merry month of may

it’s a long season, and i am a little afraid to get my hopes up; not sure if this team can keep it all together through September so we can play in October.
but it’s been fun to watch so far…

and welcome back lboros- it’s good to hear from the godfather of VEB

Glad to have you back man, and great take on the game

No, not the Cards 16-7 record….. it’s an lboros post. Sweet.

Double digit walks, 2 hit batters, 5 WP’s, etc………. I would have been very upset had the Cards lost last night. Sigh….. hope the Cards find their hitting strokes in timely situations. Glad to see RA have a late inning hit.

Go Cards!

Is everyone else getting page load errors on Future Redbirds?

to come back to earth a bit, but I’m hoping the bullpen settles down some as well.

some great curve balls last night but lboros talked about sliders mostly. I guess I just never learned for sure when a curvball becomes a slider.

At the end of the game they said:

“And the Cardinals win it on a nightmarish pitching peformance from the Nationals — 10 walks, 1 hit by pitch, 4 wild pitches and a balk.”

That really really is atrocious. Glad our guys weren’t too “agressive”

The team has been great, but the defense is what worries me the most so far. We are leading major league baseball in errors and are 6th worst in UZR. I don’t think we are this bad, but we may not be “plus”.

Schumaker seems like he’s doing well, then I check out his UZR in my latest blog and it is a -4. There is still time to learn, but this is something to watch.

Great analysis lb. I especially liked the pitching review of the recent Aprils. You should try this blogging thing more often. If you can learn your capital letters, you may have a future in this business. :)

paragraph of the WaPo’s story about last night’s game. The first sentence is brilliant:

Washington Nationals pitchers threw 173 baseballs in the general direction of home plate last night. During a 3-hour, 18-minute insult to accuracy, Washington’s pitchers walked 11 batters, pegged two and threw four wild pitches. All of 53 percent of their pitches went for strikes. Among the many that didn’t, some bounced 10 feet in front of home plate, like John Stockton bounce passes. One sailed behind Albert Pujols. One actually bounced through a batter’s legs, a hockey shot through the five-hole.

As if we would expect anything less from the MUST-READ 10@10:

Manager Tony La Russa blew his chance at a record Wednesday night in Atlanta. His starting lineup that night was the same lineup he used April 11 against Houston, according to the media relations staff.

There goes his shot at using 162 lineups in 162 games.

player from the 2005 draft to play for the Cardinals…

Rasmus, Greene, Boggs, Stavinoha,……..? I’m missing one. HELP I’m missing one! runs away crying

and topped off with an lboros post no less! it looked like the team would be very shaky after the pirates series to start the year, but after battling the Cubs so well, it looks like we might be the real deal. good to see Boggs pitching so well, and Ankiel to start getting out of his slump and/or bad habits (stop swinging at everything, Dicky Rick!)

what a loaded question…but did anyone else get annoyed when he kept calling Greene the #1 pick in the 2005 draft? Even Dan was saying it for awhile before one of them finally just said “1st round pick”.

I wonder when that houstoncardinal guy resurfaces? Great job of pinch-blogging LB. From the emphasis in your post I take it you had two major points: Maple Street Press 2009 Annual and The Show, interesting.

Contrary to popular belief CBSSports does have a baseball writer, and he talked to Mo. We get some insights into the Cardinals rehab regiment for Carp.

Keep the Sudafed coming: Carpenter, who suffered a torn oblique muscle in his April 14 start, isn’t expected back before mid-June. The Cardinals just hope he won’t be sidelined much longer than that. They figure they’ll know more on a timetable next week, when they come home to play Philadelphia and Pittsburgh during a brief, four-game stand, and Carpenter is re-evaluated. The next step in his recovery will be determined from there. “Right now it’s a situation where he’s healing,” Mozeliak says. “Don’t cough too much, and don’t sneeze.”

So the medical staff has told him no cigar bars and avoid pepper at all costs. He’ll be back to his old self in no time. (and by old self I mean one pitch away from serious injury) CBS also has this guy apologizing to Ryan Franklin. Anybody else want to join him?

the cardinals are
ahead by three and a half
let’s have a good may!

for the first time since July 17, 2007.

