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Tonight, we'll see the New York Metropolitans for the first time in 2008. The last time we saw them, we watched Joel Pineiro, then just the Cards' latest pickup, try and stabilize a crumbling rotation, twirl a gem that dropped them into a tie with the Philadelphia Phillies for the division lead in the National League East.

Well, they finally managed to beat the Royals. Congratulations to our boys in red.

I know that I complain about Tony La Russa a lot in these pages.

I do so for two reasons:

1. I'm not a huge fan of his anymore, and I often disagree with the things he does.

2. A sports columnist's job is very, very difficult to do without complaining about the managers and coaches. Seriously. Just think of how few things there would be to talk about if you didn't criticize managerial decisions. We'd all be Dan McLaughlins. Just one of those things.

Happy Friday, everyone. And since it's Friday, you know what that means. It's time again for our Baseball Card of the Week feature here on The Rundown.

Today's card comes to us from Mr. Alex Fritz of St. Louis.

It is a 1989 Topps Card featuring one of my personal least favorite players to ever don the Birds on the Bat, Tom Brunansky.

I'll bet that a whole bunch of other people forgot that Mr. Brunansky even played for the Cardinals, and this whole baseball card thing is about nothing if not strolling down memory lane.

During yesterday's postgame comments, Tony La Russa was asked about walking Miguel Cabrera intentionally, loading the bases to bring Clete Thomas to the plate. His response was, in typical Tony fashion, more than a little bit defiant:

"I can't walk in the clubhouse if Cabrera beats us. I don't feel very good now, but you've got a better chance to get [Thomas] out."

"I don't care what they say," La Russa said. "It's what I say to myself. You can't live with what people say. You live with what you think is the best thing to do. I've watched Cabrera all series. You know how many times he hit the ball on the barrel? Even if he had struggled, I'd have done it. This is a guy who makes his living in situations like that. (Parisi) just didn't make the pitches to finish it."

Well, all I've got to say is that it's a good thing Tony doesn't care what people like me say, because I say this was a bad move.

Dear friends, I am a student of the minutiae of baseball. The devil is in the details, they say, and surely they are right when speaking of the game of baseball. The tiniest actions, taking on such huge meaning, deciding the outcome of entire contests. Absolutely fascinating.

So today, I plan to tackle the most minute of all minutiae. I, fearless explorer that I am, am going to figure out exactly what a bench coach does. I know, I know, better men than I have been driven to the brink of madness, and occasionally beyond, by the position of bench coach, you say. It's madness to even attempt, you say. There are things man is just not meant to know, you say. Well, perhaps you're right. All of those things may be true. Yet still, I carry on. I consider myself to be the Jacques Cousteau of the baseball blogging world, you know, and so I must press forward. The intrepid explorer must carry on and track his quarry. I will learn the truth.

My prey is Joe Pettini, the Cards' bench coach.

You know, I really like Randy Flores. I do. He seems like a really nice guy. I like the little D'Artagnan beard; it has a nice, elegant look to it. I like his delivery; it seems like it would be tough to hit against. The guy seems to have pretty good stuff, with a fastball in the 90 mph range, more than enough for a lefty, and a slurvy kind of breaking pitch that has a ton of movement to it. Did you know he's the all time strike-out leader at the University of Southern California? It's true! Go ahead, look it up. See? Told you. I really do like the guy. Seems like a really great addition to a major league ballclub. There's really only one problem with Randy Flores.

Randy Flores can't get anybody out.

And so it's on to Detroit.

After a successful trip to Boston, (though the series ended on a bit of a sour note) the Cardinals now travel to the Motor City to take on the Detroit Tigers.

First off, can I just say how ridiculous it is that the Cardinals have now played the Tigers three years in a row, all in Detroit? What the hell is that? It's amazing to me that Majo still, after something like 130 years of history, has yet to come up with a good scheduling method. Or maybe it's not that the method is bad, they just don't have good protocols set in place. Or maybe they're just idiots. Tough to say, really. But seriously, this isn't a geographic rival; this is completely asinine. The Cards are supposed to be playing the AL East this year. So, they go to Boston, have Tampa at home and go to Detroit. Hmm, remember that game on Sesame Street, called ''which one doesn't belong here?'' Can you figure out which of those three series doesn't belong? I knew you could, kids.

Any statistician worth his scorebook will tell you that the average baseball player peaks around age 30.

Clearly, this is not true for slow pitch softball, as a ''veteran'' (read: downright geriatric in some cases) Grady's Bar team defeated RFT last night 15-10, dropping the alt-weekly squad's 2008 record to 2-3.

The St. Louis Cardinals took two of three from the World Champion Boston Red Sox this weekend. This, after getting swept by the god-awful Kansas City Royals a few days before.

I wanted to know if the Cardinals were a team that just played to the level of the competition, and what we saw this weekend was, at least anecdotally, a pretty good indication that it may be the case.

