Oscar Taveras injury: St. Louis Cardinals lose top prospect for season after ankle injury

There’s still time to jump on the Kolten-Wong-for-September-callup bandwagon, if you hustle: The St. Louis Cardinals’ top prospect and erstwhile September shot-in-the-arm candidate, Oscar Taveras, will end a frustrating season early when he undergoes ankle surgery next week, according to simultaneous tweets from Jenifer Langosch and Derrick Goold.

Well, that was sudden. As early as Wednesday morning Goold’s colleague, Bernie Miklasz, was writing about what Taveras’s imminent return to the field meant for the Cardinals in September. Now it means that Adron Chambers will probably get a few chances to repeat Tuesday night’s heroics.

It’s been Taveras’s first disappointing season as a professional, but it’s worth keeping the disappointment in context: It’s directly related to an injury, intermittent whispers about his psyche aside, and his season wasn’t actually all that disappointing when he was playing. It was more like a slow start that never really got the chance to morph into a regular finish.

This wasn’t a collapse so much as the surprising revelation that he was human—his first year in AAA Memphis ends with a .306/.341/.462 line over 46 games, most of them coming before the ankle injury that's bothered him since mid-May. Not disappointing for a 21 year old—just disappointing for this 21-year-old.