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…
The greatest Cardinals World Series Game Sevens
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.…
SMCH, Vol. 1: Brad Penny Grand Slams Himself Into Oblivion
The bittersweet symphony of Brad Penny's greatest triumph.
Meet Trejyn Fletcher, the Cardinals’ Most Interesting Draft Pick Ever
While you were sleeping/drinking, the Cardinals rolled the dice on a truly unique prep player.
Genesis Cabrera is starting tonight for the Cardinals. Huh.
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…
The first championship
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 Cardinals should send the Blues a nice bouquet of flowers for distracting St. Louis
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…
Paul DeJong is the best shortstop in the National League
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…
Ranking Pat Maroon among the greatest St. Louis Cardinals postseason moments
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…
It’s time we talk about Jim Lindeman
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.…
If Wrigley Field isn’t a dump, why is Addison Russell eventually going to be sent there?
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…
Is Dexter Fowler playing center field going to be an actual thing?
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…
The origin story of Marcell Ozuna, slugging superhero
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…
The Willians Astudillo All-Stars
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…
Is Dexter Fowler back?
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…
The St. Louis Bullpen MLB.TV Draft, Part II
John, Josh, Mike and Alex return to tackle Part II of their MLB.TV draft.
The St. Louis Bullpen MLB.TV Draft, Part I
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.
Ozzie Albies, Allen Craig, and the myth of the risky pre-arbitration extension
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…
St. Louis sports, by the numbers
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…
Re-evaluating the controversial Cardinals trades of the last two years
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…
Why we do this
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…
A definitive ranking of the 2019 Cardinal walk-up songs
The beginning of the 2019 Cardinals season has been pretty stressful, so we ranked their walkup songs to relax.
The Cardinals have largely avoided the service time manipulation plague
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…
The Marcell Ozuna trade worked
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…
The current St. Louis Cardinals jersey rankings
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…
Cardinals vs. Brewers: An opening series preview
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…
The joy of sustained excellence and the fear of all-in
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…
A look at the gauntlet that is the 2019 NL Central
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…
If you love Matt Carpenter and hate the DH, you may soon have to choose one
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.…
Looking beyond the dollars and cents of the Paul Goldschmidt extension
The Paul Goldschmidt extension will rightly be scrutinized for its dollars and cents. But is Goldschmidt the type of player who creates value in other ways too?
The Paul Goldschmidt extension is fine. It isn’t “necessary”
Following Matt Holliday's nine-year reign as the owner of the largest contract in St. Louis Cardinals history, new first baseman Paul Goldschmidt seized the crown yesterday by signing a five-year, $130 million extension with the Cardinals, one which will keep the long-time Arizona Diamondbacks slugger in St. Louis through the 2024 season, during which he…
What the WAR update tells us (and doesn’t tell us) about Yadier Molina
St. Louis Cardinals fans love Yadier Molina. Most fans of most teams love most of their players, so let me re-emphasize this: St. Louis Cardinals fans really love Yadier Molina. This love was different from, say, the love Cardinals fans felt towards Matt Holliday, a very good and very likable baseball player in his own right.…
The 42 Most Valuable Players from Game 6 of the 2011 World Series
Since I started watching baseball in 1996, sixty-four different men have won a Most Valuable Player or Cy Young award as the best player or pitcher in the American or National League. And forty-two different men played in the greatest baseball game I have ever seen. As far as I'm concerned, the latter is thus…
Jordan Hicks signed a four-year contract with the Cardinals yesterday and I am outraged
On Tuesday morning, it was announced that the Cardinals had signed Jordan Hicks to a four-year contract worth $36 million, and while I try to give hyper-intelligent modern front offices the benefit of the doubt, I am having a difficult time wrapping my mind around this one. Jordan Hicks, of course, emerged in 2018 as…
What is the appropriate role for Dexter Fowler in 2019?
