As hopelessly addicted to watching sports as I am, I can sometimes overlook the fact that there are thousands of people in St. Louis and the St. Louis area that do not care about sports or the local sports teams in particular. There are some exhausting types who might ask if there is a sportsball…
Whitey Herzog: 1931-2024
Yesterday, for the first time since 2005, Adam Wainwright was not donning a St. Louis Cardinals uniform at the Cardinals' home opener. After nearly two decades in St. Louis, the native Georgian has moved from his Hall of Very Good career as a Major League Baseball pitcher to new work, one a relatively conventional post-playing…
The day was September 27, 1959, and the St. Louis Cardinals finished their season with a doubleheader sweep of the San Francisco Giants. By this point, neither the Giants nor Cardinals, though armed with baseball legends like Willie Mays and Stan Musial, were contending for the National League pennant, but 19,477 fans flocked to what…
Every year, I come up with a new construct for how to preview baseball at large, and this is my one for this year. The thing in the subject. Simple enough, I think. Note: For the purposes of this exercise, I'm determining how a team is rated by their current odds to win the division--I'm…
I can't say that I expected, three days away from the first game of the season for the St. Louis Cardinals, that I would be writing about something that has nothing, at least in terms of its literal nuts and bolts that have been reported so far, to do with the St. Louis Cardinals. But…
The great thing about writing about the St. Louis Cardinals in the internet age is that any information I could reasonably need is at my fingertips. Writers may bemoan that they do not have access to all of MLB's proprietary statistical data, but one can simply sidestep that conversation. There is information which is fundamental…
There is a relatively early episode of Family Guy (based on the fact that I have seen and remember it) where the Griffin family is offered one of two gifts (I think for sitting through a timeshare presentation? I promise I'm not trying to seem too cool for Family Guy, a show that had plenty…
The acquisition of Brandon Crawford by the St. Louis Cardinals is simultaneously the funniest possible transaction and a completely defensible one. Acquiring a thirty-seven year-old, a fifth acquisition this off-season of a player who was born in the 1980s, is a deeply funny way of leaning into their own bit, and bringing in a guy…
Not too long into the 2023 St. Louis Cardinals season, I suggested that the St. Louis Cardinals should extend Jordan Walker. They didn't, which on one hand means that the Cardinals have not secured the services of the most exciting young player that the franchise has to offer, but it also means I have the…
On Sunday night, a team that does not play in St. Louis defeated another team that does not play in St. Louis in the championship game of a sport that is not baseball. But I promise we're going to get there. In an objectively thrilling, tightly-contested game, the Kansas City Chiefs beat the San Francisco…
Huh.
On Wednesday afternoon, news broke that the greatest coach in the history of college football was retiring. On Thursday morning, news broke that the greatest coach in the history of professional football was retiring (or possibly being retired, but he will no longer be coaching regardless). These are not stories related to the St. Louis…
The St. Louis Cardinals had a mediocre starting rotation in 2023 and four of the six pitchers who started the most games for the team last season were no longer on the team by the time free agency started--Jack Flaherty and Jordan Montgomery were dealt at the trade deadline, Adam Wainwright retired, and Dakota Hudson…
The last two years have been an endless stream of nostalgia for St. Louis baseball fans. Both with the return of Albert Pujols and saying goodbye to Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright, memories of happier seasons than a 71-91 have permeated throughout the Busch Stadium air. This morning, the Cardinals signed Lance Lynn, who pitched…
Convincing Shohei Ohtani to sign in St. Louis may not be easy, but you can't do it unless you try it.
