Of course, if Mo decided to end the Cardinals’ participation in the draft, Albert may want to look elsewhere.

In that case I can breathe a sigh of relief!

says he’ll stick around if baseball lives up to his expectations.

Well that was not really my point. I think you are right in that if Rasmus and Wallace are hard working players Pujols would certainly like them. What I am saying however is that to have a competitive team for the next 5-6 years a lot will depend on devloping cheap talent at important (expensive) positions. CF and 3B certainly qualify as important positions, so if the Cards can find two cheap good options then they will be in great position to compete and pick up FA that will allow the team to stay good.

If next year Rasmus is a pretty good CF and Wallace is able to handle 3rd that would give us a cheap and young CF, 3B, Ace Starter, and Catcher. At CF and 3B alone we would save 20-25 million. That money could be spent on a really good SS, 2B, Starter, or Closer.

Not to mention Perez and Motte which might be just as important because having a good closer and setup man can cost $15 million easy.

That means that at CF, 3B, 2 Bullpen guys, and a Starting Pitcher (Wainwright is signed very reasonably) the Cardinals could be saving 30-40 million that can be spent else where on the team to fill gaps and holes that will come up.

A trillion is a thousand billions
A thousand is negligible compared to a billion (.0001%)
Therefore, a trillion and a billion are the same; at least, the difference is negligible

QED

Re-named it the “Tiki Theory”. In any case, there won’t be any theories putting 10-wins back on the board.

It states that teams will play better w/o their superstar, and with their superstar they never win anything of any significance. Eight seasons of Albert: 4 Division Crowns, 2 Penants, 1 World Series. They may win 10 seasons down the road after he’s gone, but immediately the team is not better w/o El Hombre.

to Gladiator.

It’s easy to put a relative price on guys like Moyer and Wakefield since they middle rung guys. But Albert is currently the best. What’s his price tag? And what happens to that price tag when he’s 33? 34? 35? 40?

I doubt he’d still be the best when he’s 40, so I think it’s muddier than the Moyer and Wakefield deals. Plus, Moyer’s not even with the Mariners anymore, so what happened and why couldn’t that happen with Albert? That’s basically a player option every year and I really don’t like those so much. It’s always a lose/lose for the team.

I forgot about not being able to use things like BA, OBP, OPS, etc. as qualifiers. That kind of throws a wrench in my idea. Even though I’d like to think we could trust Albert to know when to hang them up, having a “lifetime” contract without any qualifiers is certainly a lose/lose for the team.

Is it allowed to use something like “finishes in the top 10 (15) MVP voting” as a option trigger, or is that deemed another “quality” measure?

It is true that we don’t know what Albert will be worth when he is 40. However, IF you could use the quality triggers, then, if he’s not worth it, the option isn’t triggered. In addition, I would think such a contract would have modest increases (or maybe no increases) past some number of years.

and said, look, prince albert. we want you here. we want to win. but if we want to get top-flight players, we need you to take ($15M, $18M, insert your figure), so we can extend this guy at ($XXM)?

how am I now going to get rid of these imagined images of “unflattering images” that now adorn your body?

AHHHH! the inhumanity of it all.

Razzle 2 (or as I like to put it, NozzleDrozzle—-NBA Jam back in the day saying “Razzle Dazzle” sounded exactly like “Nozzle Drozzle” I swear), Pujols 3, Sir Walruston 4, Studwick 5, Richard Alexander 6……………this makes me happy, sorry Troy you aren’t as exciting as .337 .427 .530.

TJ Miller’s passed-out graffiti bit.

giving awkward ass-pats and neck squeezes at first base for that.

just kidding.

Personally, I had already seen the videos before the link was put up and besides, I thought the Wallace video was weird. it was talking about him taking grounders and then it showed Joe Mather (with locks a flowing) taking a grounder.

I also like how when it showed Albert hitting it said, “Albert Pujols: Cardinals Infielder”.

Maybe our whole move Albert to 2nd/3rd/wherever thing got them confused.

when they traded Doug Weight (and maybe Keith Tkachuk?). It was pretty well known that Weight was going to resign with the Blues after the season, but the difference here was there was no agreement. Just a player who really wanted to play for the Blues and a team who wanted to sign him as a free agent.

There was all kinds of talk about making it illegal to sign a free agent you had just traded away and stuff, but it never went anywhere since no one broke any rules.

Also, I’d like to say that any type of situation like the one presented above would first of all piss off all other teams to the point of not doing business with the Cardinals and secondly, I wouldn’t want to simply trust that someone is going to sign with us. Who to say he decides he’s tired of the whole thing and just doesn’t resign with the Cardinals? Then you’re shit outta luck since you’ve given all the power in the “relationship” to the player.

you can’t have these “gentleman’s agreements” (btw, if it’s a gentleman’s agreement, it’s usually illegal; the only reason not to write it down in a billion-dollar sport, is b/c it’s illegal), but you could have a limited explicit agreement to retain exclusive negotiating rights until the November date.

e.g., we trade the rights to pujols for July, Aug, sept, oct of 2011, but we retain the exclusive negotiating rights to resign him until the date other teams would have begun negotiating with him. that doesn’t require pujols to sign with us. it puts the receiving team on notice about what rights they have and don’t have. as long as pujols, the cards, and the receiving team all agree, it’s above-board and I would imagine legal, unless the CBA specifically prohibits retaining negotiation rights.

this is more academic than useful, since I imagine if pujols goes into ST in 2011 without an extension, we’ve lost most of our leverage. i would not want to try to negotiate in Nov. 2011.

and he was only a Cardinal for like 2 months.

but I think I finally see the utility in this twitter thing.

I guess Oquendo is leaving early to go manage the WBC, but I wouldn;t be surprised to see Warner as the TLR replacement.

IMO, Mac is letting LaRussa hang himself because of a friendship. LaRussa, in all of his faults, is as loyal as a mule when it comes to his friends and he won’t back down from this McGwire thing for some reason of another. I don’t know if he truly believes Mac was clean or if he believes that if he keeps saying he was clean then people are going to start believing it, either way it needs to stop and apparently McGwire is the only person who can stop it. But, he chooses to remain silent while LaRussa does what he does, which is protect his boys.

He’s a big autism awareness guy, right? “Re-sign with us or autism research doesn’t get this large sum of money”

we should run a test for lupus.

My name is Inigo Montoya…you killed my father. Prepare to die.

and to think, you went to school in Georgia…

quit making me give those recs!