In the twenty-first century, Major League Baseball’s front office personnel had a major breakthrough in pop culture relevance. With the enormous popularity of Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball, general managers became easily identifiable avatars for fans, particularly sabermetrically-inclined fans. The rising popularity of franchise modes in EA Sports video games, not to mention Baseball Mogul or Out Of…
When the St. Louis Cardinals promoted Tommy Edman to the Major Leagues three months ago yesterday, it felt like the wheels were being turned for a few years on the Memphis Shuttle. While Edman had hit well for the Memphis Redbirds in 2019, he was not a particularly acclaimed prospect--FanGraphs ranked him 20th among Cardinals…
Considering the St. Louis Cardinals are in first place and have been the hottest team in the National League for the last couple months, the team has a shocking lack of viable candidates for National League Most Valuable Player. And I don't mean to win the award, which will almost certainly (deservedly) go to Milwaukee Brewers outfielder…
It's easy to forget that St. Louis Cardinals minor league prospect Dylan Carlson entered the 2019 season as a relatively minor prospect. Per MLB.com, Carlson ranked just tenth in the Cardinals system, as he entered his first season with the AA Springfield Cardinals. But throughout the season, Carlson has emerged as, along with Nolan Gorman,…
Matt Carpenter is having, by his standards, a rough season in 2019. He has never been a particularly fleet of foot runner, and defensively, while he once provided additional value by virtue of his ability to handle, if not master, multiple positions, he has been limited almost exclusively to third base. Carpenter's value comes from…
Who is the team of the 2010s? This is an open-ended question but it is also a question which can be quantified. So I decided I wanted to quantify it. Of course, the 2010s are not yet over, and the next two-plus months of baseball, particularly the off-season, will go a long way in defining…
Yesterday afternoon, Springfield Cardinals outfielder Dylan Carlson was promoted to the Memphis Redbirds. As somebody with bare-bones knowledge of the St. Louis Cardinals' minor league affiliates, a system promotion that does not involve being promoted to the Majors normally wouldn't be a big deal to me. But over the last 4 1/2 months of professional…
The life cycle of the scrappy underdog baseball player is a shockingly depressing one. Seemingly, it should be easy. You come into Major League Baseball with minimal expectations, you surpass those expectations, and everybody just loves you forever. But eventually, if you're too good, you transcend scrappiness and become just like any other good baseball…
With the 2019 trade deadline loaded with prospective buyers and limited on sellers (particularly on sellers with anything worth selling), most of the individual non-moves that the St. Louis Cardinals didn't make can be rationalized. Unfortunately, in conjunction with absoultely nothing else, the move that the Cardinals did make doesn't make very much sense. Yesterday, the Cardinals…
Editor's (my) note: So, I wrote this post on Monday night about how the Cardinals shouldn't trade for Trevor Bauer and then something happened tonight: he got traded to the Cincinnati Reds. The Reds gave up Yasiel Puig and a top-50 prospect in Taylor Trammell in order to do so, and for reasons you should…
Here's the truth: going "all in" is usually not a smart move. Of course, we need to define the context where this phrase is being used. When you're sitting around a poker table with pocket aces and a dwindling stack, all in may be your best bet. It's a way of pushing hesitant and amateur…
With the exceptions of Yadier Molina, Adam Wainwright, and maybe Matt Carpenter, no player was a more pivotal focal point of St. Louis Cardinals marketing during the 2018-19 off-season than center fielder Harrison Bader. Not quite a non-prospect but arriving in St. Louis was marginal hype, Bader burst into the regular Cardinals position player rotation with a…
The 2003-04 school year was a pretty miserable one for me. It was my freshman year in high school, and because I lived in this weird purgatory of middle and high school district overlap, in my class of 512 people, I knew less than ten of them, and I had zero classes with any of…
In 2019, Major League Baseball has three distinct classes of teams. In the upper class reside the teams with certain playoff futures--the Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Yankees, and Houston Astros all have projected odds of making the League Division Series of over 96% with over two months left in the season, and there was…
A quick gander at Bob Gibson's Baseball Reference page will tell you that the most similar pitchers to him were Jim Palmer, Jack Morris, and Amos Rusie. Comparing Gibson to these three is no insult--the trio are each Hall of Famers, with the most similar to Gibson, Palmer, also being a first-ballot Hall of Famer…
When it comes to evaluating a trade years in retrospect, there are two essential components to evalute--process and results. Sometimes, a trade can be good in terms of process--the underlying logic behind it is sensible--even if the trade works out poorly. Take, for a famous example, the 1987 trade in which the Detroit Tigers traded…
Eight years after his free agent departure for Anaheim, Albert Pujols made his much-anticipated return to Busch Stadium this past month, and the homecoming was everything all of us could’ve hoped for. Every time Pujols stepped into the batter’s box, he was greeted with a long and loud standing ovation. When he dug in with…
