In a game show format that many people are saying resembles that of the popular syndicated television show Jeopardy!, John and Turp are joined by NBC Sports writer Drew Silva and Viva El Birdos writer Gabe Simonds, with Turp jumping in as contestant and John serving as host. https://anchor.fm/the-st-louis-bullpen-show/episodes/This---is---St--Louis-Cardinals-Popular-Game-Show-ecc0no As always, check out the podcast…
Last week, apropos of very little, I wrote about the greatest players at each major professional baseball stadium in St. Louis. The next day, I decided to take my extremely cool, not at all nerdy curiosity a level further and figure out the best player at every MLB stadium. I didn't dig quite as deep…
Some of the younger readers of this website have only known professional baseball in St. Louis at one stadium. I’ve seen it at two. Some of you have seen it at three. There are some living people who have seen and remember baseball at four, but anything beyond that goes past living memory of St.…
As a person who devotes large amount of my time to writing about baseball on the internet, the whole "social distancing" thing that we are expected to (and should) do to combat the spread of the COVID-19 virus probably comes a bit easier to me than it does to most, but it is still a…
Baseball isn’t going to start on time. It probably isn’t going to start until decently after “on time”. At this point, I think we’re probably more likely to have Major League Baseball not play in 2020 than we are to have it play in May. This isn’t pure fatalism, and to be clear, I do think there…
I can’t come up with a good rationalization for this. To put the well-being of players and fans at risk is a callous, irresponsible approach. Serious measures should be taken to combat Coronavirus, and the scientific consensus indicates that large public events such as sporting events should be delayed. All of the talk over the…
With Saturday's bizarre news that semi-veteran St. Louis Cardinals utility bench player Yairo Munoz has left the Cardinals organization, the Cardinals find themselves with an open roster spot on the team's MLB bench. Munoz wasn't simply a Spring Training invite--he is a man who spent nearly the entire 2018 and 2019 seasons on the Cardinals…
Dylan Carlson has been obliterating baseballs in Spring Training as a non-roster invite for the St. Louis Cardinals, and that's awesome. But there is a part of me that gives pause to the acclaimed prospect not because I don't think he's going to be good, but because I'm not sure that he's going to be that good.…
Should Jack Flaherty start the first game of the next season for the Cardinals?
In sharp contrast to the last few off-seasons, Major League Baseball free agency largely resolved itself rather quickly during the 2019-20 iteration. Gerrit Cole, Stephen Strasburg, and Anthony Rendon were off the market by early December, and each had a pretty penny to show for it. For the health of baseball, particularly for those of…
John and Turp discuss the Cardinals' signing of infielder Brad Miller, whether the Cardinals should have topped the Dodgers' offer for Mookie Betts (17:55), which Negro Leagues player would translate the best to the modern day St. Louis Cardinals (33:00), and participate in a game of Cardinals and Oscar trivia (51:44). Remember to check out…
Note: This post was written under the assumption that Mookie Betts was traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers. Last night, Jon Heyman reported that the Boston Red Sox are trying to reconfigure the trade. Because I don't like the idea of letting 2,000+ words go to complete waste, this post is going to assume the…
Having problems with listening on the website? Check us out on Spotify, Google Podcasts, and/or Radio Public. https://anchor.fm/the-st-louis-bullpen-show/episodes/There-are-no-more-outfielders--only-DHs-eai37u
Speaking as somebody born after the heyday of the "Whiteyball" era of St. Louis Cardinals baseball, the high-flying Cardinals teams of yesteryear have long been a source both of fascination and mild annoyance for me. On one hand, discourse about the team brings out some of my "Ok Boomer"-iest tendencies. In the build-up to last…
On Sunday morning, I weighed writing something about the Cardinals. By Sunday afternoon, nothing concerning the Cardinals seemed to matter. There really is no precedent for the horrible tragedy of the death of Kobe Bryant, 41, in a helicopter crash on Sunday that also took the lives of eight others, including his 13 year-old daughter…
Two wildly different players were voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame on Tuesday—Derek Jeter, the near-unanimous, first-ballot shortstop who captained the New York Yankees to five World Series championships, and Larry Walker, who barely made it to Cooperstown on his tenth and final ballot fifteen years after his final MLB season. Jeter was easily…
In many ways, Matt Carpenter embodies everything that the St. Louis Cardinals and their fans want to believe about themselves. He is a late bloomer, a mid-round draft pick as a college senior who scrapped his way to the Majors despite the long odds he faced. Carpenter was in AAA at the start of his…
As always, listen to the podcast on Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Radio Public. https://anchor.fm/the-st-louis-bullpen-show/episodes/Baseball-insanity-and-Cooperstown-ea81j0
An unfortunate byproduct of baseball's lack of especially prohibitive team salary controls is that fans can only act as armchair GMs to so much of an extent. Take the St. Louis Blues--Taylor Hall, a recent recipient of the NHL's Hart Trophy as the league's Most Valuable Player, will be a free agent at the end…
https://anchor.fm/the-st-louis-bullpen-show/episodes/The-St--Louis-Bullpen-Show-The-Matt-Liberatore-and-Nolan-Arenado-Show-ea3e2l Remember to listen to the podcast here, or on Spotify, Radio Public, or Google Podcasts.
