The Rundown

Baseball Card of the Week: Kyle Lohse Rookie Card

2008-07-18 09:37:15

It's Friday in the Gateway City, and you all know what that means. It's time again for our Baseball Card of the Week here at the Rundown.

In honor of Kyle Lohse becoming the Cardinals' first twelve-game winner of the year last night, I'm bringing you a card from my own personal collection.

]]> This week's card is a 2001 Kyle Lohse rookie card from Fleer. It's actually kind of odd that I had this card, as virtually all of my baseball card collecting occurred between the years 1988 and 1992. However, I received the 2001 card set as a Christmas gift from my girlfriend at the time, who knew only that I loved baseball.

I never had the heart to tell her that I hadn't collected baseball cards in almost ten years. Worked out pretty well, though, didn't it?

In 2001, Lohse was a highly touted young pitcher in the Minnesota Twins' system. He came equipped with a dynamite arm and an attitude to match. Unfortunately for both Lohse and the Twins, he never quite grew into what they had expected him to be as he moved up the minor league ladder.

Lohse eventually departed the Twin Cities, moving on to Cincinnati and then Philadelphia. After the 2007 season, the Phillies failed to meet Lohse’s asking price for a three-year deal and he hit the free agent market. His agent, Scott Boras, tried to position him for a big payday, the market collapsed, and the rest, as they say, is history.

As always, any submissions for Card of the Week should be sent to me at asaeschafer@gmail.com. Thanks, everybody.

- Aaron Schafer

E-Mail of the Day: Pujols in Belgian Garb

2008-07-17 17:34:33

I'm not taking any responsibility for this post (hell, I'm not even going to edit out the grammatical errors), but this e-mail has caught on like wildfire today.

BRUSSELS -- Anheuser-Busch has accepted a $52 billion takeover bid from Belgium-based InBev NV to create the world's largest beer maker and end a month-long standoff. While pitching the deal in recent weeks, InBev chief executive Carlos Brito has said that he is "committed to the city of St. Louis" and that changes here would be minimal. One that Brito said will show up shortly after this weeks Major League Baseball All-Star event in New York will be a minor one in the long standing uniforms worn by the St. Louis Cardinal Baseball team. First-baseman Albert Pujols, one of the first to try the new outfits said "while it may take a little time for Cardinal fans to fall in line behind the change, I personally like them a lot. They'll really be enjoyable during those hot, muggy days in late July and August. I expect all of the fans will be wearing them before the end of the season!" Sporting goods stores around the St. Louis area report brisk sales of the new Cardinal memorabilia.

(photo after the jump)

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Top Ten Off-Field Cardinals Moments of '08

2008-07-16 09:51:21

By AARON SCHAFER (e-mail)

Here at The Rundown, we pay a lot of attention to the action on the field. It is kind of our job, after all. But what happens on the field is only part of the story.

It's been a busy year for the St. Louis Cardinals, and only a fraction of the action has occurred between the lines. So let's take a look at the year so far and see just what we may have all missed while we were watching the games, shall we?

]]> 1. Lohst in Translation
In mid-March, the Cardinals were looking to be dead in the water already. At the start of spring training, the rotation looked shaky. When Joel Pineiro went down with an injury, it was just one too many things. Pineiro would start the season on the DL. The Cards had no one ready to take his spot. The season looked to be over before it began.

And then came Kyle fucking Lohse. One of the most coveted free agents of the off-season, Lohse and his agent, Scott Boras, badly miscalculated the market. Lohse found himself unemployed midway through spring training after expecting to get a multi-year deal somewhere in the range of four-years, $40 million. The Cardinals needed a healthy pitcher. Kyle Lohse needed somewhere to call home. A deal was struck, a one-year deal for a paltry $4.25 million. Fast forward about four months, and Kyle Lohse is the ace of the Cardinal staff. What the future holds for Lohse and the Cards is tough to say, but his signing is unquestionably of huge importance.

2. Centene Pulls Out
Okay, so first it was supposed to be a mixed-use development, right? Then it was supposed to be a little bit of mixed-use, but with a giant corporate headquarters smack dab in the middle. But then, the rug was pulled out yet again.

Centene, the health care giant who had been in discussion with Bill Dewitt's ownership group to bring their corporate headquarters to the Ballpark Village development, finally cut the cord at the end of May. Apparently, the sides were just never able to hammer out some sort of arcane details that are just too darned complicated for the public to understand, since they refuse to tell us much of anything anyway.

Regardless of the details, the future of the whole development is once again up in the air. All the while, the 2009 All-Star game creeps closer and closer.

3. InBev With the Enemy
For as long as just about anybody can remember, the Cardinals have been tightly bound up together with that great St. Louis institution, Anheuser-Busch. The Clydesdales on opening day, the ubiquitous advertisements, hell, the stadium is named after the Busch family. Or, well, maybe it's named after the beer. Or maybe it's, oh, never mind.

So what now? Do we get InBev field? Stella Artois Stadium? Beck's Park? You know, I actually sort of like that last one. Maybe this won't be so bad after all...

