long time no blog

according to statcounter, i have been getting traffic despite my extended absence from the workd of cardinal blogging. that's fantastic. i just got done watching via gameday our seventh straight loss, so i figured there was no way the rabid redbird curse was in effect, as i haven't posted an entry since june or before.

a bit of update. the missus and i have moved back to my homeland of knoxville, tn. we have cable for the first time, so we have seen almost as many cardinal games since we got back as we had for the last two years, at least on television. i was lucky enough to get to watch our dismantling at the hands of the reds live on television tuesday and yesterday, and then today, though i was at work, we've had no customers in the coffee box, so i kept up with the whole sad affair on gameday.

is anyone else looking forward to 2008? or maybe 2009?

just let me not post for a week or two, and see what happens... i can't attribute the offensive outburst to the supposed curse, as i'm pretty sure the spate of injuries that occurred while rabid redbird was idle is worse in the long term than anything i ever attributed to it.

at least baseball seems interesting right now. i feel like i'm only twelve more injuries away from making the show at this point. some rabid-fire thoughts:

albert looks like albert again. i am giving jim edmonds the credit for the transformation, as he has looked like at least a very convincing shadow of his former self lately. let's hope this isn't a roy hobbs dying but heroic swan song for jimmy, but in fact a reflection of his real ability being played out as a veteran on a team that needs him. let's hope albert never again forgets that he is albert pujols.

todd wellemeyer pitched a reasonably good game for his first major league start, but count me among those who think that anthony reyes needs to pitch his own way, and in the majors. the two seamer obviously isn't working. while i don't think his aaa-stunning two-and-a-half-pitch arsenal will kill major league hitters forever, i think it can serve him for a bit while he learns a different new pitch, whatever that may be. anything at all, let dyar miller teach him to refine his less than useful curve, a cutter, a knuckleball, a screwball, any old pitch as long as it's not a sinker, which he will eventually refuse to throw at all.

jesus, between head bumps and infected knees, chris duncan had better watch out for falling satellites or something from here on out.

kelly stinnett, huh? as a back up to gary "freakin'" bennett, or as the primary catcher? whichever the case, i just cant wait to hear the magic words "yadier molina participated in a workout/bullpen session today."

that's all for now. i've been busy with the impending move, but i'll try to keep gaps this long from occurring again.

offense-ive

i can't say i thought i'd ever say this... i'm ok with a 9-7 loss.

wainwright obviously struggled with his command, but that will happen. it was ugly, but hopefully fixable. that's what we have genius dave duncan for, and even if adam doesn't work out, perhaps he can turn randy flores into a top notch starter or something.

seven runs on twelve hits means offensive production. our pitching has been strong on the whole, so if we can actually score a run or six, we might win some of the quality starts we're getting.

series victory, guys. i know you've got it in you.

a win is a win

is a win.

dear cardinals pitchers,
just so you know, keep up the good work. if it's less than amazing, you'll probably be tagged with the l.
sincerely,
rabid redbird.

nice to see multiple 0-fer's ended last night. if everyone can remember how to hit today, there's a chance our boys might all progress to the mean.

thank you, gods of baseball.

crossing over

my other blog has a r.i.p. tag. i didn't want to have to add one to this blog. now i have. let's all hope i need never use it again.

josh hancock was this team's cal eldred, in one respect, having the strength of ego to do the mop-up role but the ability to get the outs when they were most important. josh was a team player and from all accounts an extremely nice guy. i liked him, i liked that we had him in cardinal red.

the question has been raised: was josh hancock drunk? the answer, in my opinion, is meaningless. will his death be less tragic if he was intoxicated? will his friends and family grieve any less?

in the last twenty years or so, a vocal minority has arisen in our country blaming alcohol for any manner of social ills, using drunk driving as an easy target for their spearhead. drunk driving is foolish and unsafe, but that doesn't make drinking evil. if we're playing fair, let's go ahead and condemn driving as well, since it's hard to get a dui on foot. driving is worse for more people (and the environment) than drinking, which primarily affects the drinker.

