i dont see the problem with playing good baseball and being in the race. so there are a number of holes in the team, but at least they hustle and play a hard nine. look, at detroit they have almost zero hustle on that team, and our team full of hustle should’ve won that series.

it seems like you’re suggesting that the cards just give up this season. but why not just play your hardest and see what happens. that seems to be the feel of this years ball club, and frankly its been a lot of fun to watch so far.

I guess I’ll just start w/ the fact that Izturis and Looper are free agents and Adam Kennedy and Joel Pineiro are signed through next year.

Of course you notice that you traded Ludwick and Lohse and got nothing in return.

I guess that’s all I’ll deal with but I’m not quite ready to give up on the season just yet. The last 2 games were bad losses, to be sure, but I’m still not ready to go into full rebuilding mode.

First of all, I don’t see how you can argue that we should trade Ryan Ludwick. I will admit, I was very skeptical of him at first, but I think he has proven himself. He was derailed earlier in his career with a multitude of injuries, and having finally recovered from them, he is playing to his potential. Ludwick is 7th in the NL in OPS so far this season, and he also has 143 TB and 16 HR in just 275 plate appearances. He has provided power to the lineup, which is something we have severely lacked this season, and I just don’t see how you can justify trading him based on 37 at bats. If we traded every player that had a slight slump, our team would be in shambles.
Also, I really don’t see how you can justify trading Lohse. He has an ERA of 3.94, a WHIP of 1.29, and he only has 24 BB. Although his strikeout numbers may be a little low, he is issuing very few walks, and he is winning games. Until Lohse’s 9-2 record starts to worsen, there is really no good reason to trade him, especially when you are only 4.5 games back before the all star break.
It seems like you are ready to throw the season away based on a few ugly losses, and I feel I am speaking for most of the VEB readers when I say that I am very far away from giving up on this team. Don’t forget that we are just reaching the halfway point, and we are only 4.5 games behind the Cubs, the team that for the past 100 years has mastered the art of choking. We have had a few stupid losses, such as the one that came tonight on a game winning walk, but for the majority of the season we have been playing very solid baseball. Considering the number of injuries that has plagued our team lately, I would actually say that we have done a good job of staying in the race.

at least on maybe getting the wild card. The Brew Crew are just hot now….I don’t think they will be that much better than us the 2nd half of the season. It just depends on if they pick up a good starter via a trade…which they might do.

As for us….it will depend on if Mo will put his foot down at some point and tell Tony that Duncan needs to be in the minors and if he can somehow get us bullpen help. But will he do it? A lot of other factors include Pujols staying healthy and getting Wainwright back ASAP…...but if we keep loosing games like we have the past couple of days I will be in the same boat as you are KeepOnRolen. Mo needs to try and do SOMETHING soon….the bullpen is in shambles and he can’t just cover his eyes and hope they turn it around. A couple of moves need to be done quickly before the ship really sinks.

a very valuable piece, an .860 OPS kind of guy. He’s not a 1.100 OPS guy, as he was in April-May, and he’s not a .730 OPS guy like he has been in June. Every player has slumps, and like duncan and ankiel he’s obviously got something of an awful one going on right now (great timing, dude!), but you don’t just dump a guy w/30+ HR power who is making $400K this year and is cost-controlled through his age-32 season.

If Mo decided Rasmus was ready and traded Luddy for Peralta or Cano and promoted Rasmus, that would be one thing, but you don’t just give up on a guy because he has 35 bad at bats, at least 3 of which were caught on the warning track. And he’s had a 22.8% line drive rate over the last 30 days, 21.9% over the last 14, even including this last rough week, so he’s just hitting into really bad luck.

The same goes for Duncan. The best thing to do with him at this point is to send him to AAA for the rest of this year and give him a shot to crack the ‘09 team out of spring training, since he’s obviously not just “in a slump”. But we won’t get anything for him by trading him, so it is just flat-out absurd to drop him unless someone wants to overpay.

As far as winning the wild card, the brewers have been overplaying lately; they will fall back a bit soon. We’ve been having bad luck lately and will pick it up. it’ll be a close (and fun) race, unless something awful happens.

the Minnesota Twins are on a 9 game winning streak. If this Cardinals team went on a 9 game winning streak, we’d have the best record in baseball.

Just something to think about.

KeepOnRolen is being a naysayer about the season just because his name isn’t as creative now that Rolen has been traded?

Kneejerk.

wow.

I’m all for statistical projections and scientific evaluation of a team. But to just pick out all the players that are doing better than expected and to label them as “playing over their head” and saying they will “regress to the mean” isn’t smart analysis, it’s lazy.

Ludwick is playing better than we could have hoped. But he was also a very good prospect when he was younger who was derailed by a great deal of injuries. Is it really that inconceivable that, after posting a 110 OPS+ last year (in his first completely healthy season while playing only part time) that he could jump to 125, 130, 135 OPS+? It would be pretty silly to trade our second-best hitter just because his success is unprecedented and then to watch him be a premiere outfielder for some other team for the next five or six years.

Wellemeyer is also a bit of a shock, but he’s also not getting the success from nowhere. His walk numbers are down significantly. I don’t think anyone would have told you Welley didn’t have great stuff—I remember watch him flounder for the Cubs bullpen back in 03-04-05 while throwing 95+. He’s got his command under control, perhaps at the expense of velocity. It’s helping quite a bit.

Regarding Chris Duncan—it’s just silly to a) cite his strikeout numbers as a reason for why he isn’t worth anything and b) to use last year as a 100% reliable sign of decline, considering he played the second half with an injury that eventually landed him on the DL and under the knife, is just silly. Last year his OPS in the first half was .927 and in the second half it fell to .677. I don’t know exactly what’s up with him this year, but it’s pretty clear he was affected by an injury last year in the beginning of his age 26 “decline phase.” In any case, it’s borderline idiocy to trade Duncan right now…you would just be selling low on a proven major league commodity. We get some crappy AA player for him and he goes off to wherever and resurrects his career next year. Great idea.

You say that there’s no way we could expect Looper to have an ERA around 4.00 right now, but that’s just not true. Look at his game log from 2007. He was riding a nice 4.12 ERA, then he got blown up on June 15 and promptly went on the DL. Healthy and in his second year of pitching in a rotation, is it really COMPLETELY UNFATHOMABLE that he’s be reproducing the success he had last year up until an injury?

Aside from all this stuff, I also find it interesting that in your 2009 model we have resigned Izturis, we received nothing back for Ludwick’s .945 OPS, we’re starting Ankiel in left despite his far superior arm to Schumaker’s in right, you’re willing to make assumptions about Tyler Johnson being healthy but not Carpenter, etc.

I think this whole thing is silly.

Anybody else wonder what next year’s potential roster has to do with the subject of this post? I appreciate the time and effort put in, but I think we could have a better discussion if the discussion was framed a little better.

I mean maybe that’s just what Buzz Bissinger would say.