The fact is, the Cardinals and Anheuser-Busch have been tied together for years. A-B's corporate identity is changing, and you just have to wonder if there's any room in that new identity for the local nine.

4. About Last Night...
Did everyone see the All-Star game last night? Never mind the fifteen innings of the game itself. The Yankees put on a spectacular show last night, sending their ballpark off in style. Admittedly, the ceremony probably went on a little bit longer than it strictly needed to, but 49 Hall-of-Famers were at the game last night. Whitey Ford was there. Yogi Berra was there. Willie Mays was there.

You want to follow that show? I don't.

5. Isn't that Tony Parker's Husband?
Earlier this season, after less than 100 big league at bats, the Tampa Bay Rays signed Evan Longoria to a six year deal worth $17.5 million. If both of his options are picked up, the deal could end up being worth a total of $40 million. Why does this apply to the Cardinals, you ask? Happy to answer.

Really, this is important for just about every team in baseball, but particularly to the Cards. See, the Cardinals just happen to have a guy named Colby Rasmus in their minor league system. Before the season, Longoria was rated right around the second or third best prospect in the game. Rasmus usually came in right around number five on those lists. Now, that's not to say that the Cards need to be in a hurry to sign Colby to a long term deal any time soon. But what the Rays did is part of an entirely new paradigm in the way that teams value players.

Formerly, contracts were awarded entirely on merit, on past successes and performance. Increasingly, though, teams are beginning to look at players in a slightly different light. Cost-controlled years are more important all the time, to the point that teams now appear willing to pay for not only a player's potential, but for predictability. Rather than wait for a player to prove he's worth a certain dollar figure, we may now see teams setting a dollar figure on a player years beforehand, counting on the contract to be advantageous at best, non-crippling at worst.

As a team who not only possesses a prospect of a similar caliber, but also has committed themselves to player development in the future, the new paradigm for investing in talent and trying to control costs means more than you might think to the Cardinals.

6. Goodbye, Scott
Remember when Scott Spiezio got kicked off the team in spring training? The man with the red goatee was given the boot after it came to light that he maybe hadn't been completely honest about what he did on his winter vacation. Seems that Scotty had actually been running over people's fences, vomiting on pretty much everything in sight, and hiding in closets significantly more than he had let on. Which, of course, begs the question: how much of those things is cool, and how much is a problem? Well, apparently, however much Scott did was too much for the Cardinals.

The year before, the Cardinals had mourned the loss of Josh Hancock and had to deal with Tony La Russa's own boozing. Coming so soon on the heels of all that, the team had to react strongly, and they did. They could have let it fester, but they didn't. It was defining moment in the season, I think. If ever there was a time the organization had to make a stand, that was it.

7. Turn Out the Lights, the Ballgame's Over
It wasn't supposed to be like this. Jimmy Edmonds, one of the defining players of the Cardinals in this decade, had requested a trade to the Padres. He wasn't going to be a starter here anymore. He was going back home to Southern California. Life wasn't good, necessarily, but it was alright. F15teen, Edmonds' restaurant here in St. Louis, scheduled quite a to-do, a homecoming for Jimmy Ballgame. The first time Edmonds took the field back here in the Lou, wearing his Padres uniform, was supposed to be a beautiful thing.

Well, suffice it to say, the Edmonds Day thing at F15teen didn't happen. It was cancelled at almost the exact moment that Jimmy became a member of that team that plays on the north side of Chicago.

Jim Edmonds is a Cub now, and it sucks.

It wasn't supposed to be like this.

8. On Base, Schmon Base
Tony La Russa said an interesting thing in spring training. He said that the lead-off spot in the lineup, which was basically just a huge void, would be filled by the player with the best on base percentage.

I know, doesn't seem like a big thing, does it? But in saying that, Tony said quite a bit.

La Russa's opinion of stat heads in general isn't real high. He spoke of them in less than glowing terms in Three Nights in August, comparing on-base percentage to red stretch banlon. In other words, it ain't gonna last.

So he changed his mind, you say. So what? Well, the thing is, when Tony made that statement in spring training, he was essentially setting forth his new persona for the year. We've seen a bit of a New Tony this season, a Tony much more willing than in years past to try something a little bit different. In the past, La Russa was seen as a total maverick, but as time went on, he became set in his own ways just as firmly as the baseball men who once criticized him for his unorthodox methods 25 years ago. By 2007, Tony was a dinosaur himself, hidebound and inflexible.

With that one statement, embracing an idea he had long decried, Tony set all that to rest. He may not be a maverick anymore (or he may, I don't see a whole lot of other clubs batting the pitcher 8th yet), but at the very least, Tony has shown new flexibility that I didn't think he had in him anymore.

9. The Hippies are Coming!
The Dave Matthews Band became the first band to play a concert at the new Busch Stadium. I'm sure that's pretty exciting to a lot of people. To me, well, it's pretty neat that there was a concert at the new stadium. And hey, I hear Dave Matthews is a pretty cool guy. So there's that.

It's not every day you can convince tens of thousands of college freshmen to get together and smoke weed, right? Oh, really? Well, nevermind, then.