I don't know anything about prospects. I am a complete idiot regarding prospects. There are like a dozen prospects I know about in all of baseball that aren't St. Louis Cardinals prospects. Matt Liberatore is one of them. Well, was one of them. This afternoon, news broke that the Cardinals had acquired the former Tampa…
In 2014, shortly after finishing their fifth consecutive losing season, the Miami Marlins signed their franchise player, right fielder Giancarlo Stanton, to the most lucrative contract in professional sports history, a 13-year, $325 million agreement characterized by backloaded money and a player opt-out following the 2020 season. The sheer dollar amount in conjunction with the…
2018 was a mediocre year for my sporting interests. The St. Louis Cardinals finished on a relatively high note, including a memorable surge for August and Matt Carpenter, but ultimately, they still missed the postseason for the third consecutive season. My college basketball allegiance, the Missouri Tigers, made the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball tournament…
https://anchor.fm/the-st-louis-bullpen-show/episodes/The-St--Louis-Bullpen-Show-The-Best-of-St--Louis-sports-in-the-2010s-Draft-e9opc8 You can listen to Mike Bauer, John Fleming, Alex Turpin, and Josh Matejka rank their favorite St. Louis sports moments of the decade above, or check out the podcast on Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Radio Public.
An inherent problem with being an armchair MLB general manager is that the sport doesn’t have a hard salary cap, and thus the smart move if your sole motivation is winning is to just sign everybody. If you are a fan and thus have no connection with the actual front office, you don’t have to…
On Friday, I introduced the All-MLB batters of the 2010s. Today, it's time for the pitchers. You should know the drill by now. Starting rotation 1. Clayton Kershaw One of the best ways to evaluate a baseball player is not how well he plays at his best, but at how well he plays at his…
On Monday, I posted an NL Central All-Decade team, which is inherently arbitrary and pointless and rewards players for spending time in the MLB division which generally spends the second-least in the sport on player salaries. I had fun, and I hope you did, but it was inherently an exercise in provincialism. Here's the real…
Some people like end-of-decade lists. Some people hate them, or argue that ACTUALLY the decade began in 2011 because there was no Year Zero (you know, before written history--this is why we frequently declare things like that the 1970 Baltimore Orioles were the best baseball team of the 1960s and that Goodfellas was the greatest film of…
On Wednesday I posted Part 1, numbers 6 through 10, of what I believe are the ten greatest Ozzie Smith baseball cards of all-time. The wordy intro was a nostalgic trip you're probably familiar with, that collecting baseball cards was once an almost rite of passage for any adolescent discovering the sport itself, only to…
"I was there when it was fun; I was there when it all collapsed." - Me Ozzie Smith will turn 65 at the end of this month which means he has not played professional baseball for a very long time. It's not easy, I suppose, watching your first sports hero grow old because there stands…
In just under a week, a panel will decide the four teams that will participate in the creatively-titled College Football Playoff. Will the committee tasked with doing so pick the correct teams? Subjective, but they'll probably come pretty close. Is there anything stopping them from making hilariously bad picks for the sake of hilarity? Nope!…
When evaluating which free agents would be good fits for various teams, arguably the most important factor to consider is team need. More depth is always good, sure, but a great free agent fit is one where the team has a hole in their lineup, rotation, or bullpen, and a free agent provides such an…
In both the 2017-18 and 2018-19 off-seasons, the marquee move for the St. Louis Cardinals followed a familiar pattern--the Cardinals acquired a premium, middle-of-the-order offensive threat with dwindling remaining years of club control in exchange for a handful of decent, already MLB-caliber young players and prospects. In December 2017, the Cardinals traded four prospects, two…