i've railed about this once too many times this year. go cardinals. resquiat in pace, josh.

road grays

in anticipation of the rabid/thedamned family's imminent move (in two months), and for the sake of readability, i am changing the blog into it's road grays. please let me know if the change is to your liking (or just comment on something; i don't care, i just like feedback).

if schumaker isn't switched out for ryan ludwick soon, i'm going to have to call in the goon temp agency my company uses for collections and have him placed on the dl. i love the defense, skip, but this is not a lineup that can afford to carry a .185 obp outfielder. we need some pop (hell some contact, even) in the worst way. since so taguchi has tony's vote for the "aging fourth outfielder with something to prove award," he's here to stay. sorry, skip.

are giants stronger than pirates?

in the end, it doesn't matter, as they both seem to be able to outplay the cardinals. rabid thoughts

albert seems to be seeing the ball a little better, which is promising. if anyone else on the team can manage to get it going (hello, scott and jimmy), we may be able to go from having a horrendous offense to a merely a limp offense. lots of bloggers have noted that he seems to be pulling everything these days, which is a bothersome habit, but probably just a habit, so here's hoping he can break out of it.

mr edmonds, this town (mostly) loves you. please justify this with your bat (we know how great a defender you still are). a scant three years ago, you had grounded into the fewest double plays of any major leaguer (4), a number you have already matched in april of 07. 4 is an absurdly low number for a season, but it's high for a hitter of your calibur in less than one month.

i want birds to eat some bear this weekend. i want to not have to hang my head in shame when a cub fan walks by. i want an outfielder who can hit now and again.

coming in out of the cold

saturday's postponed game was the first one that mrs. rabid and i attended. it was cold, and so were the cardinals' bats. they were the best seats i have ever purchased (right field field boxes, twenty feet into foul territory). the drunken folks behind us had driven in from hannibal, mo in time for the noon start; instead of going to the arch, or the art museum, or some such, they had chosen to drink from noon until gametime. while your very own rabid redbird is no stranger to drink (though at times, sobriety has seemed like a long lost acquaintance), hours of drinking followed by hours of driving is never a good idea. i can only hope they killed no one on the way back to hannibal.

yesterday, our son, jackrabid, had his first birthday party/bbq. in celebration, the cardinals rediscovered their abilities at the plate (most of them, anyway... both rolen and edmonds 0-4 with a walk weren't quite mv3 calibur, but what can you do). perhaps i need to grill 20-plus pounds of meat for every game, or perhaps we need to change the jersey numbers to 42 permanently. whatever the case, it was good to see/hear.

that's all for today, as work crises come before baseball good times.

various complaints about good things, game 9 post

with the game on the radio over my shoulder and everyone out for a while, i have a moment of calm at the ridiculously tense office. note to job seekers: never work for a family owned company with fewer than 25 employees if you're not a member of the family.

since my last post, we've found our way back to .500, which is good, and without carp or any real help from albert, which is amazing. last night's game winner hit by a sub who should have been a scratch himself was pretty damned cool. i'm still not convinced that this team isn't still in a decline phase, but at least we can still beat up on the weaker members of the division.

i am amazed at how many commentators and "experts" think that the astros standa chance this year. adding carlos lee doesn't make up for losing clemens and pettite, and very few teams can ride to glory on the backs of wandy rodriguez and woody williams (as a 41 year old).

carp's elbow is a worry, but i'm of the school of thought that says better to lose him for part or even all of this season than have him be less effective in the remaining years of his contract. i was relatively impressed with kiesler last night, though i hope we don't ink him in at the cost of utilizing other important minor leaguers.

how long before we release hamlet (despite the occasional game winning two run double) and call up ankiel (with amaury marti/cazana taking his roster spot in aaa)? ankiel is tearing triple a up, amaury x is tearing the mexican league up, whereas preston is swinging for the fences every time and coming up short. like our other logjammed outfielders, ankiel is a left handed hitter, so he's more likely to replace skip schumacher.