The Cards struggle to score against the Royals at home. They drop three straight to one of the worst teams in baseball, looking utterly lifeless for pretty much the whole series. They then go to Boston, playing one of the best teams in the game, and the best home team in something like forty-five years, and play brilliant ball, taking two of three and failing to sweep largely because of some very poor base-running by everyone's favorite wookie, Chris Duncan.

Let Me Tell You Why I Hate the Red Sox

Gentle Readers, (in my best Stephen King):

I despise the Boston Red Sox. It's a little odd, too, because there are a ton of reasons that I should like them. I love teams that draft and develop their own players, and the Red Sox have done a better job of bringing along their own talent than any other team in baseball. Even their outside acquisitions, guys like Josh Beckett, have been brought in largely due to Boston's ability to deal from a position of strength, i.e. they can afford to give up a fair amount of talent without hamstringing themselves due to the depth they've cultivated.

I'm a huge fan of Bill James, the baseball stat guru who still advises Theo Epstein, the Red Sox general manager. James is not only one of the smartest people in the game, but he's also one of the funniest and most down to earth, a far cry from so many of the joyless number crunchers who have taken his ideas and run with them.

Hell, I even love the city of Boston. All of New England, really. I've been only briefly, but I instantly fell in love with the landscape, the weather, the architecture, everything. I love St. Louis with my very soul, I really do, but finding myself, like the Walkmen, lost in Boston, would be far from the worst thing in the world.

So, why do I hate the Boston Red Sox? Well, I'm glad you asked.

I asked last Friday for everyone out there to send me your submissions for the baseball card of the week. Well, I won't lie. The response was not overwhelming. However, enough people did submit entries for me to pick a winner, and it's one that I actually feel really good about. I thought that, considering how we've recently seen Jason Isringhausen seemingly rise from the dead, this submission might be appropriate.

Today's card comes to us courtesy of David M. of Eureka, Missouri. It's a 1994 Bowman Jason Isringhausen rookie card. David himself acquired it in a '94 box set he bought in 1998 from a neighbor who was cleaning out their attic.

In 1994, Izzy was a hard throwing starter prospect in the New York Mets' system. Along with Bill Pulsipher and former college phenom Paul Wilson, Isringhausen was part of the trio of young pitchers dubbed ''Generation K'' by the Metropolitan faithful. All three eventually fell victim to injuries, with none of them living up to the billing they enjoyed.

Citizens of St. Louis, the Cardinals need your help.

You see, due to a little known bylaw of Major League Baseball, if you get swept by the Kansas City Royals, you're out of the league.

This unfortunate fate has befallen several teams over the years, few of whom you probably remember. Teams such as the Oklahoma City Tornadoes, the Jacksonville Gigolos, and the Newark Murderers have all been kicked out of MLB over the years and had their records expunged. The last chance the Cardinals have of not suffering a similar fate is today at 1:15 p.m. at Busch Stadium.

The Cardinals have now lost four series this year. One each to the Giants, Brewers, Pirates and now the to Royals, after going down in a 3-2 loss last night against the cross-state ''rivals.'' The Brewers are at least a respectable team, though not anywhere near as good as we all thought they would be before the season. The other three, not so much.

Sports columnist Bryan Burwell wrote this morning about why the Cardinals shouldn't rush Yadier Molina back into the lineup. The piece lays out a solid case for giving the battered catcher all the time he needs to come back from his concussion. All in all, a great article with an excellent premise.

The only problem is that, just a couple of days before, there was another print column, written by Bernie Miklasz, that had an entirely different premise. The premise of this particular piece was that Yadier Molina's toughness embodies perfectly the spirit of the 2008 St. Louis Cardinals. His heroic effort in holding on to the ball after he was flattened is everything good about this Cardinal team. Also quite a good read, with a solid idea behind it.

The problem, of course, is that both of these articles are completely right.

No, I'm not here to question the Post-Dispatch's consistency (we'll save that for other RFT writers). What I want everyone to see, though, is that even in the same paper, the very culture of hero worship, particularly for those who put themselves at risk and play through pain and injury, exists side by side those who quite sensibly decry it.

So what is an athlete to do?

The addition of ace pitcher and RFT circulation manager Kevin Powers wasn't enough to ensure victory last night in a tightly contested game versus Chevy's Fresh Mex.

Powers -- whose prowess in beer-related sports is comparable to Bo Jackson's onetime dominance of real athletics -- missed the first three games of the season to conclude his Monday-night dart league campaign. The postponed start had little to no adverse effect on his pitching. Powers struck out the side in the fifth inning and recorded a whopping seven Ks over nine innings.

When the Cardinals play the Kansas City Royals tonight in the first of a three-game series, they will see team that's a work in progress. Seems like we've been hearing that for a lot of years now, doesn't it? There is, however, one real difference now as opposed to years past.

Progress.

For years, it's seemed as if the Royals have been in a constant state of rebuilding, with each year bringing a promise of new, young players who are going to compose the future nucleus of Kansas City baseball.

Unfortunately, it's also seemed as if each new crop of players eventually turned into just another lesson in why the Wal-Mart way doesn't work when it comes to professional athletics.