Pan fried

where did our pitching go?  We've turned into a pitching and defense team since 2004 and when the pitching is as bad as it has been this series that spells trouble.  The 14 game excursion was frustrating but our offense did score 11 runs this series.  Not an immense amount but when you score 7 runs and don't win the game...well thats unaccpetable.

I was exceedinly concerned about the offense when Pujols went down. They've calmed some of my worries about that.  There is certainly less room for error but we can still be an above .500 ballclub if our pitching rights itself.  I'm not asking for a staff of aces but some quality starts would be great.  Maybe it's just a lull but the combination of an injured(?) Carpenter and the other four pitching poorly (or maybe just falling back in line with their peripherals - regression to the mean can be a real B***H) our SP looks anemic.  The bullpen is going to feed off good starting pitching but they aren't free of blame either.

He's played 3, count 'em, 3 games at first this year. How can you say he sucks? He's not Albert, but he's not Dick "Stone Hands" Stewart, either.

As far as the team goes, panic hasn't set in yet; heart palpitations, yes, but not panic.

experience of uncertainty and ordinariness kind of exhilarating, actually.  I get a reminder of what most of my life as a baseball fan was like.  And a little pressure cannot be a bad thing.  I'll bet for all the agonizing TLR is doing right now, he's having the time of his life.

And can it be a bad thing to have a little pressure on the front office to question the steps they've taken? To try some different theories about pitching-staff construction, etc.?

Monday night at the game I made the comment(early on) that the cards seemed determined to win. They were playing aggressive. Rolen's baserunning in the first was excellent going to 2nd on the throw to third and then advancing when the 3rd basemen threw the ball into centerfield. However, when the reds took the lead in the ninth, you could see the team deflate. I am not trying to strike up an izzy bashing session, but I believe that loss set the tone for the rest of series. the Cards look very lethargic in the last two games. It makes you wonder what the outcome would have been if that first game lead would have held up. For one thing we would still have at least a two game lead in the division.

Last season I did a study of MLB similar to the NCAA football BCS. I wanted to see if certain teams rode a favorable schedule to a bloated record and vice versa. Without getting into too much detail, I factored in the winning percentage for the entire year, plus the record 5 games before & after each series, and at the end of the year came up with a number somewhere between 960 and 1040 (with a few outliers).

For reference, last year's STL team faced an average Challenge Rating (CR) of 968, meaning that they tended to face more teams below .500 or decent teams playing poorly right before/after their series with the Cardinals. Some of the swing is attributed to the fact that the Cardinals didn't have to play against themselves, but basically they got somewhat lucky with their schedule. That said, the Cardinals had the second-easiest draw (and just ahead of the Padres, Brewers and White Sox); the New York Yankees had by far the easiest schedule, with a CR of 937. OTOH, the Rangers, Nationals and Blue Jays had the toughest roads to travel (1066, 1064, & 1061, respectively).

(Side note: this system reaffirmed my notion that the Cubs always seem to get it up for strong teams playing well. When going against REAL competition (CR >1.28, basically every time the Cards showed up), they were 16-8; everbody else: 63-75.)

So far this season (games thru 5/31), St. Louis has had a criminally easy schedule, with a CR of 882 (Cincinnati is 2nd in the NL with a 941). Early in the season, it's fairly easy to get wild numbers out of this system, but still ... They had a very easy first month (817), followed up with a decent May (941) - and they took advantage of it.

Combining this CR system with Win Probability Added, you really see that the Cardinals are Pujols, Carpenter, and not much else. An offense w/o Albert that is basically holding us back, a starting staff (minus CC) that only works well when backed by a top notch attack, and a bullpen that gets the job done on most nights, despite a dead-weight anchor at the end. I'm not really harping on anyone individually, but collectively they're just a .500 team waiting for Albert to do something spectacular to save the day or for Carp to pitch a gem.

that we are about 6 games out of the wild card with a few weeks to go in the season.  Then we can catch fire, stay hot, and win the stupid ass wild card which seems to be the very best way to go far in the postseason.  This way we don't have to worry about that whole "season" thing like TLR does.  Then we will have a 'second chance' to beat those teams well ahead of us in the standings one last time.  And you know what?  We'll beat 'em.  Because we'll have nothing to lose and because we didn't spend all our energy on trying to win a pennant like teams used to have to.

...hey it could work...  

One of the best posts of the year.  This kind of writing makes this blog my 1st stop on the internet.

If Rolen hadn't let the ball through his legs, and Isrighausen hadn't pitched that one floater, we'd all be talking about how great they've done so far.

I know those are two big ifs, but I agree that we don't need to be wringing our hands and gnashing our teeth just yet.

...but of our remaining June schedule:

3 Brewers
3 Pirates
3 Rockies
1 Kansas City

Record should be: 7-3

3 White Sox
3 Indians
3 Detroit
Record hopefully: 4-6

11-9 over the rest of the month.  I could live with that.  Those AL matchup records could go back up if El Hombre returns.

week has made me reconsider using Reyes and Wainwright as trade bait.  These two have performed very well during thier short careers at the Show.  

Wainwright showed again last night why he should be considered "untouchable",  The two innings he pitched last night were not mop-up duty.  He came in against a team that wanted to embarass the cardinals and slammed the door shut on thier offense. The kid is the Holy Baseball Trinity: young, cheap, and good.

Reyes has performed well and is a very good 4-5 starter.  Instead of trading any of these two we should involve another team by trading 2 of our #3 starters (mulder and marquis) for some prospects and flip those prospects for a real #2 starter.  Schmidt? Willis?

Unless the Birds can get an extension for Mulder before the season is over, we won't throw enough money at him to resign him anyway.  

Not good news in the Grimsley affadavit.....Albert's personal training is apparently named...

If you think they are clean at this point, they probably aren't.

and start to put the pieces together.  If he is the name redacted, then Albert is about to feel the questions rain down all over him.

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Last October 20, one day after the Cardinals were eliminated from the NLCS, Pujols was on the phone with Chris Mihlfeld, a Kansas City trainer who works with Pujols in the offseason. "Chris," he said, "we need to work on my situational hitting." Situational hitting? Pujols had just finished a season in which he hit .329 with runners in scoring position.

"But that's Albert," Mihlfeld says. "He is always going to find a reason to be unhappy with his game because he believes if he does not do that he's going to level off. He doesn't want to level off."

Hard to say what would be wrong with leveling off at Pujols' numbers over his first five seasons: He hit .332 with an average of 40 home runs and 124 RBIs. But Pujols wanted to be a better situational hitter, so he made that a focus of his offseason.

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