This afternoon, the baseball world was stunned by the announcement that Los Angeles Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs, 27, had died suddenly while the team was in Texas to play against the Rangers. Tonight’s game was cancelled, and while articulating the pain of the death of a 27 year-old man seemingly in peak physical condition was…
Watching the 2019, and probably 2020, St. Louis Cardinals just became a lot less fun. The announcement on Monday afternoon that Cardinals relief pitcher Jordan Hicks had suffered a torn ulnar collateral ligament. While no timetable was announced for his recovery, this is almost always a sign that a pitcher will miss the remainder of…
It is hard to overstate how lucky the St. Louis Cardinals were to draft Albert Pujols. Famously, Albert Pujols was not a coveted amateur prospect, and in 1999, the Cardinals drafted the pudgy amateur third baseman out of Kansas City's Maple Woods Community College with the 402nd overall pick. Every team in baseball passed on…
https://twitter.com/justin_klugh/status/659236511565639680 Hello all, and welcome to the second edition of what I'm hoping can be a lengthy series for this little old blog (if the monstrous person known as John Fleming will allow it), Something Moments in Cardinals History. Again, the purpose of this series is to look back at those Cardinals moments that aren't…
For years, "St. Louis is a baseball town" was used in a largely complimentary way. It was a thing that those involved in baseball said to speak highly of the passion for and knowledge of the sport in the St. Louis area. It didn't really have any tangible benefits--mostly, it meant ESPN announcers would compliment…
There is nothing like a Game 7. The finality of a winner-take-all game with a championship on the line is indescribable. My biases in favor of Game 6 of the 2011 World Series as the greatest baseball game I've ever seen aside, I think the objective answer for greatest game ever has to be a Game 7.…
The bittersweet symphony of Brad Penny's greatest triumph.
While you were sleeping/drinking, the Cardinals rolled the dice on a truly unique prep player.
Do you remember October 10, 1996? On that day, the St. Louis Cardinals evened their National League Championship Series tilt against the Atlanta Braves at one game apiece. A huge seventh inning, capped off by a Gary Gaetti grand slam, allowed the Cardinals to defeat Greg Maddux (!!!) on the strength of a strong start…
One strange element of St. Louis Cardinals fandom, to me, is pointing out how the team has won 11 World Series championships. There is, of course, the "we won 11 rings!" obnoxiousness, which implies that I, a fan, had anything to do with such jewelry acquisitions, but additionally silly is that I, and most Cardinals…
The St. Louis Cardinals are 25-24, and while most baseball markets would dream for a .510 winning percentage to be considered a devastating step back, St. Louis has certainly seen better from the Cardinals. The start to the season is made especially more disappointing given how much confidence there was in the Cardinals to start…
Fernando Tatis Jr. is very good and is probably soon going to be the best shortstop in the National League for the next decade, as long as he remains in the National League. The 20 year-old San Diego Padres phenom entered Major League Baseball this season with extremely high expectations and a consensus top-three prospect…
In the mid-2000s, a teenager from Oakville High School in suburban St. Louis had a dream. While some disputed his long-term athletic upside, he imagined a future in which he would guide the St. Louis Blues, the preferred hockey team of his youth, to postseason glory. And no moment has more tension parlayed into more…
On April 11, 2019, attempting to complete a four-game sweep, the Cardinals took the field for an afternoon game against the Los Angeles Dodgers. Scheduled to head to Monterrey, Mexico, that evening, the Cardinals trotted out their getaway lineup, with José Martínez, Tyler O'Neill, Jedd Gyorko, and Matt Wieters filling in for their regular counterparts.…
Four years ago, everything was looking up for the Chicago Cubs. The Cubs, who in 2014 had won just 73 games, improved by 24 games in 2015. While their 97-win season was only good enough to finish in third place in the National League Central, the Cubs vanquished the 98-win, second-place Pittsburgh Pirates in the…
Former St. Louis Cardinals outfielders Peter Bourjos and Jon Jay were teammates in St. Louis for a grand total of 740 days, but for those of us who spent that duration far too deeply immersed in the depths of Cardinals Twitter, it felt like they were teammates for 740 years. The center fielders were the…
There is a fairly high probability that this morning, many of you are very tired. The main cause of this extreme fatigue, if I know the demographics of this site, is those of you who stayed up late to watch the St. Louis Blues, whose first game of the Western Conference Semifinals inexplicably began at…
For several years, now-unemployed pitcher Bartolo Colon became a beloved figure in Baseball Twitter because, well, because he was fat. It seems pointless to argue that he was beloved for any other reason. Once a somewhat chubby but still relatively athletic looking Cy Young-level pitcher for the Cleveland Indians and then-Anaheim Angels, among others, Colon's…
The St. Louis Cardinals didn't sign Dexter Fowler to be a superstar. While a visceral reaction to a $16.5 million annual salary for half a decade sounds like a lot of money, this bill is commensurate with an average to slightly above average player. And in 2017, his first season with the Cardinals, Fowler fit…
John, Josh, Mike and Alex return to tackle Part II of their MLB.TV draft.
