When I was ten years old, I’d take a wiffle ball bat and a tennis ball, use my left hand to toss the tennis ball up in the air, quickly get into a batting stance, and swing. If it went 100 feet and relatively high, it was a home run. That’s what fantasies are for.…
The five greatest individual Cardinals playoff performances this decade (before last night, which I cannot yet be objective about)
So, um, that was fun. The rational part of me knew that last night was possible, and maybe even likely. I have the receipts to prove it. But the dumb fan in me couldn't fathom the Cardinals ever winning a game after Sunday night's heartbreak, much less the next game. I fancy myself an analytical person who…
A look back at the great Cardinals trade swindles, from the other side
In the twenty-first century, Major League Baseball’s front office personnel had a major breakthrough in pop culture relevance. With the enormous popularity of Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball, general managers became easily identifiable avatars for fans, particularly sabermetrically-inclined fans. The rising popularity of franchise modes in EA Sports video games, not to mention Baseball Mogul or Out Of…
The chase to be Team of the 2010s
Who is the team of the 2010s? This is an open-ended question but it is also a question which can be quantified. So I decided I wanted to quantify it. Of course, the 2010s are not yet over, and the next two-plus months of baseball, particularly the off-season, will go a long way in defining…
Let’s remember some guys on the 2004 St. Louis Cardinals
The 2003-04 school year was a pretty miserable one for me. It was my freshman year in high school, and because I lived in this weird purgatory of middle and high school district overlap, in my class of 512 people, I knew less than ten of them, and I had zero classes with any of…
Bob Gibson and toughness
A quick gander at Bob Gibson's Baseball Reference page will tell you that the most similar pitchers to him were Jim Palmer, Jack Morris, and Amos Rusie. Comparing Gibson to these three is no insult--the trio are each Hall of Famers, with the most similar to Gibson, Palmer, also being a first-ballot Hall of Famer…
Comparing the Tommy Pham trade to other terrible trades of the 2010s
When it comes to evaluating a trade years in retrospect, there are two essential components to evalute--process and results. Sometimes, a trade can be good in terms of process--the underlying logic behind it is sensible--even if the trade works out poorly. Take, for a famous example, the 1987 trade in which the Detroit Tigers traded…
What Pujols did
It is hard to overstate how lucky the St. Louis Cardinals were to draft Albert Pujols. Famously, Albert Pujols was not a coveted amateur prospect, and in 1999, the Cardinals drafted the pudgy amateur third baseman out of Kansas City's Maple Woods Community College with the 402nd overall pick. Every team in baseball passed on…
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.
St. Louis Bullpen 