Friday, March 30, 2007

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.

Friday, March 23, 2007

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.)

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

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