as i type this, the pirates have a run in and the bases loaded, so i'd better stop posting. if i go on too long, i'm sure someone else important will end up on the dl.

looking forward

as a cardinal fan who fell in love with the team during the boom years (2001 to the present), i don't have a sense of perspective on an 0-3 start. thank god i have become a fan of baseball in the last two years. today, the warehouse manager and i went to nick's pub for lunch, and there was a kansas/kansas state game on. i watched it as though i were being offered a scouting position. the alternative was an ultimate fighting ripoff, so it's not like it was a hard decision, but still...

there is no curse.

all in all, i'm really looking forward to tonight's game. i want to see wainwright start, if only to see if that hammer curve flattens out after a few innings (please, god, no). i really hope we see a three hr game for the redbirds tonight, with none in the cheatboxes in left. god knows they need the morale boost. god knows cardinal nation does as well.

curse reversal?

i wondered aloud to mrs. rabid last night if there had been a reworking of the rabid redbird curse, i.e. that the cardinals would lose if i didn't post here. i promised to investigate, so here, for the sake of experiment, is the test post. if the cardinals win tonight, i will try to post at least a little before every game. if not, i will give up my silly superstitions.

on the whole, the cards haven't played such bad baseball these last two games, but they haven't been able to get all of the good baseball into one inning. last night, there were some timely hits that weren't followed up by timely hits. bloop, bloop is good when followed by blast, or even when followed by bloop, bloop, bloop, ad nauseam.

glavine and el duque are good pitchers, so it isn't the end of the world by any means. kip wells actually looked (to mike and john, sounded to me) pretty good last night, apart from the error. albert's double and rolen's homer were promising signs, but i get the feeling that team hasn't gelled yet. how many double plays can one hit into? one would hope we've knocked out a good portion of ours for april in these first two games.

there is no curse. last year, when rabid redbird began and the youngest member of the rabid family was born, we won the world series. remember that every day. remember catching siouxs! (mrs rabid) when she came running in from the kitchen between the final out being announced on the radio and actually seeing it on tv. remember the look on yadi's face, and remember that the guy who got that final out will see a lot more innings this year.

fifty some odd hours to go

real baseball is coming so soon, i can hardly stand it. of course, if it isn't simulcast, i won't get to watch it, as we are the last american family without cable (by choice, i might add, though we do miss watching a lot of baseball). nonetheless, real baseball.

in the meantime, tonight, we've got real baseball versus just shy of real baseball. i hope john rodriguez gets a start in rf for memphis, and i hope he clobbers the shit out of the ball, even if it's at the expense of adam wunderkind. no team needs both so taguchi and skip schumaker as of's. i realize that both skip and jrod are left handed swingers, but they have different skill sets as well. despite the fact that a disproportionate number of major league pitchers are lefties as compared to the general population, there are still a lot fewer lh's out there than rh's, so both skip and jrod could still be used in optimal conditions most of the time.

tomorrow night we have the civil rights game in memphis, featuring the cardinals versus the indians, supporting an effort to raise african american participation in the game. perhaps the idea behind putting the indians in such a game is so that all baseball fans, be they of black, white, hispanic or asian descent, can join together and say "at least we have it better than the indians." actually, part of the purpose of the game is celebrating the indians getting rid of (inordinately racist mascot) chief wahoo's bottle of firewater. someone told me that the big contraversy was whether there would be a dh in the game. go figure.

happy weekend, cardinal fans. i'll try to get in an opening day post, but as usual, the computer is in the (very nearly one-year-old) baby's bedroom. bad planning in the rabid redbird house, to be sure.

