Blogs

Today brings news that the St. Louis Cardinals have acquired Joel Pineiro from the Boston Red Sox in exchange for cash and a minor league player to be named later. The move is intended to shore up the Cards' struggling starting rotation.

Now, as a recent transplant from the great Northwest and a Mariners fan, I have often questioned Walt Jocketty's penchant for signing questionable ex-Mariners -- see Exhibits A and B -- and have been happily proved wrong both times.

In this case, however, I can confidently state this will not end well. Joel Pineiro sucks. Bad.

Mariners fans have long speculated that steroid use may have contributed to Pineiro's success early in his career, particularly in 2001, when he posted a 2.03 ERA in 75 innings. Since then, however, he has gotten increasingly worse, peaking last year when he rocked an ERA of 6.36 and a record of 6-13. He did nearly lead the league in one category -- earned runs allowed: His tally of 117 was third best, er, worst.

M's fans commonly described him as "Joel Pineiro: Your 2006 Oakland A's MVP."

As Jeff Sullivan of the popular M's blog Lookout Landing wrote when analyzing whether the M's should retain Pineiro's services after 2006, "[Maybe] he can bounce back a little in 2007, but the rest is just Joel being really really bad at what he does."

This year he has posted an ERA of 5.03 in 34 innings as a reliever for the Red Sox. Boston briefly considered using Joel (pronounced Joe-EL) as a closer before the season started (presumably because they never saw him pitch before acquiring him on a one-year $4 million contract). Needless to say, the experiment was short-lived.

The bottom line: Pineiro has a mediocre repertoire of pitches, little command of anything he throws, and a proven track record as a loser.

In other words, he ought to fit in nicely with the rest of the current Cardinals rotation.

-Keegan Hamilton

This just in from the Memphis Redbirds, the St. Louis Cardinals' minor-league affiliate: At the team's August 10 game against the Omaha Royals, the first 1,500 fans to arrive at AutoZone Park in Memphis will receive a Marvel comic book whose cover "will feature the Incredible Hulk, Spiderman [sic] and Iron Man alongside Rockey and Redbirds outfielder Rick Ankiel."

Unreal'll trade ya an autographed copy of Tim Lane's Stagger Lee chapbook for one of them Ankiel comics, straight-up.

Hell, we'll even throw in a handful of Al Sharpton for Mayor campaign buttons.

-Unreal

Let's get funky!

-Unreal

Gut Check swaggered back into town after a long weekend in Dallas. What did we dish up?

- We sent our army of land crabs after you, the reluctant restaurant reviewer.

- We found a damn good cheesesteak.

- Media nonsense about food in China annoyed us -- again.

There's even more at Gut Check. I can't think of a punchy slogan this week. Just go read.

-Ian Froeb

Our friends over at Highway 61 (Revised) snapped a pretty hilarious picture of our "Steal Das Book" issue at Lambert International Airport.

Find the post here -- and knowing them, the promise of a PhotoHunt contest is completely true.

-- Annie Zaleski

Over at our music blog, A to Z, Roy Kasten discusses St. Louis mayor Francis Slay's decision to refuse to give Ike Turner an honorary day. Below is an excerpt from the post, which is found in its entirety here.

St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay titled his recent blog entry on the Ike Turner Day affair "Spiked Ike." Apparently "Turner Burner" and "Wife Beater Repeater" were too subtle.

In the blogospheric tradition of "fisking" -- to quote The Observer: "savaging an argument and scattering the tattered remnants to the four corners of the internet" -- here's a point-counterpoint critique of Slay's rationalizations for denying Izear Luster Turner Jr. an honorary day in the city whose music he helped put on the map.

Nearly a hundred newspapers across the country (and countless blogs and forums) have picked up a story about my decision not to name an "Ike Turner Day" in the City of St. Louis, when Mr. Turner headlines the annual Big Muddy Blues Festival on Laclede's Landing in September.

Only eighteen words in and Slay offers his first evasion: It's not wholly true that Slay decided against an "Ike Turner Day." The truth is that the Office of the Mayor initially okayed an Ike Day request from the Big Muddy Blues Festival. But not long after Big Muddy executive producer Dawne Massey sent out a press release stating as much, Slay reversed his own office's decision.

In the normal course of events, I probably would have.

But what was abnormal about this course of events? Slay doesn't say. Could it be the knee-jerk reaction of activist groups and others who called and e-mailed the mayor in the hours after the proclamation was made public?

Slay's aide, Cathy Smentkowski, who had green-lighted the proclamation, told me, "Once [the announcement] came out to the forefront, then we started getting calls about it. I was like, 'Oh, apparently this isn't that routine, and I really need to cross my t's and dot my i's."

Based on interviews with Smentkowski and Big Muddy's Massey, the timeline went something like this: Massey made her request in early June and received approval from Smentkowski via e-mail a few days later. On July 17, Massey sent out her press release, and the proclamation was made public. The next day, the mayor's office reversed the decision, forcing Massey to send out a correction to her initial press release.

-- Annie Zaleski

My review of La Gra Italian Tapas is now available online. Click here to read.

Also in this week's issue: Malcolm touches upon a subject close to Gut Check's heart and tries to keep down a cardboard shipping box, while Kristie reflects upon summer and a Lakeside Lemonade.

-Ian Froeb

Sate your appetite at Gut Check, the RFT food blog.

Spotted at the corner of Hampton and Pernod:

-Ian Froeb

What do award-winning Riverfront Times writers do to unwind after hours?