Let’s hope that number never shrinks.

i don’t think the rotation can pitch nearly as well as it has the first month. pineiro will not continue to pitch this well nor will lohse. the cardinals have had pretty good luck with (insert pitcher here), but you can’t expect that to continue either. eventually, boggs/walter/whomever is going to get bombed in consecutive starts at some point. it’s going to interesting to see how the cardinals respond should that happen.

the x-factor per se is the performance of todd wellemeyer and chris carpenter. if wellemeyer can find his groove from early last year, he could easily offset the drops in performance that will surely come from pineiro and lohse. and if carpenter is back, that prevents boggs or walters from getting shelled and having their confidence shaken. however, if carpenter comes back and pitches at a high level, boggs is still making quality starts, and wellemeyer still hasn’t found his groove, do you send wellemeyer back to the ’pen and have boggs continue starting?

That’s a shame.

Game 5 of the 2006 W.S. is on right now on MLB Network

That’s really unfortunate.

I don’t know what happened to his stuff over the offseason, but it just seems more electric now. He looks like he could be a middle of the rotation type guy if everything works out.

Greene’s stance is a lot funkier than I expected, I hope he jacks a dong because I bet it looks really cool when he really connects.

I really hop Welly has a good game tonight, the Nats have a tough pitcher on the mound. I’ll be reasonably happy if he keeps this game close because there is always the Nats BP.

How many more starts does he get before he comes down with a mysterious injury? Does Mortenson get the call? or does Welley get the Kip Wells treatment and be allowed to still get 25 starts?

and i noticed that big z has a better batting average than 6 of the cubs starting position players in today’s game

Someone brought up a Larry Walker trade in one of the fanposts recently. I wonder if maybe Zimmerman could be that for the Cards.

Zimmerman for Motte + Freese?

Young and good players for a very good 3B w/ a long term deal.

Thoughts?

later guys

From the P-D:

2B Skip Schumaker

3B Joe Thurston

1B Albert Pujols

LF Chris Duncan

RF Ryan Ludwick

CF Rick Ankiel

C Jason La Rue

SS Tyler Greene

P Todd Wellemeyer

that group has an average OBP of .404 for 2009… I was very surprised to see that Ank’s OBP is higher than Luddy’s

If so which ones do you listen too?

The only one I listen now is the one off the ESPN MLB page w/ Eric Karabell and Peter Pascarelli

From everything2.com

maybe I should have done a fanpost, but oh well.

The Gashouse Gang is the nickname given to the 1934 St. Louis Cardinals, a ragtag group of major league baseball players if there ever was one.

There are two commonly circulated origins of the name:

One story says that the team couldn’t afford more than one uniform per player. After a particularly grimy game against the Boston Braves, the team boarded a train up to Brooklyn for an early doubleheader, and had no time to launder their uniform. The next morning, as the team arrived in the hotel lobby, one newswriter claimed they resembled the gangs of the Gashouse district in Lower Manhattan. The name stuck to describe the scrappy, reckless play of the team.
The other story says that Frank Graham, a reporter for the New York Sun, was talking with Leo Durocher about the team. Graham commented half-jokingly that the team might be good enough to play in the American League. Durocher responded, “They wouldn’t let us play in the American League. They’d say we were just a bunch of gashouse players.” Graham, and eventually the rest of baseball, used the name from then on.
Whether or not either story is true is irrelevant; the name was certainly apt. Featuring notorious hardasses Durocher, Burleigh Grimes, and Ducky Medwick, the team also had the dugout pleasure of:

The Dean brothers, Dizzy and Daffy, both a tad kooky, plus similarly named Dazzy Vance;
Fast-talking catcher Frankie Frisch, who spent hours before the game learning intimate details about the opposing batters, to distract them come game time;
Bill Walker, Jack Rothrock, and Jesse Haines, the resident poker players on the team, and often found in the dugout playing cards;
and a smorgasbord of walking nicknames: Tex Carlton, Spud Davis, Ripper Collins, Flint Rhem, Pepper Martin, Kiddo Davis, Buster Mills, and Red Worthington.
Despite the team’s general lack of presentability, they managed to scrap together a fantastic season, going all the way to the World Series and defeating the vaunted Detroit Tigers in seven games.

MLB network follows the 2006 world series with a look back at the 1985 W.S.

Is he the latest victim of the flu bug?