on the importance of spring training naps

rabid redbird is going on record to tell tony la russa that he's a naughty, naughty manager... for driving tired.
a 20 plus hour day is hard for most anyone (that's why laws have been changed to keep truckers and medical interns from pulling them), and even harder for a 62 year old man. falling asleep at a stoplight is proof that he shouldn't have been driving. however (steeling myself for the angry screed from some readers), it doesn't prove that he was intoxicated. i am strongly opposed to drunk driving, but i don't believe that lowering the legal limit from .1bac to .08bac had anything to do with stopping drunk driving accidents. it's a money-maker for state governments and the neo-prohibitionist organization mothers* against drunk driving (a group whose founder will no longer have any part of, thinking that they are going too far). given tony's size, .093bac is approximately two to two and a half glasses of red wine (his preferred tipple). a quarter of the people leaving busch stadium have consumed more than that, and the period of time between seventh inning last call and the game's end is rarely long enough for everyone to sober up. am i saying it's ok to drink and drive because lots of people do it after games? no. i myself rarely get a second beer at the park anymore (mostly because i'm cheap), and frankly don't see how some of the people i've seen at the park could really enjoy the game. as a still relatively new baseball obsessed blogger, i need to devote a lot of attention to catch the subtleties of the game.
but i digress.
tony was tired. driving while tired is as bad as driving drunk. so is driving while on the cell phone. it was irresponsible for him to get behind the wheel fatigued, but he might have fallen asleep with or without the alcohol in his system. in our country, one means a night in jail, the other a warning and an offer of a ride home.

*(the current president of madd, glynn birch, is billed as the "first dad to head madd". far be it from me to deny that many members of madd have suffered great tragedies at the hands of drunk drivers [and his is certainly one], but their scope has widened to stop drinking, not just drinking and driving.)

re-entry

two weeks remain in spring training. the games are meaning more, braden looper looks more like a sure thing, and rabid redbird is doing the pee pee dance waiting for meaningful baseball. we visited knox vegas last week, aka the land that baseball forgot (my grandmother gets mad when jack is wearing cardinal colors instead of a vols outfit, as though they were rivals or something), so i have been flooding my consciousness with baseball since saturday.

some thoughts
position players
jenc on the dl to start the year? well, at least some of our aaaa guys will get a chance to prove something, i guess. skip and so, together again? if we must. i love so, but i still want to know why skip doesn't just have his job at this point.

skinny jrod still hits virtually everything to the warning track, but not out. however, the .350+ batting mark says let him keep that up as long as injuries require.

hamlet better start hitting, from the sound of things. tony won't stand for settling, and neither will cardinal nation.

pitchers
i'm liking the springer signing less and less these days. true, 1.75 million isn't much in today's baseball market, but it's a lot of money to pay for a guy who's a) old b) possibly injured (see rincon, ricardo) and c) russ springer. i know we need some veteran presence in the bullpen, but thirty-two-year-olds can be veterans as well as thirty-nine-year-olds.

dennis dove? why not. he's a fireballer, and not jorge sosa, both strong selling points.

it's good to see izzy feeling more comfortable on the mound, if only to help tums sales in st louis. i'd say rolaids, but my brother-in-law works for the people who make tums, so i'm bucking the norm.

more to come later this week.

oh, and thanks to cardnilly for the new link

spring training spill

i determined as i waited for blogger to load that i would post a blog to whichever blog i had neglected for longer, then i realized i have a lot more to say about baseball right now. here goes.

spring training has me all excited. i can't wait for grapefruit league games, hearing who is tearing it up in "live" bp, who has learned to throw a cutter in the off season. i watched more pro football this off season than i ever have before, but it's no substitute for baseball. i think that this year my be the watershed year in which i become capable of following at least the whole national league, if not both leagues. as a still relatively new baseball fan who has been absorbing concepts for the last few years, it took me a while just to follow the entire nl central. no more. every day when i get home from work, i give my wife the details of what went on in baseball today, and i think that will be expanded in 07.

at what price belliard? we could have had jabba as a backup 2nd baseman for less than gollum. not that brass could have forseen it, but it is still something of a loss. hell, i'd almost consider jabba to be a backup right fielder, as deep as he plays 2nd. i guess it worked out for the best, what with management's hope to make the whole team of albert and former angels.