10. The Mayor is Coming!
You know, Mayor Slay has taken a lot of heat over the whole Ballpark Village fiasco. Hey, it's his city, right? So, you know, when the giant fishing hole in the middle of downtown shows no signs of going anywhere, we all tend to look askance upon him, you know?

Hey, there, Mr. Mayor. How come this fucking hole's still here, when we were promised, you know, stuff that wasn't a hole? You know, all that stuff? That wasn't a hole? Is this thing on?

But hey, at least the guy has some outrage of his own. He came on out on his blog a while back and began blasting away at the Ballpark Village delays. How important is that to the Cardinals and their owners? You know what, it's tough to tell. But hey, at the very least, it's one of the more interesting things we've seen, and that's good enough for me.

RFT Softball: Up in Smoke

2008-07-15 15:08:32

Team RFT had a sniff of its old self last night. It smelled a lot like marijuana. Sticky, gooey, chronic marijuana.

gallery.tyo.ca

Then again, perhaps that odor was just the fumes wafting over from the Macanudo-size blunt being passed around in the nearby parking lot. Whatever the case, the secondhand smoke seemed only to stoke RFT's lethargy Monday night and produce more than a few flashbacks to seasons when the team routinely suffered defeats by double-digit margins.

From the onset yesterday, it was clear that this was not the same club that just two weeks ago rallied for its greatest victory of the season. Hitless in the top of the first, RFT took the field only to watch Chevys Fresh Mex bat its way through the order on the way a quick eight runs. Chevys added to its tally in nearly every ensuing inning and led 22-3 going into the final frame.

While Chevys' bats were finding a Jarlsberg wheel's worth of holes between RFT fielders, it was all RFT could do to not hit the ball directly into the gloves of its opponents. Chevys' man-mountain of a pitcher recorded so many 1-3 putouts that several RFT players questioned whether his girth wasn't exterting some type of gravitational pull on the ball.

As he does so often, Tom "Sox" Kavanaugh scored the first runs for the good guys, with a three-run blast over the fence in center field. Chris Schaeffer proved once again that the proper mixture of human-growth hormone and Busch beer can work wonders; the outfielder had another big day, going three-for-three at the plate and ably scooping up two flyouts to right-center.

Plays of the day, though, have to go to Ray "Ray" Richardson and Cathleen "Coach Cat" Joffray, who hit back-to-back, inside-the-infield home runs in the seventh.

Those "hits" brought the final score to 22-5 and left RFT with a 3-4 record on the season.

The team can only hope that next week's party in the parking lot will feature a more stimulating intoxicant -- say crack or meth. This team could use the pick-me-up.

-Unreal

Now for the Bad News About the Cardinals

2008-07-15 10:51:32

Yesterday, I took a look at some of the biggest positives from the first half of the season.

And really, it's been mostly positive so far. A team that no one really gave any chance of competing has reached the All-Star break in second place in the division, and is leading the wild card race. All good stuff, right? What more could you possibly ask for? Hell, this season has been such a pleasant surprise that I even decided to go with an extra positive, just to reflect how optimistic I find myself feeling toward this year's team.

Well, now comes the bad news. And there is always bad news. In no particular order, here we go:

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1. Total Bull:
I have to say, I'm sorely tempted to simply write the bullpen three times and be done with my three negatives. The relief corps was supposed to be the strongest part of this team coming into the season. In fact, some predicted it to be the only good part of the team. Instead, the Cards' pen has combined to blow 21 saves, tops in the major leagues. Obviously, not all of those have turned in to losses, as Larry Borowsky of Viva El Birdos pointed out yesterday. He comes to the conclusion that the bullpen has probably cost the Cardinals about five games in the standings, compared to an what an average 'pen would have done. Myself, I think that may be a little low, but it's a good place to start. Five more games would give the Cards a 5.5 game lead in the Wild Card race, and put them only a game behind the Cubs for the division crown. Personally, I think the Cards could easily have won six or seven of those games, but let's not head down that road, shall we?

Bottom line, the bullpen has badly hurt the Cardinals this year. And that's really all there is to say.

2. Chris Duncan:
You know, there have been times in the past when I've probably been too hard on Chris Duncan. He seems like a nice enough young man, perhaps a bit immature at times (such as when he's dry-humping a trophy or something), but hey, he's still nearly a kid, after all. So he probably doesn't deserve it when I've poked fun at the way he looks when he's trying to track down a pop fly, or the giant wad of chaw in his lip, or any of those other things. However, when it comes right down to it, Chris Duncan is not helping this team win ball games. That's not me being mean to Chris, or crying nepotism, or anything else. That is a fact.

All along, we always said that no matter how bad Dunc was in the field, he made up for it with his bat. Well, unfortunately, that's just not true anymore. He no longer seems able to drive the ball with any kind of authority, and he still takes way too many empty swings at the plate. He still does a nice job of drawing walks, but that's just not enough on a team with so many other talented options in the outfield. He was sent down to Triple A to ''figure things out,'' then was brought up almost immediately despite hitting a robust .166 in Memphis. There were other options on the team to play first base at the time, and the Cardinals should have used them, if they were serious about Duncan getting himself right.

