It's easy to forget that St. Louis Cardinals minor league prospect Dylan Carlson entered the 2019 season as a relatively minor prospect. Per MLB.com, Carlson ranked just tenth in the Cardinals system, as he entered his first season with the AA Springfield Cardinals. But throughout the season, Carlson has emerged as, along with Nolan Gorman,…
Mike Shildt stands up for his players and we should be glad he does
Matt Carpenter is having, by his standards, a rough season in 2019. He has never been a particularly fleet of foot runner, and defensively, while he once provided additional value by virtue of his ability to handle, if not master, multiple positions, he has been limited almost exclusively to third base. Carpenter's value comes from…
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…
You can never have too many good outfielders
Yesterday afternoon, Springfield Cardinals outfielder Dylan Carlson was promoted to the Memphis Redbirds. As somebody with bare-bones knowledge of the St. Louis Cardinals' minor league affiliates, a system promotion that does not involve being promoted to the Majors normally wouldn't be a big deal to me. But over the last 4 1/2 months of professional…
How the Cardinals should incorporate Matt Carpenter and Yadier Molina down the stretch
The life cycle of the scrappy underdog baseball player is a shockingly depressing one. Seemingly, it should be easy. You come into Major League Baseball with minimal expectations, you surpass those expectations, and everybody just loves you forever. But eventually, if you're too good, you transcend scrappiness and become just like any other good baseball…
The moves the Cardinals didn’t make
With the 2019 trade deadline loaded with prospective buyers and limited on sellers (particularly on sellers with anything worth selling), most of the individual non-moves that the St. Louis Cardinals didn't make can be rationalized. Unfortunately, in conjunction with absoultely nothing else, the move that the Cardinals did make doesn't make very much sense. Yesterday, the Cardinals…
Why the Cardinals should be glad they avoided Trevor Bauer, besides the fact that he’s an annoying dork
Editor's (my) note: So, I wrote this post on Monday night about how the Cardinals shouldn't trade for Trevor Bauer and then something happened tonight: he got traded to the Cincinnati Reds. The Reds gave up Yasiel Puig and a top-50 prospect in Taylor Trammell in order to do so, and for reasons you should…
Being “All In” is a Cardinals’ pipe dream
Here's the truth: going "all in" is usually not a smart move. Of course, we need to define the context where this phrase is being used. When you're sitting around a poker table with pocket aces and a dwindling stack, all in may be your best bet. It's a way of pushing hesitant and amateur…
What to do with Harrison Bader
With the exceptions of Yadier Molina, Adam Wainwright, and maybe Matt Carpenter, no player was a more pivotal focal point of St. Louis Cardinals marketing during the 2018-19 off-season than center fielder Harrison Bader. Not quite a non-prospect but arriving in St. Louis was marginal hype, Bader burst into the regular Cardinals position player rotation with a…
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…
St. Louis Bullpen 