I know for a fact that a nonzero number of St. Louis Cardinals employees have read, and presumably will read, St. Louis Bullpen posts. I say this not as a way of congratulating myself but as a bland statement of how sports blogging community works--this website does not generally generate the level of interest of…
So, um, what is the plan for the Cardinals?
Last off-season, everything that the St. Louis Cardinals did fell into place relatively quickly. They signed Kyle Gibson and Lance Lynn by Thanksgiving and then added Sonny Gray the next Monday. They traded Tyler O'Neill two-and-a-half weeks before Christmas. Even the Matt Carpenter signing, which felt like a checkout aisle impulse buy, happened on January…
Juan Soto and the death of the bad baseball contract
Major League Baseball is less than three years removed from an owner-initiated lockout which threatened (and did briefly delay) the start of the 2022 MLB season, and it was based on the premise that owners needed a better deal with the players with regard to their collective bargaining agreement. I suspected this was not the…
How the Cardinals should spend their money this offseason (and how they should spend the money they won’t spend)
They could spend a lot of money, but there are some better options than others if they aren't going to do that.
Meet the 2025 Cardinals. Same as (or worse than) the 2024 Cardinals.
You could make a case, despite a few decidedly mediocre seasons in the back half of the decade, that the St. Louis Cardinals were the Team Of The 2010s. The San Francisco Giants won the most titles, but were nondescript otherwise. The Boston Red Sox got a pair themselves but also had some downright lousy…
The slow fizzle of the Dylan Carlson era
It would be really, really easy, and frankly a bit cathartic in the short term, to bemoan just how poorly top-tier St. Louis Cardinals prospects over the last decade have panned out. Even setting aside the obviously outlying case of Oscar Taveras (not to mention the departure of the other former top prospect who was…
Cardinals recreate the Harrison Bader-Jordan Montgomery trade, acquire Erick Fedde for Tommy Edman; also get a replacement Tommy (Pham)
On one side stands the St. Louis Cardinals holding onto a center fielder who had come to the Majors and surpassed his level of hype tenfold but had gone through a recent spat of injuries and had just one more year after the current one of remaining club control. On another side stands a starting…
Your 2024-25 NBA road trip guide
Hello, all. This is a post with a target audience of a handful of my friends, though because I am posting it on S T L Bullpen dot com, it is accessible to a bunch of other people. That's fine, though--I'm not posting social security numbers or anything. I'm not gonna tweet out a link…
Willie and Bill
An underrated part of the single most significant story in the history of professional baseball, Jackie Robinson's integration of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the National League on April 15, 1947, is that the man who broke baseball's color barrier was also a transcendent talent. The headline is not that Jackie Robinson was a Hall of…
The incorporation of Negro Leagues statistics has enriched our appreciation of St. Louis baseball history
Those familiar with the history of major professional baseball in St. Louis are likely aware that, prior to the 1920s, the St. Louis Cardinals and St. Louis Browns were not typically very good teams. There were periodic winning seasons, but it wasn't until the arrivals of Rogers Hornsby and George Sisler that St. Louis developed…
St. Louis Bullpen 