One of my favorite and least favorite pastimes of the free agent hot stove season is yelling about how to spend somebody else’s money. On one hand, it is fun to dream of what new players the St. Louis Cardinals could sign, and I prefer being able to preserve these fantasies to, say, the artificially…
Adam Wainwright was not the best pitcher available this off-season. Gerrit Cole or Stephen Strasburg was/were (and is/are). Either would be a valuable addition to the St. Louis Cardinals, but not uniquely so. Gerrit Cole has built a growing legacy with the Houston Astros and would remain a valuable member of the team’s World Series-contending…
As always, in addition to listening here, you can find the episode on Spotify, Radio Public, and Google Podcasts. https://anchor.fm/the-st-louis-bullpen-show/episodes/The-2019-20-Free-Agent-Draft-e8uslt
Per a quick glance at FanGraphs, 379 players participated in a Major League Baseball regular season game for the St. Louis Cardinals in the 2010s. Given that the Cardinals were the third-winningest team in the sport over the decade, and by some measures the most successful team in the sport since 2010, it should come…
Twenty-eight teams have been listed and analyzed as candidates for Team of the 2010s. And now, two teams remain (if this is your first time checking out the series, you may want to catch up before you continue forward, though that's really up to you--here are Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4).…
Six teams remain to be listed in the rankings of the greatest teams of the 2010s, and for the first time, every team listed below is one that I consider to be a legitimate contender for the crown. All have some compelling argument to be the decade's best team, though since there is a Part…
After two days of running through a bunch of teams who, at best, had their moments of glory in the 2010s, Part 3 of The Team of the 2010s Rankings deals with fringe contenders for the crown and teams that, even if they never quite reached the upper echelons of the sport, avoided the devastating…
Yesterday, in Part 1 of the rankings of the greatest baseball franchises of the 2010s, we delved into some pretty spotty franchises, though near the end, we got into franchises that had their moments. And that's largely what Part 2 is as well--franchises that certainly were not the paragon of success in the decade but…
https://anchor.fm/the-st-louis-bullpen-show/episodes/Its-awards-and-hilarious-managerial-hirings-season-e8p6bi As always, you can find the podcast on Spotify, Google Podcasts, Radio Public, and other sources, in addition to being able to listen right here on ess tee el bullpen dot com.
In August, with a month and a half remaining in the MLB regular season and with two and a half months remaining until the final World Series champion of the 2010s was crowned, I decided to publish a list of the greatest teams of the decade so far. And now, my "so far" includes the…
Baseball is, first and foremost, a people-pleasing business. There is no inherent value in the ability to hit a baseball hard or throw a baseball fast; these are skills which are appreciated because they allow people, namely the fans of participating teams, to feel happy. And the Houston Astros have spent the last week making…
Some people don't watch baseball after the St. Louis Cardinals are eliminated from championship contention. That's fine. You're allowed. I am not one of those people, and many of you reading this are not one of those people. But after you spend an entire season being almost singularly devoted to one specific baseball team, it…
The latest episode of the St. Louis Bullpen Show, starring myself and Alex Turpin, can be found at the link below. Also, please subscribe via Spotify, Radio Public, and elsewhere to be kept informed of the latest episodes. https://anchor.fm/the-st-louis-bullpen-show/episodes/The-NLCS-and-2019-recap-and-a-look-ahead-to-free-agency-e7rdpv
When the St. Louis Cardinals signed Dexter Fowler following a 2016 season which saw the team’s half-decade postseason streak snap, he was supposed to solidify an outfield that was hit or miss for most of the prior year. It didn’t result in the Cardinals making the playoffs. When the Cardinals acquired Marcell Ozuna, he was…