3. Always on the Level:
Maybe most puzzling, and certainly most frustrating, is this team's propensity for playing to the level of their competition. Which, of course, is all well and good when you're playing good teams, but what about when you're going up against somewhat less than the best that the league has to offer?

Against the Rays, Red Sox, Phillies and Cubs -- some of the best teams that the game has to offer -- the Cardinals have gone a combined 10-7.

On the other hand, against the Pirates, Rockies, and Giants -- who are all well below .500 on the season -- the Cardinals have only managed to go 13-13. That's breaking even, yes, but you have to clean up on the weak teams if you want to be a true contender. You can't expect to consistently win against the good teams; that's what makes them good teams. You have to hang around even against the powerhouses and pad your record against the powder puffs. To this point, the Cards just haven't proven that they can do that.

I don't know if it says anything real about this team or if it's just a statistical anomaly, but either way, it's frustrating. You watch this team play so well against talented, high quality teams, and then roll over and play dead against the Pirates, and you just can't figure it out. Regardless, if this team doesn't figure out a way to roll up some W's over the league detritus, they're going to find themselves stuck firmly on the outside looking in come October.

See? That wasn't so bad, was it? It's been a pretty positive season to this point. Not all roses, of course, but far better than we expected. Now let's all go and watch some ESPN exhibition bullshit!

- Aaron Schafer

R.I.P. Dave Ricketts and Bobby Murcer

2008-07-14 18:01:53

This past weekend saw the passing of (at least) two former major leaguers: Cardinals backup catcher Dave Ricketts died days after his 73rd birthday, and Yankees third sacker Bobby Murcer died at age 62. Both are remembered as uncommonly classy men.

from, uh, the author's, uh, collection

Bobby Murcer, courtesy of Topps 1969 -- when baseball cards smelled like gum. His first full season in the bigs.

Dave Ricketts in '69. I know what you're thinking. Obviously the guy eventually was able to live this down. Just ask Yadi Molina.

I have only the vaguest recollection of seeing Murcer play, and none whatsoever of Ricketts. Though I grew up in St. Louis, my baseball game-going career didn't heat up at all till the mid-1970s.

Derrick Goold's sweet piece about Ricketts in this morning's St. Louis Post-Dispatch told me more about Ricketts than I'd known, through the prism of the current and former players who benefited from his teaching:

Some called him Dave, most called him Mr. Ricketts, and Yadier Molina, sitting at his locker after the Cardinals' victory Sunday, said he "was like my dad."
"I'm here because of him," Molina said. "He made me into a catcher. I wasn't a catcher when I got here. I learned a lot from him. He was like my dad, there for me since I was 17. He meant so much to me."

[...]"I've never seen a coach who has worked harder for whatever team he's involved with than Dave Ricketts. Ever," [former Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Steve] Blass said. "Totally dedicated. ... He had a zest for life that was part of his personal life, and, thank goodness, we are better because it spilled over into his professional life.

"He was a bright light in our game."

]]> Here's a link to Bobby Murcer's obit in the New York Times; it'll take you through all the high points -- the pitiless Next Mantle comparisons, the Forever a Yankee Despite Stops in San Francisco and Chicago career trajectory, and, of course, the story of how Murcer stood tall when teammate Thurman Munson died in a plane crash in 1979:

Murcer was traded back to the Yankees in late June 1979 and emerged as a team spokesman six weeks later when the Yankees' star catcher and captain, his longtime friend Thurman Munson, died in the crash of his small plane. Murcer and his wife stayed up all night with Munson's widow, Diana, in the hours before Munson's funeral -- attended by the Yankees, who flew to Canton, Ohio, from New York -- and Murcer delivered a eulogy.
"We all flew back to Yankee Stadium for a game against Baltimore," Murcer recalled in a 1983 article for The Times. "None of us wanted to play, but we did, and I batted in all five runs and we won, 5-4. I never used that bat again. I sent it to Diana."

I saw Murcer play in Yankee Stadium more than once. His ascendance -- and for that matter his descent -- roughly followed the arc of my baseball card-buying obsession: He was a perennial All Star from from '71 to '75 and garnered significant MVP consideration in '71, '72, and '73 -- which says something, given that during all three of those seasons the Yankees were mired in fourth place in the AL East.

My father had grown up in the Bronx, a block away from the House That Will Be Torn Down Just as Soon as MLB and FOX Finish Wringing the Last Drop of Nostalgia Out of the Place, and during much of the time I was growing up, his mother still lived there.

Look! The wonders of Google's Street View!

And I never realized just how close!

www.fearandloafing.com

The Say Hey Kid: Not my card. Hell, I'm not that old.

My father wasn't much of a baseball fan -- at least not compared to me. But that comparison's unfair to him. It's true, he was definitely not a Yankee fan. If he rooted for any team, it was the Giants (Polo Grounds era), and he instilled in me at a very early age an abiding admiration for Willie Mays. I did see Mays play, and more than once -- both at Busch II and at Shea, the latter in the very twilight of his career, after he became a Met.