What would it look like if you could draft a "team" of all the MLB squads you'd most want to watch? We decided to find out.
On Wednesday, news broke that the St. Louis Cardinals had signed third baseman Matt Carpenter to a two-year extension. Carpenter, firmly a part of the Mount Rushmore of St. Louis Cardinals this decade, remaining in St. Louis through 2021 warranted a post, but truthfully, nobody seemed to have a strong opinion on the matter. It…
At one point when I was writing for Viva El Birdos, the SB Nation higher-ups provided a writing prompt that they hoped team site writers would answer: "Why did you become a fan of (fill in name of team)?" Some people had eloquent answers for the St. Louis Cardinals: beautiful stories about how watching the…
On September 29, 2017, the St. Louis Cardinals played and lost to the Milwaukee Brewers. The Cardinals, eliminated from postseason contention the night before, elected to sit Dexter Fowler for the game, but did play its three next best outfielders in the game. When the team played against the Colorado Rockies ten months and two…
There are 81 of these things. The first home game of the regular season for the St. Louis Cardinals doesn't count for any extra in the standings than the 22nd home game, nor the 54th home game, nor the 78th home game. Its impact is not what it is, but what it represents. 22% of…
The beginning of the 2019 Cardinals season has been pretty stressful, so we ranked their walkup songs to relax.
The San Diego Padres lost 96 games in 2018, but they entered 2019 with a sense of genuine optimism. They signed, for a second consecutive off-season, one of the top two available free agent position players in Manny Machado, and also signed solid lottery ticket veterans Ian Kinsler and Garrett Richards (Kinsler is currently the…
On Sunday afternoon, with the St. Louis Cardinals clinging to a one-run lead in a game which would help equalize the season-opening four-game set against the Milwaukee Brewers, defending National League MVP Christian Yelich drove yet another in a long series of rockets into the outfield. The tying run easily scored, and while there was…
With baseball season starting, what better time to spend irrational amounts of money on merchandise? Well, you shouldn't, because buying baseball jerseys is an objectively stupid use of money, but if you're like me, you're probably going to do it anyway. Look, I've blown $100+ at casinos before; at least if I'm going to buy…
So we're doing this again, huh? We're going to get emotionally invested in 162 (preferably more) of these games, most of which will take more than three hours, and somehow this is our idea of a good time? Are we sure we want to do this? Okay. It's wonderful to have this baseball thing back…
December 5, 2018 was a notably slow day at work for me. It was the kind of day where I sat at my computer and stared at my e-mail inbox. It wasn't that I had checked out from doing work--it was that work had checked out from me doing work. I was going to a…
For the last several seasons, Major League Baseball has developed a mostly earned reputation for its lack of dramatic divisional races. Some teams are building juggernauts; the rest are tearing down what little they have in hopes of saving money and experimenting with young players to form their eventual competitive core. The American League remains…
Matt Carpenter has long been a man without a true position for the St. Louis Cardinals. As a four-year college player turned somewhat late bloomer, he was primed to make his way into the Cardinals starting lineup at 26, but then the guy who played his position happened to be a seemingly unmovable hometown hero.…