i have made an ankiel category. i don't know how to feel about the guy. his meltdown was before my time, so i don't have that bad taste in my mouth. i guess i'd like to see him succeed as an outfielder, but not just because tony feels guilty. if he's not a major waste of organizational resources, fine. if his bat is real, fine. if he is doomed to be a career minor league guy, let someone else try with him.

i have a strong feeling about trades in the works. we have a lot of rp's and of's. some of them are relative bargains, too. i'm expecting the proverbial "impact bat" by the all star break.

god, i love baseball.

aaaantiiiiiiiiciiiiipaaaaaatiooooon

i'm waiting excitedly for next wednesday, though i know it will be a disappointment. "pitchers and catchers report," but it's to start throwing, working out, etc. they won't even pitch a bp for another week after that.
nonetheless, after a long, dim offseason that has seen the cubs get simultaneously better and worse, the astros finally get some offense while trying to convince oswalt to pitch every other day ("how many bulldozers will it take, roy?"), and the brewers pay jeff suppan as though he really will be a #2 guy, i'm glad to have baseball again.
so far, we're only going to one game this season, but that will have to change. i'm just hoping they offer the 5.50 tickets again this season, or it will be a bigger budget hit than we're ready for.

hamlet rides again

the st louis cardinals have re-signed outfielder preston "hamlet, prince of denmark" wilson to a 1 year deal. i, for one, am in favor of this, as it means i have a whole new baseball season to reference hamlet and baseball. it also means that mookie "claudius" wilson will be spending a lot more time in st louis.

ok, let me qualify. provided we didn't pay him an absurd sum, i like this signing.

second qualifier: by absurd sum, i mean an absurdly large sum. i don't mean "league minimum + 83lbs of m&m's, six crocodile teeth, and enough helium balloons to fly to nepal." that would actually be reasonable.

(g)rumblings

from the various happenings since my last post or passed over by it:

i'm ok with the ryan franklin signing, as long as it doesn't force anthony reyes or adam wainwright to be the odd man out. it's just a cheap insurance thing that keeps braden looper that much further out of the rotation.

rick ankiel has yet one more last chance to be a cardinal. count me among the "why the hell not" crowd, assuming we're paying him a regular minor league salary.

so signed today, pre-arbitration. i like so, but i wanted him to be an outfield defensive coach this year for the cardinals, not an outfielder. skip schumacher should be our defensive replacement this year, but 925k for so isn't that bad.

according to various sources, we either are or aren't trying to sign weaver. unless he's willing to sign for close to his actual worth and a short term contract, i say no thanks.

betting on the brokedown

ok, i'll admit that though i'm not his biggest fan, i would like to have at least one more healthy, "vintage" season out of the guy (considering what we gave up for him). he is a good pitcher when on top of his game.

that said, if the contract walt offered him is not incentive laden to the point of near-ridiculousness, i may have to kill someone. maybe something like this

base yr 1: $500,000
>50 innings: $500,000
>100 innings: $1,000,000
>150 innings: $1,000,000
>10 wins: $1,000,000
>15 wins: $1,000,000
no dl time after returning: $500,000
not frosting his hair in '07: $500,000
no interviews until return: $500,000
not sounding like a douche when he does do interviews after return: $500,000
total with all incentives: 7mm

base yr 2: $1,500,000
>50 innings: $500,000
>100 innings: $1,000,000
>150 innings: $1,000,000
>200 innings: $1,500,000
>10 wins: $1,000,000
>15 wins: $2,000,000
1 or more home runs hit: $50,000 each
not frosting his hair in '08: $500,000
not beating redbird brass at golf: $500,000
not sounding like a douche in interviews: $500,000
not wearing a "sounds of the game" mic: $500,000
total with all incentives: 11mm + hr (hit) bonuses

for the "not sounding like a douche" incentives, i offer my services to the cardinals for a mere 50k per year.

i should write contracts for the cards. think of how much we could have saved on marquis if we'd had a "not sounding like a douche" clause...