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All right. This is really, really going to hurt me to say, but I figure I just need to do it quickly, like ripping off a bandage. Get it out there in the open. Here goes.

Lance Berkman should win the MVP award this year.

Oh, God. What have I done? How am I going to live with myself?

Last Night: One of the cleanest games you're ever going to see played. The pitching was crisp on both sides (after of the first inning by Oswalt) and the defense more than held up its end of the bargain. When Berkman came up leading off the ninth inning, Ryan Franklin had a two-run cushion to work with, which was nice, since he didn't have to try and be too very careful with Fat Elvis. He could afford to challenge Berkman, with no fear that he could potentially tie the game. Franklin did, in fact, challenge Berkman.

Berkman won.

I was at Busch Stadium Wednesday for a story I’m working on (sometimes I love my job) and saw an interesting sight before the game against the Astros.

I can tell you everything you need to know about the 2008 Cardinals, and it will only take one at-bat to do so.

Please allow me to set the scene. Bottom of the fourth inning Wednesday night against the Houston Astros. One out.

Leading off the inning, Yadier Molina had singled to the Astros' left fielder. Brian Barton, batting seventh, came up and lined a pitch right back up the middle for a solid single as well. Following Barton's hit, Adam Wainwright came up, trying to bunt the runners over. He ended up fouling off a bunt attempt for strike three. He stomped back to the dugout, clearly disgusted with himself.

Up to the plate stepped Cesar Izturis.

When the 2008 season opened, I, like a lot of other people I'm sure, had various ideas about what this year would be about. Lots of us thought it would be about assessment, about looking at the current resources and deciding just what we have here. Others thought it would be about angry fans, disgusted with ownership for going cheap in recent years. Still others thought the story of this year would be that of a surprising playoff run -- from a team no one gave a chance. So far, all three of those perspectives have some merit, but the real story of this season is one that I don't think many of us saw coming.

The story of this season is quickly becoming the story of loyalty. Specifically, we're seeing Tony La Russa's loyalty placed front-and-center, as he makes the decisions that move the team forward or backward.

You've read what our Cardinals writer Aaron Schafer thinks the St. Louis Cardinals management should do to help improve the club this season. Now you can have your say.

Schafer thinks at least two of the Cardinals' current five outfielders should be traded this season. Who would you trade?

Now onto the infield:

Step to the pitcher's mound:

What to do with the slumping closer, Jason Isringhausen?

So, where do we go from here? (Vote on your changes here).

Memorial Day has come and gone. The first real holiday of summer always provides a nice opportunity to look around and take stock of a baseball team; to assess the strengths, weaknesses, and everything in between. So, what have we learned so far?

The Cardinals currently find themselves sitting at 30-21, nine games over .500, and half a game behind the Cubs in the National League Central. I freely admit, this is absolutely shocking to me. At the beginning of the season, I looked at this crew and I predicted around a .500 finish, maybe a little worse, and probably third place in the division, behind both Chicago and Milwaukee. For the record, I saw the division finishing up like this:

Chicago
Milwaukee (winning the Wild Card)
St. Louis
Cincinnati
Houston
Pittsburgh

Just a short jaunt northward from San Diego go the Cardinals, to take on the Dodgers in the latter half of their West Coast Swing. What they find when they get there, though, will be much further from the Padres than the drive would indicate.

Whereas the Padres are a team sinking, falling further and further from contention under the weight of aging veterans, injury issues, and a weak farm system that has failed to bolster the major league roster, the Dodgers are very much a team just beginning to come together.

Lately this guy has been getting a lot of play in the blogosphere (and here and here) for his uncanny ability to re-enact the batting stances of pretty much every prominent Cardinal since 1980:

But I’m kind of partial to this five-year-old’s take...

You remember Garrett Stephenson? He was a Cardinal pitcher back in the late '90s and early 2000s. Righty, tall, decent stuff, never really had great results. He did have a couple of solid season wearing the Birds on the Bat, though, winning sixteen games in 2000. What I remember most about the Garrett Stephenson era, though, is watching him self-destruct for about one inning in any given outing, then listening to his post-game comments, as he talked about how well he pitched, except for just that one little pitch.

