes prior to 2017, when they bet big on some high school arms who haven’t panned out at all.”That view seems to be shared by other prospect evaluators like those at Baseball America. Although they have not updated their rankings for 2019, they did rank the Royals 26th in August, up from 29th earlier in the year. They also applauded the 2018 draft class that added balance to the system, writing the club has “a nice mix of position players who aren’t that far off of the Top 100, but they need their college and pitching-heavy 2018 draft to match up with those hitters.”Joel Rueter at Bleacher Report ranks the Royals 24th in baseball, after having ranked them dead-last the previous season. He notes the college pitchers selected last June - Brady Singer, Jackson Kowar, and Daniel Lynch - and promising improvement by young players like M.J. Melendez make it a “system on the rise.” Rueter highlights outfielder Seuly Matias as an “X-factor”, saying that he needs to change his approach from his “20-grade hit tool, which is extremely poor” Miguel Gonzalez Jersey , to tap into his raw power.Craig Edwards at Fangraphs took a more quantitative approach to a ranking by using metrics based on scouting grades to evaluate each system. The Royals were actually tied for 10th in all of baseball in the number of prospects (24) that graded 40 or 45. But they have just one player that graded 50 or higher (Matias), and no players that graded 55 or higher, illustrating the absence of upper-end talent in the system. That gives them an overall ranking of 27th. Still, you can see the progress being made, as noted by MLB Pipline when they highlighted Kansas City as having one of the most-improved systems. Evaluator Jim Callis wrote that the Royals made a jump from having the second-worst farm system in baseball due to their 2018 draft class, highlighting later picks like pitchers Kris Bubic, Austin Cox, and outfielder Kyle Isbel as players that are already among the best in the Kansas City system.Fangraphs writer Stephen Loftus found it typically takes two years for a team to go from bottoming out to jumping up rankings. The Royals will have another shot to improve the farm system this June, when they will have the second-overall pick. This should be a pretty pivotal summer for many of their top minor leaguers. While there are enticing tools to get excited about, many of their prospects still have glaring holes to their games that will need to be fixed if they hope to become impact big leaguers. If the Royals hope to accelerate their timetable to contention, they will need much more progress to be made.