February 2012
1 post
When it came to the Super Bowl I came down hard on the side of the Patriots, for the same reason I do anytime they’re in the playoffs, which is the only time I care enough about the NFL to actually pick a side. The Patriots are, for better or worse, the St. Louis Baseball Cardinals of the NFL—by which I mean, civilian hatred of them approaches Cardinals level, except there’s...
January 2012
10 posts
The Cardinals would seem to have severe trouble securing Roy Oswalt. We all thought they had him at the 2010 deadline only to wind up w/ Jake Westbrook, the equivalent of a full-count foul. (Sorry, Jake. Thanks for top11 Game6.)
If this gets done that half-inning of high-pressure relief may be more important. Would Westbrook go trade instead of bullpen? I’d like to think not, especially if...
Roy Oswalt and the most infamous off-mound fist-pump in Cardinals postseason history may be RSVPing to the 04-05 Astros reunion in St. Louis. I mean Beltran didn’t develop much of a history as an Astro, but is it fair to say he developed much history against the Cardinals? And Berkman was the only Astro who really mattered among their famous B’s; Biggio was too nice and Bagwell was too...
Beltran Condescends Heavily To Mets Fans But It's... →
December 2011
9 posts
Last night I watched Game 6 again. What? My seasonal affective disorder has been acting up again, and I didn’t get any WS merch for Christmas, and I needed to watch Berk fully Berk that game, kind of from start to finish. Joe Buck talks about Berkman wanting to shave the gray out of that beard and you can smell winter coming in all its salty exigencies. However: Berk gonna Berk.
No...
Freese in ESPN Mag →
Somehow I never saw Matt Holliday as a mentor.
"Saturday morning's throng arrived early and... →
vom.
After the 1987 season a significantly pre-orange Jack Clark signed with the Yankees. I was eight and convalescing from the World Series. My dad had the talk with me, the talk about New York, and about why guys go there, and why players leave at all. When you’re eight years old you assume they’re all playing for free, because why wouldn’t they?
Yesterday surprised me by being...
Who am I kidding with this fake vitriol. I have a perfectly rational response to today but I feel like I should bitch for awhile first, on general principle.
I was about to write a panicky/contemptuous Pujols post before I realized I said everything in the last one. Supposedly we could know something as soon as the next few hours/when the sun comes up in Dallas.
Mostly I can’t believe they actually took the bait and went to ten years. I was fully prepared to say take him, and fuck you very much, when the Marlins went to ten. Now it makes the...
November 2011
7 posts
It’s Matheny. They’re totally cashing out on Pujols, is what I would say if I were a totalitarian neg, and if I hadn’t officially endorsed Matheny for the job. Oquendo’s role in the retention process was probably overstated anyway.
Is Pujols in Miami like the shittiest fucking development in a month of Mondays, or does it merely set your teeth on extreme edge? I keep having visions of Pujols out there in the cane fields like Ricardo Montalban or something, winning them over one contraption of a sentence at a time. He toured the new ballpark and couldn’t believe how big it was? Why would a sluggy hitter like Pujols be...
The managerial candidates in ascending order of preference:
6. Joe McEwing—Sorry, but no. Loved your 2.0ing of Hurricane Hudler but minor-league instructionalism, that’s more you, Joe Mac.
5. Ryne Sandberg—I hate when athletes I liked as a kid get fat, does that count as animus? Tony Gwynn, Don Mattingly, Ryne Sandberg, and those are just the obvious ones. BMI aside, Sandberg...
Catching up with TNY, I found this.
This is not a eulogy. I had Tony La Russa’s Topps baseball card as early as 1987. The first time I ever wondered what it was like to be him was after Game 1 88, sitting at Journeyman’s Pizza in Doniphan MO. One of the adults said “There was nothing La Russa could do. He had his pitcher.” I wondered what it felt like to manage a juggernaut to the World Series and then...
October is over. So is Tony La Russa’s career, and the overlapping of those two is way more divine than I could have hoped for. He made up his mind in August which makes sense retroactively; the nadir of the 2011 Cardinals felt like everyone’s last straw. At that point coming out on his terrace for coffee of a morning must’ve felt like shingles all over again—or the...
October 2011
154 posts
Reconstructing a game by in-game threads is a surreal, turbulent way to make sense of it. VEB was in a sour mood all night. When it got to 7-4 some David Eckstein type, trying to get the commenters back into it, was greeted w/ more or less derision. Hardcore fans freak out hardcore, we groused: leave us alone. It turned out she was right; whoever that person is deserves that thread’s game...
Best of the reax:
Leitch and the platonic ideal of the Cardinals
Jeff Passan on Berkman, Holliday, and the audio-free homer
18 plays w/ a leverage index over 3.00, 11 over 4.00
Freese’s WPA is the highest ever in a postseason game
LBNL, David Freese is Robert Horry
Glad I’m still enough of a little kid to appreciate what just happened/enough of a grown-up to properly acknowledge it. Brb, too drunk to recap.