It never failed. Pretty much every game, Stephenson would go out there, cruise along for a couple of innings, looking like he had everything under control, and then bam! He would go out, walk the leadoff hitter in an inning, give up a hit or two, and then the wheels would just fall completely off. He would end up with a line of about four or five innings, somewhere between four and six runs, and all of them would have come in that one inning.

The biggest non-World Cup event in fútbol (soccer, for those of you who don’t habla español) is being played today in Moscow at 1:30 p.m. Central Time.

Didier Drogba

For the first time in Champions League history, it’s an all-English Premier League affair, pitting Manchester United and their flopping Portuguese pretty boy Cristiano Ronaldo against Chelsea and their flopping Ivory Coast-born pretty boy Didier Drogba. Fortunately for Americans, ESPN 2 is broadcasting the game, but where to watch to get the proper atmosphere in soccer-mad St. Louis?

Last night for the Cubs.

I know that Cards fans didn’t want to see this happen, but you have to admit it's pretty cool that Jimmy Ballgame is still out there making plays like this.

- Keegan Hamilton

After a rainout last week, the RFT's softball season resumed last night with spectacular results. Yes, you read that correctly, after getting shut out and shat on in the opening game of the season, the home team emerged victorious from a 15-14 roller coaster ride of a game last night at Legion Park in Overland.

After holding opponents Chevy's Fresh Mex scoreless in the top of the first, newcomer Andrew Ciembronowicz led off the bottom of the first with a base hit, followed by another hit, and a ground-out. MVP SS/LF/Superhuman Tom Kavanaugh then stepped to the plate and ripped a double, scoring what many no doubt thought would be the first and only runs of the season. Amazingly though, like Barry Manilow's career, the hits just kept on coming. Buoyed by some hustle base running, excellent pitch selection, poor fielding by Chevy's, and some actual honest to goodness hits, the RFT eventually batted a round in the first inning, scoring eight runs in all. Though the opposing pitcher was talking on his cell phone during two at-bats, giving directions to a lost teammate, no call to the bullpen was made.

It wasn't supposed to be like this for the Padres; not at all.

San Diego came into this year with a pitching staff that boasted last year's Cy Young award winner (Jake Peavy) at the top, one of the best road pitchers in all of baseball as the Number 2, (Chris Young) and a Number 4 who's won more games than any other active pitcher, plus three Cy Young awards of his own (Greg Maddux). They had an intriguing reclamation project, (Mark Prior) of a pitcher who finished in the top five in the Cy Young voting in his rookie campaign. They even picked up a solid soft tossing lefty, (Randy Wolf) just to round the whole thing out nicely. The staff was loaded with talent and experience to make any other team envious. One of the best 1-2 combos in the game, one of the best and brightest to ever put on a uniform, and a former phenom-turned-rehab-wonder. It should have been far more than enough.

The Padres have pitching in spades but could use a bat like Tony Gwynn's this season. The lack of offense explains their pitiful 14-30 record and putting up only two runs in a loss against the Cardinals Monday night. (photo: http://www.signonsandiego.com/)

Ryan Ludwick and Albert Pujols are finally starting to make this offense look a little bit like what we expected.

Before the season, most pundits, (and I include myself here) looked at the Cardinals' lineup and said lots of the same things.

They've got a ton of power. The middle of that lineup is going to hit a lot of bombs.

They're really weak around the edges. Outside of the mashers in the middle, it's an uninspiring group.

There's an awful lot of strikeouts in that lineup. This team is going to struggle to put men on base.

Well, through the first month-and-a-half of the season, the Cardinal offense has been a study in absolute topsy turvy results. The power that we all expected, from players like Troy Glaus, Albert Pujols, and Rick Ankiel, hasn't really been there. Most of that, of course, can be attributed to the puzzling lack of homers from Glaus, but even Albert, up until very recently, wasn't putting the ball over the fence like you usually expect him to. He was getting pitched around, of course, but the numbers were still surprisingly low. Ankiel was really the only one of those three who was hitting for power, and he was only doing it in bursts, in between stretches of looking like a Special Olympian at the plate.

Just sayin'.

-Unreal