The thing that really stands out when one watches highlights of José Adolis GarcÃa, as he was known at the time, during his time as a St. Louis Cardinal, besides the fact that he tripped rounding third base and the Cardinals were eliminated from playoff contention by the Milwaukee Brewers because there is only one…
In 2023, the Milwaukee Brewers won 92 regular season games, which gave them the fifth-best record in Major League Baseball. Finishing ahead of Milwaukee in the standings were, respectively, the 99-win Tampa Bay Rays, the 100-win Los Angeles Dodgers, the 101-win Baltimore Orioles, and the 104-win Atlanta Braves. And with the MLB postseason field reduced…
Like most people who read this website, I am a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals. But I am also a fan of baseball, and when the MLB postseason hits, that still matters to me independent of the presence or absence of my favorite baseball team. But despite the lack of Cardinals, I do still…
On Tuesday, September 12, Adam Wainwright won his 199th career game. He allowed two runs in five innings, walking three batters and striking out three batters; these are not great statistics, but he did get 11 ground balls, which is impressive enough. Of his 199 career wins, this was certainly not his greatest triumph nor…
Last Friday, I was driving to Milwaukee, a city I absolutely adore (I say when describing it in August as opposed to in February) when new reports came out that suggested that the Milwaukee Brewers would be entertaining the possibility of relocation if they did not receive adequate public funding for major renovations on American…
Like every other sports sicko hanging around the internet over the last couple months, I have spent countless hours playing the viral first-baseball now-other-sports trivia game Immaculate Grid. For the uninitiated, the premise of Immaculate Grid is simple--you receive a 3-by-3 grid with the rows and columns titled, mostly by sports franchises but often also…
Realistically, there were three realistic options for the St. Louis Cardinals at the 2023 trade deadline. Delusion: Convince themselves that they had a chance to make serious postseason noise in 2023 and either acquire new talent or maintain the status quo. The bare minimum: Sell off pending free agents at the last possible moment for…
It wasn't exactly a surprise, but as first reported by Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic, the St. Louis Cardinals have traded Jack Flaherty to the Baltimore Orioles in exchange for minor league infielder César Prieto, as first reported by MLB's Francys Romero, and minor pitcher pitcher Drew Rom, as first reported by ESPN's Jeff Passan.…
Paul DeJong was supposed to be dead money. His contract, which saw the St. Louis Cardinals getting some bargain-bin years out of the shortstop early in it, was supposed to have turned fully sour and that the Cardinals were going to run out the clock. Instead, Paul DeJong has been shockingly competent this season. I…
Jordan Montgomery and Chris Stratton are valuable enough players for a good baseball team with a desire to make postseason noise in 2023, but they have minimal value for the 2023 St. Louis Cardinals at this point. It's nothing against them, but Chris Stratton is about to reach free agency and so is Jordan Montgomery,…
Three months ago, the St. Louis Cardinals trading Jordan Hicks to the Toronto Blue Jays would have been inconceivable. Not because the Cardinals as sellers was inconceivable--the initial warning signs that the 2023 season would unfold as it has were already in place--but because Jordan Hicks still being on the Cardinals in July seemed impossible.…
At the end of the day, the team and the pitcher have been good for each other.
I debated back and forth over whether to make this an actual post, because frankly I don't care much about explaining most of these answers, but I had enough to say on enough players that I figured I would go with it. Obviously it goes without saying that, say, I don't think the guy who…
1997 really wasn't that long ago. We had cable television and we almost had Dan McLaughlin broadcasting baseball games on it. This isn't ancient history. But to revisit the trade which brought Mark McGwire to the St. Louis Cardinals on July 31, 1997 feels as though it would require some competence in Olde English to…
As a veteran of the First Great Nolan Arenado Trade Rumors Posting War, I believe that the lessons which I learned during the first cycle of Nolan Arenado trade rumors are instructive about the future of the Cardinals third baseman. In 2019, the Colorado Rockies signed their star third baseman Nolan Arenado to an eight-year,…
Last night, Nolan Arenado suited up for the National League All-Star Team as the lone representative of the St. Louis Cardinals. There were other Cardinals with credible All-Star Game cases, but when you're in last place and the home of awful 2023 vibes, you take what you can get. But what was notable is how…
There are two things that every baseball organization should strive to bring to their fans: a quality product, and to do no harm to them. Baseball stadium construction is, broadly speaking, a giant racket. The Oakland Athletics are currently in the midst of trying to secure public funding for a new stadium in order to…