When I was a kid, we spent most of our summers away from St. Louis, thanks to the blessed vicissitudes of the academic calendar. In the late 1960s, that meant Vermont, where we actually lived year-round in '66 and '67 when Dad taught at Bennington College. By the 1970s we were mostly going to Mexico, where my parents had first taken us for a year-long sabbatical in 1972-'73.

In the mid-1970s my grandmother was here in St. Louis, living -- or, more accurately, dying -- at Delmar Gardens nursing home. There had been a fire in her apartment in the Bronx that augured the unmistakable signs of dementia, the same disease that today too slowly kills my father.

Google Maps Street View

The Delmar Gardens of that era bears no relation to the current posh residences; when my grandmother lived there it was a prototypical (which is to say depressing and smelling of old people's lunch) nursing home of its era, located at the corner of Vernon and Leland avenues not far from our house, and even closer to RFT's present-day HQ. She detested the place, and at least once tried to escape. In those days the solution was to tie you down.

I remember Grandma Meta's apartment on Walton Avenue as a dark shabby space in a dark shabby building with dark shabby hallways and a dark shabby elevator. The kitchen was tiny; my father's old room still had his stuff in it. Later the murky memory of that kitchen would come back to me whenever my father would tell the story of how, in his teens, he'd discovered the joys of diner-griddled hamburgers and how, in an attempt to please him, his mother had tried to duplicate the flavor but failed to get it right because the ground beef she used wasn't of sufficiently bad quality.

On our way east to Vermont in those days, we'd invariably stop for a week or so in New York to visit relatives; the entire extended family, Mom's and Dad's sides, lived there, or thereabouts. On more than on occasion the visit coincided with the annual (at that time) Mayor's Trophy game between the Yankees and the Mets, to which my grandmother, generously, took me. Of course, that event has long been eclipsed by interleague play. I remember, though, being mildly disappointed that the game was a mere exhibition and wouldn't count in the standings.

Grandma Meta died in the late '70s; I can't recall the year. I do hazily remember visiting her with my girlfriend every week during one of her final summers, when I was seventeen or eighteen and my parents -- bless them -- went off to Mexico and left my older sister and me "in charge" here. (For months!) I was unsurpassedly in love, and for the first time in my life. Of course, it ended badly, for me, anyway -- though only in the short term.

Finally, here's a poem of Dad's, from a collection called The Detachable Man:

A QUESTION OF MEMORY

Every morning
the doctor with rimless glances
asks her for the date.

Forgetting backward
she disremembers this morning,
then yesterday,

reels in the years,
undoing the web of her life from the outside in.
Last winter hisses behind her brow, erased.

Caught in her mouth, a memory stirs,
the husk of an enormous moth
that crumbles at the touch.

Voracious, inconsolable, she wolfs it down,
croaks at the doctor, I know your game!
and scowls at the wall.

Under her door she can see the days
pass in the corridor like empty wheelchairs.
An inmate shuffles past,

dragging his walker like a portable cage.

-Donald Finkel

-- Tom Finkel

Former Cardinals Coach Dave Ricketts Dies at 73

2008-07-14 11:58:36

Over the weekend, Dave Ricketts, a longtime coach in the St. Louis Cardinals' organization, passed away at the age of 73.

Mr. Ricketts was one of the most respected men in the game of baseball, both as a former big league catcher who played on the 1967 Championship squad for the Redbirds, and then later as a coach who helped to bring numerous other catchers through the minor leagues for the Pirates and the Cardinals. He taught generations of players to play the game the way it was supposed to be played, and he will be sorely missed by those around the game.

We here at the Riverfront Times would like to take this opportunity to offer our condolences to the Ricketts family, and to the Cardinal family.

- Aaron Schafer

Four Positive Notes for the Cardinals at the All-Star Break

2008-07-14 11:55:54

Ah, the All-Star break. That special time of the year when we all huddle up together around the television with a big bowl of popcorn and listen to Chris Berman make an ass of himself calling the Home Run Derby and then watch one of the biggest farces in all of sports. That's right, everybody! We thought of the best way to determine who gets home field advantage in our sports' championship series! Nope, not the best record. Not even close! We're going to use the outcome of an exhibition game! I know, why didn't we think of this years ago? Oh, and on top of that, we're still going to require that every team be represented, and we're still going to let the fans decide who plays in this utterly meaningless yet somehow ridiculously important game!

]]> Sorry, everyone. The whole All-Star game thing just really, really pisses me off. My apologies for the angry rant. I shall attempt to keep myself a bit more under control.

Well, since we're here at the break, I thought I would take a moment to look at some of the positives and negatives from the first half of the season. Well, technically, the first half of the season ended more than two weeks ago, but don't tell baseball. They want us to think the All-Star game still comes in the middle of the season. Let's just play along.

Anyhow, I was going to do the three biggest positives and the three biggest negatives. But, in the spirit of trying to remain optimistic, I decided to do four positives and three negatives. Maybe that'll give us all some good karma going forward.

First the good news, tomorrow comes the bad news...

