i'm so easily manipulated. one comment from my dear friend at Twunch, and here i go, posting on the interbot again about the baseball i so dearly love. some updates.

we have moved again, this time within knox vegas to a house we bought. thanks to directv, we now have the mlb network for the first time in our lives, granting us perhaps 3 more games a year. since we have yet another kid on the way, we get to watch that much less, but it's nice to know it's there.

ok, the baseball. it's too early to do a season preview, and that's not really what this blog has been about from the start. let's just get back to the little blurbs all three of you who've read this blog all know and love.

as i type this, albert has hit his fourth homer of the young season, and the cards are sitting at a 5-2 record. here's hoping for another standard season from the mang, by which of course i mean another thor-like performance. we're currently tied with the fucking cubs for the lead of the nl central, but trust me, no matter what, they will find a way to fuck this up. it seems that we have at least three, and perhaps even four pitchers available to fill out our five man rotation. hell, even piniero has made me feel all giddy inside for the '09 season, though he too will manage to fuck that up, i think.

carp. if it's true, it's what i've been hoping for for two years. it's the reason i felt it worth starting to post again. it's the reason i still believe as only a man who still is amazed when a lottery ticket turns into nothing at all can believe. please, carp, please.

oh, and i went to church yesterday for the first time in several years. that's gotta help, right?

some thoughts on the new cards this year.

dennys reyes and trevor miller are both left handed. they will do. that is all.

khalil greene should prove that he is capable of sustaining his previous levels of offensive production, while creating only a slight decrease in infield defense as compared to izturis. he ma also show at least a touch of emotion while in st louis.

joe thurston will manage to look like a big leaguer and sign with someone else for way too much next season. he will then fail, but we will have got what we needed from him. well met, sir.

freese and barden will probably rotate out for their memphis equivalents (or troy glaus, should he prove not to be totalled) as the season progresses. they will show promise, but still need seasoning, which they will not really get.

colby rasmus will start somewhat slow on paper, but be an OPS force from day one.

there, the season preview i promised i wouldn't do. why you trust me, i'll never kow.

on second thought

this should prove to be an interesteing year for the cards. if we can just forget the mistake that is cesar izturis sooner rather than later, we may have a chance to see a real youth movement at busch. we already have the majority of our players on this side (only for a few more months, for me) of thirty, if memory serves. all of them are at least somewhat intriguing, so even if we aren't a contender, we could be seeing the future of our cardinals.

the missus left for st louis tonight; i expect her call to let me know she arrived safely any time now. i will be going tomorrow for a total of thirty-six hours or so before returning and getting back to the ol' vino slinging. ah well, at least i'll be able to stop by the stadium for a few minutes with jackthedamned.

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.

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.

looking forward

we're in first place in our division, yet, i'm already entertaining thoughts of next year... what does walt need to do in the offseason? a few thoughts from a newish fan...

rotation:
carp
serious pitching acquisition/healthy mulder (tbd this season)
reyes
wainwright
#5 guy better than weaver/ponson

i can even deal with suppan or marquis as the #5 guy, but we can't carry this many mediocre pitchers and expect good things come october 2007.

relievers:
replace flores
fill wainwright's spot competently
i'm not sure what izzy's contract length is, but i like keeping him as long as it doesn't cost us more than he's getting now ($12 mil this year, i think, or 13% of payroll?)

lineup
restructure and resign edmonds
a hard hitting left fielder (that isn't chris duncan) so we don't have to rely so much on edmonds' streaky bat
lose so, duncan, and jrod. i like them all, but we have to do better than this. if we have to keep one, make it jrod, who is getting better in the field and is better off the bench than the other two.
lose gollum and belliard, replace with a honest to god short stop
move eck to 2nd (his [all-american] college position)
keep yadi, but get a better hitting back up catcher than gary freaking bennett.

next off-season is also the time to start negociating future contracts with rolen, pujols, and carp.

perhaps it's time the secret weapon was our manager.

now that i've got this down, maybe the team will get back from the slide, get mad (not frustrated), and start kicking ass again.