In 2016, as the leadoff hitter for the Chicago Cubs, Dexter Fowler contributed a 129 wRC+ for the eventual World Series champions. This mark denotes that the center fielder was 29% better than a league-average hitter, which was a career-best for the soon-to-be free agent, who signed with the St. Louis Cardinals that December. Fowler’s…
Jedd Gyorko as the metaphorical center of the 2019 Cardinals
Jon Jay spent four-plus seasons as the primary center fielder for the St. Louis Cardinals, with intermittent cameos by others in the starring role, and while he spent most of that time as a solid if not spectacular player, his cataclysmic 2015 was enough to convince the Cardinals to cut bait on the $6.2 million…
Ranking the Cardinals’ Worst Free Agent Signings of the Last 20 Years
As we documented earlier this week, the St. Louis Cardinals have made some very good free agent deals over the last two decades. But they've also made some very, very bad moves. Today, we are going to rank those moves from the most terrible to the not-nearly-as-terrible-but-still-quite-terrible. As a reminder, we will only be looking…
Ranking the Cardinals’ Best Free Agent Signings of the Last 20 Years
If you’ve been near a TV or internet browser in the past few days, you know that Bryce Harper has signed an enormous deal with the Philadelphia Phillies, thus ending any pipe dreams of Harper suiting up for the St. Louis Cardinals. The Cardinals could still sign Dallas Keuchel (as this blog has previously advocated)…
Matt Wieters, Francisco Pena, and the confouding reasons they are locked in a battle for backup catcher
As the number-five overall pick in the 2007 Major League Baseball draft, Matt Wieters was burdened with extraordinary expectations from the moment he joined the Baltimore Orioles organization. According to Kevin Goldstein of Baseball Prospectus (and later of the Houston Astros), Wieters was baseball's best prospect entering 2009, ahead of future MLB aces David Price and Madison…
The 2019 class for the Cardinals Devil Magic Hall of Fame
Last year we unveiled the inaugural class for the Cardinals Devil Magic Hall of Fame, a place where we honor those who made some sort of Robert Johnson-esque pact while playing in St. Louis. The five inaugural inductees were Will Clark, Tom Henke, Gregg Jefferies, Craig Paquette, and Tony Womack. The criteria for eligibility is…
The Cardinals go off-brand by extending Miles Mikolas
On Tuesday, the St. Louis Cardinals announced that they had signed Miles Mikolas, 2018's surprise starting rotation revelation, to a four-year contract extension which will keep him in St. Louis through 2023. His contract will remain the same for 2019, but starting in 2020, Mikolas is slated to make $17 million per season. It had…
The Cardinals are one Dallas Keuchel away from being NL Central favorites
The transactions which the St. Louis Cardinals have made during the 2018-19 off-season point to an organization desperate to make it back to the postseason after three consecutive Octobers spent at home. The most obvious example of this is trading four long-term assets in exchange for Paul Goldschmidt, who is scheduled to become a free…
Let’s recast “Homer at the Bat”, because at this point The Simpsons might just repeat the same episodes again
If the fact that I created a website devoted to baseball wasn't proof enough, let it be said that I am a very big baseball fan. Another thing I've been a fan of for basically as long is The Simpsons, a highly influential animated sitcom which satirizes American culture as poignantly and hilariously as anything I…
The St. Louis Cardinals Team of the 2010s
The 2010s have been, in the grand scheme of things, a glorious decade for the St. Louis Cardinals. The team won a World Series to start a franchise-record run of five consecutive postseason appearances. The team has had winning seasons in all nine of its concluded campaigns, and it is projected by most outlets to…
Should the Cardinals move Carlos Martinez to the bullpen to start the 2019 season?
Although Martinez has been the best Cardinals pitcher over the last several years, some believe he would be better suited as a relief pitcher.
The Cardinals stand to gain from baseball’s proposed rule changes
It is February 7, and despite teams not seeming to realize it with regards to free agency, baseball season is less than two months away (no, it isn't "baseball season" once the Super Bowl ends--watch basketball or hockey or soccer or NASCAR or something, guys). And what better time than now for Major League Baseball…
Don’t Overthink it: Bryce Harper and the Cardinals are an Obvious Fit
I’ve actually been sitting on the idea for this article since the St. Louis Cardinals acquired elite first baseman Paul Goldschmidt just before the Winter Meetings. My point was a pretty simple one: despite the addition of Goldschmidt, the Cardinals should still aggressively pursue Bryce Harper in free agency. He would perfectly fill an area…
Bracing for a post-fandom baseball landscape
On Sunday, the Los Angeles Rams and the New England Patriots will square off in Super Bowl LIII in Atlanta. As has been recalled repeatedly in the last few days, locally and nationally, living argument for a 100% estate tax Stan Kroenke illegally bought the then-St. Louis Rams in 2010, lied vociferously about his intent…
The break-even age for modern baseball stars
Major League Baseball goes through different stages of what is considered a player's peak. Usually, it falls somewhere in a player's late twenties, though in the late 1990s through early 2000s, when older baseball players such as Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds were Simply Working Harder Than Everybody Else Out There (after all, they were…
Kris Bryant, Yadier Molina, and the joy of our big, stupid rivalry
In the modern Online culture, we tend to grade viral social media moments on a curve. If a comedian writes a funny tweet, that's swell, but that is expected. But if Ted Cruz, very much not a professional comedian, replies to Deadspin soliciting requests for pictures of him playing basketball (I don't remember the reason--it…
