One of my favorite twenty-first century St. Louis Cardinals teams was the 2003 team. This may seem a bit odd. There is no objective reason for me to hold a candle for the 2003 Cardinals--they were a pretty good team, finishing 85-77, and they were buoyed by typically excellent seasons from Jim Edmonds, Edgar Renteria,…
Come on, guys, win a game. Just one stupid game. Recapping games is more fun when I'm not just writing "hey, the Cardinals struck out again" over and over. Or maybe it's more fun for you guys when I just lose my mind over mid-season baseball games, I'm not sure, but it's not as fun…
Hi folks. For a while I was considering going down to Busch Stadium for tonight's game between the Atlanta Braves and St. Louis Cardinals because of the following factors: The Carlos Martinez mystery hair bobblehead. I ended up not attending because of the following factors: The heat index when the game started was well…
After a bye week, this is Part 3 of a series about an alternate timeline in which the St. Louis Cardinals decide to function solely to succeed in 2018, abandoning all interest in long-term player development and instead hoping to win this one title. You can read Part 1, about the first day of trades,…
That Greg Holland, who was signed on Opening Day to a one-year, $14 million contract which also cost the St. Louis Cardinals a second-round draft pick, has improved from his start to the season is about as predictable of a baseball event as one can find. Through May 25, after which Greg Holland found himself…
Yesterday, I wrote a preview of the series between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Cleveland Indians in which I did not once use the latter team's actual nickname, because the team's nickname isn't as good as what it could be. In the Dead Ball era, the formal nickname of Cleveland's American League baseball team…
Tonight, the St. Louis Cardinals will open a three-game series at home against one of baseball's most successful teams of the last few seasons, the Cleveland Lindors. Cleveland has yet to win a World Series since 1948, but they have had some magnificent teams intermittently. They are not a great franchise, per se, but they…
In the first round of the 2009 MLB Draft, the St. Louis Cardinals selected Texas high school pitcher Shelby Miller with the 19th overall pick. By most standards, Miller was a very good pick--he's already the seventh-best #19 pick in history (if this sounds like a familiar topic, it is) and he has a very…
If the St. Louis Cardinals do not win the National League Central this year, I hope the Milwaukee Brewers do. Perhaps this is not a particularly shocking assessment, as the chief contender outside of these two teams is the primary rival of them, the Chicago Cubs. But even so, the Brewers are a perfectly likable…
The primary metrics by which coaches and managers in professional sports are measured are wins and losses. Wins and losses exist for players, particularly for baseball starting pitchers, but there are more descriptive statistics which are in the mainstream (earned-run average, to use the most famous example). For coaches, one's record is what we have,…
St. Louis Bullpen 