Unreal gets asked this question all the time. Not many of our cubiclemates share our twin passions, pumpkin carving and appliqué. But a few are karaoke enthusiasts of some repute.

And some are not.

An example of the former is the staff's soon-to-be-no-longer most eligible bachelor Chad Garrison, captured here bravely belting out his signature anthem, Foreigner's "I Want to Know What Love Is":

-Unreal

The atmosphere at Left Bank Books' Harry Potter midnight release party on Friday was like the opening weekend of a Star Wars film, the finale of The Sopranos, an anime convention and the last Beatles performance rolled into one.

Kids bear-hugged books as they scored them, then strolled along the thousand-person, two-block-long line and displayed their first editions like trophies. Some, apparently unaware that the ending had leaked on the Internet three days prior, rushed out of the store and immediately began studying the final pages.

According to a Left Bank employee, attendance was about 3,000. The festivities shut down several blocks in the Central West End, and included everything short of a full-scale quidditch match, including sponsor tents with Potter-themed gimmicks like Butter Beer from Fitz's, Ben and Jerry's Honeydukes, Wizard's Chess and (my personal favorite) the oft-photographed Harry Potter Port-a-Potties, a sign that mysteriously disappeared sometime before midnight.

The highlight, however, was the costume party, which drew children and adults with way too much time on their hands. Finalists included a Sirius Black who might very well have stepped off the set of Pirates of the Caribbean, a Bellatrix Lestrange who could have doubled as an Ozzy Osbourne groupie, and the winner, a kid who bore such an uncanny resemblance to real-life Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe that I shudder to think what it's like at recess for him the other 364 days of the year. Also spotted were a fully outfitted Crookshanks the cat, a Dumbledore who probably recycled his costume from last weekend's Pagan Festival at Tower Grove Park and enough teenagers in plaid schoolgirl miniskirts to produce a Britney Spears music video anthology.

-Keegan Hamilton

So I screwed up.

In this week's review of Lily's, I mentioned chicken tamales. Dutiful readers have been dropping by Lily's and asking for said tamales. One problem: Lily's doesn't have chicken tamales. They have pork tamales, which is what I ate there and meant to write but, well, just didn't. Chalk it up to what we in the biz call a brain fart.

My apologies to the Esparza family for the mistake. And all you readers asking for the chicken tamales, try the pork: They're, uh, just as good.

-Ian Froeb

Gut Check has set the table. Now get your butt in here and eat.

- We learned that we shouldn't eat certain chili sauces for hot dogs.

- We learned that we couldn't eat those buns made from cardboard -- because they don't exist!

- Cheesesteak Quest continued.

- We let you do our job for us.

Gut Check. No reservations required.

-Ian Froeb

Yesterday the St. Louis Post-Dispatch broke a story of significant local import on its Web site.

No, not the "news" that Cy Young Award-winning pitcher Chris Carpenter will undergo elbow surgery and miss the rest of this season and most of next.

Though now that you mention it, am I the only one irritated that the Post needs to trumpet, way up high in the story, the fact that "the club confirmed [the treatment plan] about 90 minutes after the Post-Dispatch first reported it on its website, STLtoday.com"?

The story to which I refer was a much shorter one, written by investigative reporter Carolyn Tuft, which revealed that two American Civil Liberties Union lawyers have sued the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, demanding the release of internal-affairs investigative files pertaining to the theft last fall of numerous World Series tickets by eight SLPD officers. The suit was filed on behalf of John Chasnoff, of the local activist group Coalition Against Police Crimes and Repression.

(The officers confiscated the tickets from scalpers around Busch Stadium, then handed them out to friends and family, who used them for admission, then returned them to the cops, who tucked them back into the department's evidence locker. The scam was made possible by the fact that tickets at the new Busch are scanned for their bar codes, and not torn. That same fact, however, made it possible for investigators to determine that the tickets seized for evidence had been used to enter the stadium.)

I wish Mr. Chasnoff luck with his suit.

I'd like to be able to muster more enthusiasm, but Mr. C and his law team have an uphill battle ahead of them.

They're going to argue that the internal-affairs file is a "public record" by virtue of the fact that it concerned a probe into "criminal conduct."

That might seem, on its face, to be a no-brainer. But the SLPD's lawyers are going to counter that the officers' misdeeds, illegal though they might have been, don't fall under the definition of "criminal conduct."

How do I know this? I know this because I'm familiar with this particular line of argument, having been on the receiving end of it in the past.

When I saw the photo of a seemingly beaten-up Aimie Mokwa in today's Post-Dispatch I felt an involuntary twinge of sympathy for Joe Mokwa.

It was not unlike the twinge of sympathy I felt for the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department head honcho three years ago, when we published a story by then-RFT staff writer Bruce Rushton about the SLPD's uncomfortable relationship with the uncomfortable phenomenon of cops who batter their spouses.

Aimie Mokwa had found her way into that story too.

Randy Roberts, who takes over on Monday as music editor at LA Weekly, sent us this link to a NASA site:

"Explanation: Beautiful sunset sky colors are reflected in Pony Express Lake in this twilight skyview from northern Missouri, USA, planet Earth. Recorded on Monday, a two day old crescent Moon and brilliant planet Venus shine through thin clouds. Joining the conjunction on the right of the Moon's sunlit crescent is fellow wanderer Saturn, with Regulus, alpha star of the constellation Leo, above and right of Venus. Moonlight and Venus light streak the almost-calm lake waters."