That advanced baseball statistical research allows us to quantify just about anything is both the greatest strength of the sabermetric movement and the aspect of it which gives us the falsest sense of security. Statistics are objective--even if they are complicated to a point of impenetrability to the casual fan, like WAR or wRC+ or…
The good news for the St. Louis Cardinals is that they are in the midst of a four-game winning streak. Yes, the New York Mets have been disappointing and the Washington Nationals have been straight up bad, but this is the kind of progress that a baseball team which entered 2023 was division title aspirations…
It was a little less than two years after David Freese's 2011 postseason heroics solidified the homegrown third baseman as a bona fide St. Louis Cardinals legend, while walking through a suburban Schnucks grocery store of all places, that something I had never really considered occurred to me. The day after David Freese saved the…
Before the 2023 season, FanGraphs projected that the St. Louis Cardinals would win the National League Central. And by and large, their projection systems still believe the Cardinals to be a pretty good team, fundamentally. A cursory glance at their current rest-of-season odds show that they believe the Cardinals are a 86.34 win team over…
Two weeks ago, after the Sinclair Broadcast Group opted to stop payment to the San Diego Padres for their right to televise games, Major League Baseball took back broadcasting rights for the team, one which is among the most exciting in the sport and which holds the highest payroll in baseball outside of the city…
Last week, the Missouri legislature rejected measures to legalize sports gambling in the state. Entering 2023, sports gambling was legal in 36 states plus Washington D.C., and there is a spot, the East St. Louis, IL venue now known as DraftKings at Casino Queen, which is a seven minute drive, thirteen minute MetroLink ride, or…
Yesterday, the St. Louis Cardinals won their first baseball game in their last nine. This is a thing that, no matter how bad you think the Cardinals are going to get, is going to happen from time to time. I am asking, not out of a sense of negativity but out of a sense of…
As a general rule of thumb, I would consider it a bad sign if I am referencing the following tweet in regards to the way that you are approaching something. https://twitter.com/DSzymborski/status/737030860260663297 Mike Matheny, of course, is no longer the manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, but the spirit of five hundred spiders in a kindergarten…
For the first time in my time as a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals, I am writing this sentence: the St. Louis Cardinals, over a month into the season, have the worst record in the National League. The Cardinals currently sit eleven games under .500, playing the season at a crisp 52 win pace.…
Between his 882 Major League Baseball games played for the St. Louis Cardinals and the many thousands of games he broadcast as the team's radio announcer, there are generations of St. Louisans who have spent as much time with Mike Shannon as they have spent with all but a handful of people in their lives.…
In 1989, Oakland Athletics home games were attended by 2,667,225 people--in the American League, only the Toronto Blue Jays, who were opening up their brand new stadium then known as SkyDome, turned more fans through the turnstiles. Entering the 1990s, Oakland was not only packing fans into their stadium, but they were loading up with…
On Saturday, Nolan Arenado went 0-for-5 with four strikeouts. He did make a pretty nifty defensive play, but it would be safe to say that this was not going to be the game his supporters note when crafting his case for induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame five years after his retirement. But…
If the Cardinals believe in Jordan Walker, now is the time to secure his services for the long term
It's rather difficult to analyze the first six games of the St. Louis Cardinals season. Entering the season, I thought the first week was going to be tricky--three games each against the Toronto Blue Jays and the Atlanta Braves, two of the arguably five or so best teams in baseball, is not an easy task.…
On May 22, 2002, the newest St. Louis Cardinal, Jordan Walker, was born in Stone Mountain, Georgia. In St. Louis, in the fourth-to-final season at the former Busch Memorial Stadium, the Cardinals hosted the Houston Astros. The game concluded in the bottom of the ninth inning thanks to a lead-off home run off the bat…
In 2022, the St. Louis Cardinals had their first major award winner (Most Valuable Player, Cy Young Award, Rookie of the Year) since 2009 when first baseman/plain hamburger aficionado Paul Goldschmidt took home the award as the National League's Most Valuable Player. You may be asking yourself--is this enough? Is winning the most major of…
Since it was announced on Saturday that twenty year-old super-prospect Jordan Walker would make the St. Louis Cardinals' Opening Day roster, the overall reaction from St. Louis fans has been overwhelmingly positive. Walker, a consensus top-five prospect in all of baseball and the most ballyhooed St. Louis Cardinals prospect since no more recently than Oscar…
St. Louis Bullpen 