Four Up:

1. Yadi's Bat
I'll just get it out of the way right now. I'm not a huge fan of Yadier Molina. It has nothing to do with him personally. Yadi does everything that everybody says he does. He's the best in the game right now at throwing out base runners, and he's become a plus at blocking balls and all of that stuff, too. Defensively, he has no real equal. The reason I'm not a huge fan isn't because of anything that Yadi does or doesn't do, I just happen to think that catcher defense is hugely overrated. I value defense a ton when it affects balls in play, but catchers simply don't affect the game nearly as much with their gloves as conventional wisdom states, I don't think. The game plan is drawn up before the game ever starts, and the pitcher has to decide for himself what pitch to throw. A truly awful defensive catcher can really hurt your team, but as you head up the ladder, the law of diminishing returns kicks in in a big way. The difference between an average glovesman behind the plate and an elite one just isn't that great.

Anyway, enough of all that. I'm writing about good things here, and Yadier's bat definitely qualifies. I admit, I never saw him as developing into anything more than a below average hitter. For this season, at least, Yadi has looked to be much better than that. He's currently hitting over .300, and looks to have come up with a comfortable, consistent approach at the plate. Of course, we've thought that before, only to see him change his batting stance again a week or two later. But still, he's been a bit plus this year at the plate. I still worry about the lack of walks, as batting average along is just too volatile to maintain a high on base percentage, but I've got to give the man his due. He's hitting far better than I expected him to this season, and it's been great.

2. The Kids are All Right
Remember in years past, when you would look at the Cards' minor leagues and see only a vast wasteland, all maroons and greys? Well, no more, and you don't even have to look at the minor leagues to see the difference anymore. Just look at the major league roster. The proof is right there. In fact, the kids have been the brightest point of the season thus far.

Ten players have made their major league debuts with the Cardinals this year, and most of them have managed to hold their own in their first tastes of the big leagues. In the bullpen, Chris Perez and Kyle McClellan have been arguably the only real bright spots. Joe Mather has struggled a bit at the plate but has shown solid outfield defense and plenty of potential with the bat. Mitchell Boggs gave the Cards some much needed innings, keeping us all safe from another Mike Maroth-type experiment. Brian Barton has brought speed, excitement, and an understanding of advanced aeronautical principles to the team. Even if this year still turns out to be strictly a transition season, and there is no playoff berth in the Cards' immediate future, this team has been unbelievably fun to watch and follow, and the young 'uns are the biggest reason for that.

3. Kyle Lohse
Did anyone see this coming? I didn't think so. After being spurned in the offseason, Lohse ended up signing with the Cardinals midway through spring training only because Joel Pineiro looked to begin the season on the DL.

What's strange about the whole thing is that you could almost feel a palpable difference the day that the Cardinals signed Lohse. When they managed to get him for one year and only $4.25 million, when he had previously been asking for 4/$40, it suddenly seemed as if the Cards just might have come up with a real steal. There was no longer a cloud hanging over camp. Still, though, if you had told me that Lohse would win eleven games before the break and have an ERA well under four, I likely would have called you a liar and considered punching you in the face for trying to spread false hope to people.

I don't know if the Cardinals should sign him to an extension. Lohse is represented by Scott Boras, so I can't imagine his services will be even halfway affordable after the year he's having. But Kyle Lohse is a huge part of the reason why the Cards are leading in the wild card race, and that certainly does make him the steal of the offseason.

4. The Outfield of Dreams
Ryan Ludwick, Skip Schumaker and Rick Ankiel. As strange as it seems to even think it, that may be one of the top three or four outfields in all of baseball. In a season full of surprises, the performance of the Cards' flycatchers has to be the biggest. Ankiel looks like a young Jim Edmonds, both with the glove and when he swings through a high fastball. Ludwick looks as if he may have finally gotten past his injuries to become the player he was long projected to be. And Schumaker, whom I admit I never saw as any better than a fourth outfielder, has somehow grown into a competent ML starter.

All of them have good gloves. All have good arms, with the exception of Ankiel, who has some sort of laser cannon on his arm, sort of like Mega Man. All can handle the bat just fine, thank you very much. And all of them have something to teach us about persistence, and hard work, and the grace of the game of baseball.

- Aaron Schafer

Cardinals at the Crossroads

2008-07-11 10:04:37

You know, so far this season, the new Cardinals GM has led a pretty charmed life.

True, John Mozeliak did inherit a mess of a front office at the beginning of his tenure. He did some nice work with that situation, moving quickly to restore harmony and begin healing the rifts between various factions in the St. Louis Cardinals organization. So there is that. He did a nice job of trying to add some stability to the team's roster, and I said as much over at Viva El Birdos quite a while back.

But when it comes right down to it, he hasn't really had his feet held to the fire just yet.

]]> This is a Cardinal team that came into the season with very low (some might say nonexistent), expectations set before it. In the off-season, it was generally accepted that the Cardinals were just flat out going to be bad this year, pretty much no matter what After the debacle of 2007, it didn't much seem to matter what Johnny Mo' did. All we were really hoping for is that it didn't get any worse.

After the season started, Cardinal fans continued to preach patience, accepting that this was a transition year. Even as the team started off hot, we still just took it as a bonus, a tiny little bit of serendipity thrown our way by the baseball gods. Manager Tony La Russa, long thought to have a problem with young players, somehow found a way to get this team to play hard and play well.

