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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
