Like every other sports sicko hanging around the internet over the last couple months, I have spent countless hours playing the viral first-baseball now-other-sports trivia game Immaculate Grid. For the uninitiated, the premise of Immaculate Grid is simple--you receive a 3-by-3 grid with the rows and columns titled, mostly by sports franchises but often also…
What the Cardinals and Jack Flaherty meant for each other
At the end of the day, the team and the pitcher have been good for each other.
A look back at the anachronistic Mark McGwire trade
1997 really wasn't that long ago. We had cable television and we almost had Dan McLaughlin broadcasting baseball games on it. This isn't ancient history. But to revisit the trade which brought Mark McGwire to the St. Louis Cardinals on July 31, 1997 feels as though it would require some competence in Olde English to…
No St. Louis Cardinals player is less going to be traded than Nolan Arenado
As a veteran of the First Great Nolan Arenado Trade Rumors Posting War, I believe that the lessons which I learned during the first cycle of Nolan Arenado trade rumors are instructive about the future of the Cardinals third baseman. In 2019, the Colorado Rockies signed their star third baseman Nolan Arenado to an eight-year,…
The kings of the stadiums
There are two things that every baseball organization should strive to bring to their fans: a quality product, and to do no harm to them. Baseball stadium construction is, broadly speaking, a giant racket. The Oakland Athletics are currently in the midst of trying to secure public funding for a new stadium in order to…
How to “win” a trade
That advanced baseball statistical research allows us to quantify just about anything is both the greatest strength of the sabermetric movement and the aspect of it which gives us the falsest sense of security. Statistics are objective--even if they are complicated to a point of impenetrability to the casual fan, like WAR or wRC+ or…
What is David Freese?
It was a little less than two years after David Freese's 2011 postseason heroics solidified the homegrown third baseman as a bona fide St. Louis Cardinals legend, while walking through a suburban Schnucks grocery store of all places, that something I had never really considered occurred to me. The day after David Freese saved the…
Mike Shannon was the perfect icon of St. Louis baseball
Between his 882 Major League Baseball games played for the St. Louis Cardinals and the many thousands of games he broadcast as the team's radio announcer, there are generations of St. Louisans who have spent as much time with Mike Shannon as they have spent with all but a handful of people in their lives.…
Did Nolan Arenado lock up his Hall of Fame induction last weekend?
On Saturday, Nolan Arenado went 0-for-5 with four strikeouts. He did make a pretty nifty defensive play, but it would be safe to say that this was not going to be the game his supporters note when crafting his case for induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame five years after his retirement. But…
The continuum
On May 22, 2002, the newest St. Louis Cardinal, Jordan Walker, was born in Stone Mountain, Georgia. In St. Louis, in the fourth-to-final season at the former Busch Memorial Stadium, the Cardinals hosted the Houston Astros. The game concluded in the bottom of the ninth inning thanks to a lead-off home run off the bat…
St. Louis Bullpen 