All pleasant surprises.

We all looked around at the end of April; lo and behold, the Cardinals were in first place. ''Wow, what a crazy season,'' we all said. ''I don't know how long it's going to last,'' we said. ''But I'm just going to enjoy it while it lasts.''

Well, it looks as if all that may be coming to an end now.

The patience of the fans, and the manager, appears to be running out already. You turn on talk radio, or check the message boards, and all you read about is how the Cardinals need to make a move to keep up with the Cubs and the Brewers. They both just made big acquisitions, so what are we doing? We can't just stand still; the division is going to get away from us.

The manager has also apparently decided that the patient, prudent, build it for the long-term approach just isn't cutting it anymore. He's tossing around demands for the Cards to make a deal, saying they need better protection for Pujols. So now Mo has to make a move.

Actually, wait. Let me break in here for a second. The whole thing about Tony wanting ''better protection'' for Pujols is a bit irritating to me. The thing is, demanding that sort of protection is easy to do, but filling such a request is damn near impossible. There's really only one player on the market that Tony can be referring to with that sort of demand, and that's Colorado's Matt Holliday.

The problem with that, of course, is that Holliday plays the outfield, which is already pretty crowded here in St. Louis last I checked. So I just have to wonder, if Tony wants Holliday, which one of our current flycatchers sits?

I can't imagine it would be Ankiel, since he's far and away the best center fielder currently on the team. Tony seems to have quite a man crush on Skip Schumaker, so I doubt it's him. Do you sit down Ryan Ludwick? Well, as I detailed earlier, Ludwick and Holliday are pretty much the same player when you take away Holliday's Coors Field bonus. So you can sit Luddy down, but any improvement you might see in the offense will probably be pretty marginal.

So do we send away Chris Duncan to make room for Matt Holliday? I guess that's possible, but Duncan went down to Triple A, hit .160, and still got the call back to the big leagues, so... well, I'm not really sure how to finish that thought. It just seems to me that when a player most likely called his current manager ''Uncle Tony'' when he was little, there's not a whole lot of chance that he's ever going to truly be the odd man out. So exactly where do you fit in Holliday's big outfield bat, Tony?

Sorry for the tangent. It just seems as if there's constant call from everybody lately for the Cards to add a bat, but no one stops to consider just exactly where that guy is going to play. This isn't the American League; every player has to have a position.

And so we now see the Cardinals at a crossroads of the season. They still haven't won a series in July after dropping two of three to the Phillies, and they've fallen back to 4.5 games behind the Cubs. The Brewers just acquired one of the best pitchers in the game, and are right on the Cardinals' collective asses.

So just what does Mo' do now? Up to this point, the expectations were so low that no one minded the plan calling for being more tortoise than hare. Now, though, it looks as if Mozeliak is going to have to make a decision.

Does Mo' stick with the plan, secure in the knowledge that he's doing the right thing for the team in the long term? Or does he do what everybody else goes to the crossroads to do and sell his soul to try and keep up with the Cubs and the Brewers?

It's been pretty easy for Mo so far this season. He's just kind of been able to go with the flow. Well, the current is changing, and he's going to have to decide what to do about it. I think I've probably made my position on the matter pretty clear in the past. I'll be waiting with bated breath to see just what Mo decides to do.

- Aaron Schafer

Baseball Card of the Week: Albert Pujols in 2004

2008-07-11 08:48:22

Hey kids, it's time again for a new edition of the Baseball Card of the Week!

Today's Card of the Week comes to us from Alan West (no offense, Alan, but it would be much cooler if your first name were Adam), of St. Ann, Missouri.

It's a 2004 Bowman Chrome Albert Pujols card. I have to say, I've never seen a card from this particular series, and it's in beautiful condition to boot. Thanks to Alan for the submission.

Of course, we all know what Albert has been doing, both in the years previous to this card and the years since. Thus, I don't feel it necessary to go into a big recap of Albert's career. Just enjoy, folks.

As always, any submissions you have should be sent to me at asaeschafer@gmail.com. Thanks.

- Aaron Schafer

The Mark Mulder Pitching Obituary

2008-07-10 09:40:19

Well, it certainly did shoot the idea of a prediction contest all to hell and back, didn't it?

Who had a third of an inning, with no runs? No one? Really? Didn't see that one coming?

Seriously, though, that's obviously the sort of line that no one could have really predicted. However, I am a man of my word, and I promised a winner, damnit. So, E.J. Miller, by dint of his predicting closest to the correct number of innings, is the winner of the Mark Mulder Watch Contest. Congratulations, E.J. I'll be in touch soon to hammer out the details. Thanks to all who participated.

I wasn't expecting anything great out of Mulder. In fact, a couple of days ago, I was discussing the prospects for his return with a friend of mine, and I said that I thought he was done. I said he would probably never contribute anything positive to the Cardinals, this season or any other.

Still, I'm more than a little bit heartbroken this morning.

]]> We may very well have seen the end of a man's career last night. That may sound a bit melodramatic, but that doesn't mean it isn't true. Mulder has publicly stated that he would rather retire than go under the knife again. Given that the Cardinals were already putting out the ''left shoulder discomfort'' speech even before the end of the game, it doesn't look as if Mark is going to be able to make this work.

You'll read a whole lot of people this morning spouting off about Mulder, and a lot of it will probably be nasty. The thing is, it's easy to be angry with Mulder. We traded away one of the best pitchers in the game to get him, and less than four years later it looks as if he may be done entirely. He's almost certainly done as a Cardinal. Even John Mozeliak, almost always the optimist, sounded defeated after the game discussing Mulder. Why wouldn't we be angry with Mulder? What we gave up to get him (see: Dan Haren), and this is what we end up with? This is bullshit.

I'll tell you why we shouldn't be angry with Mark Mulder: it isn't his fault.

It isn't Mulder's fault that Dan Haren turned into a perennial Cy Young contender. It isn't his fault that Walt Jocketty gave up the organization's best young prospect at the time, in Daric Barton. It isn't his fault that the front office, desperate to avoid admitting the deal was a disaster, felt like they needed to bring him back, even after the shoulder surgery. And most of all, it isn't his fault that his left shoulder, just a few years ago one of the most valuable joints in all of baseball, is now a mangled mess of hamburger and tendons.

In fact, Mulder did everything he could to try and make it right. He pitched his ass off in 2005, turning in an ERA of 3.64 despite the fact that his stuff and velocity were both already well on their way out of town. It now looks as if he was already having shoulder issues in the second half of 2004, yet he managed to win sixteen games and compete effectively all season the next year.

How you go about pitching that long, almost two complete years all told, with an arm that's slowly disintegrating is beyond me.

When free agency came around, Mulder took a lesser deal than he could have gotten on the open market to stay in St. Louis. He wanted to show the fans just who the real Mark Mulder was, he said. He diligently rehabbed, endured two major surgeries, and made comeback attempt after comeback attempt, trying to help out his team. He rebuilt his delivery in an attempt to just pitch around the problem when it appeared his shoulder just wasn't going to get any better. In short, Mark Mulder did everything you could ever ask of a baseball player, and more.

Hell, even if Mulder had never pitched a game beyond his 2005 duel against Roger Clemens and the Astros -- when Mulder threw ten shutout innings and won on a walk-off hit by Larry Walker, the Mark Mulder era certainly would have at least been memorable.

Not only does the Mulder era appear to be over now, but this largely closes the Walt Jocketty era, as well. Mulder was Jocketty's last big deal, the elephant in the room whenever Jocketty's tenure in St. Louis was discussed. Jocketty's inability to adjust to the organization's new direction was the biggest reason for his departure, of course, but the Mulder trade certainly didn't help matters any.

I suppose it's time to move on now, to look forward and contemplate where the Cardinals go from here. It looks as if Mulder's heading back to the disabled list, and the club is going to call up Jaime Garcia, their talented young lefty, to help out on the staff. The future just keeps coming for this team, faster and faster all the time.

Still, I hope you'll take a second for Mark Mulder. Yes, he's got millions of dollars. Yes, he's tall and handsome and ever so easy to go all Schadenfreude on. But Mark Mulder is also a competitor, and a man. And no matter how much money or fame or anything else he has, his passion for the game was very real. It now looks as if that may very well be taken from him, at far too young an age for anyone.

What I keep coming back to is this: he came back to the Cardinals to prove to the fans exactly who the real Mark Mulder was.

Mission accomplished, Mr. Mulder. This may not have been what we had hoped, but I think we all see just what kind of man you are. Thanks for the memories, Mark. Good luck.

- Aaron Schafer

Mark Mulder Pitches Tonight, and a Contest!

2008-07-09 10:00:26

Well, the Cardinals did what I had no faith they could do last night. They beat Cole Hamels, one of the most talented young pitchers in the game, with Joel Pineiro on the mound in the Phillies' park.

Pineiro was masterful, riding a sharp sinker and tight slider to a shutout performance. The few times he found himself in a jam, Joel made the pitch he needed to and got the double play in a couple of key situations. He didn't rack up the strikeouts the way that Hamels did, but at the end of the night, Pineiro's name had a W next to it, and that's all that mattered.

As good a game as we saw last night, though, it was only a warmup.

Tonight, we see the main event. Of course, just what kind of event it's going to end up being is anybody's guess, but I think it's pretty safe to say that it will be an event either way.

Mark Mulder will take the mound tonight and make his first start of the year.

]]> Instead of giving you a whole lot of detailed analysis and possibly snarky commentary on what I think Mulder might do, I thought we would try something different today. I thought we might have ourselves a little contest.

What I want from all of you is your predictions. Give me Mulder's line. Innings, hits, walks, strikeouts and runs. I also want the final score of the game.

Put your predictions in the comments section below, and the person who comes the closest to the actual totals will be declared the winner.

The winner of this contest will receive a $20 gift certificate to a local restaurant. I have a list of places you can choose from. We'll work the details out after we see just exactly how this whole thing works out.

Alright, everybody, get your predictions down. It's free food.

- Aaron Schafer