Playing Guaranteed-Moneyball with the 2012 Cardinals

And came across this.

I think the worst thing that happened during that era derived from the growing tension between the front office and the field level. A young man named Doug Jennings, who had outstanding minor-league translations (especially in OBP) was put on the 25-man roster. Tony La Russa apparently took the position that you can force me to have him, but you can’t force me to play him. Jennings was on the big club’s roster for parts of four seasons, and never accomplished anything; but it is hard to accomplish anything when in four seasons you get 323 plate appearances. A precious few men can still be productive with scant and irregular play, but most cannot (that’s an analytic fact). The needless barriers between modern and old-time cost Doug Jennings a career—probably a pretty good career.

that the signing of one of them would make it prohibitive to also sign the other?

“Theriot and Patterson are below replacement level, but not a long way below replacement level.”

If this is true, then replacement level has no meaning, or at least “replacement” means someone off the street, not a generic AAA minor leaguer. Patterson is the worst player in baseball. Theriot isn’t much better.

We blow a 5 run lead in the ninth in a game where a win would put us within a game of the playoffs, and then lose to the Cubs the next day. I’m glad I haven’t been on VEB for this.

Here’s a fun take-down of the Cubs season from Yahoo sports (also, handily, linked in the sidebar).

Highlights:

Tyler Colvin (…) Your OPS plus is 42. Forty-two! Juan Pierre’s is 83. If you were twice as good as you are now, you’d still be as useless as Juan Pierre. Juan makes outs for a living. The good news is, you’ve now played in 217 big league games, that’s enough to qualify for the MLB dental plan. Do everyone a favor. Use it.

Dempster (…) I’m not sure how Zambrano gets an unending stream of crap thrown at him, while you don’t pitch any better and people act like you’re Roy Halladay around here. You’re just as overpaid as Zambrano is, but you never get any crap. It’s not like you ruined the 2008 season by walking seven guys in game one of the playoffs or anything. You should be very proud of extending your streak of allowing more hits than the season before to four, and the fact that your strikeout-to-walk ratio continues to get worse every year. But you just keep kissing up to the media and maybe nobody will notice. On the bright side you didn’t break anything trying to get to the handshake line after a game this year. So there’s that.

Starlin Castro (…). I almost excused you from this today. Almost. You son, are good at baseball. You were born to hit. You were also born to turn routine grounders into balls that rattle around the first base dugout, but you can work on that. You’re going to get 200 hits and you’re only 21. (…) The reason I can’t let you out is because that one Sunday night you let your mind wander for three full innings and you committed the worst sin any player … nay, any human can make. You made Bobby Valentine’s observations correct. I can’t forgive that of anyone.

I want us to either sign Pujols and play the youngsters (Greene, Descalso, Ryan Jackson, whatever) – OR – I want us to trade for a real starting shortstop. I think that Furcal has shown us that his arm strength is still there, but not much else is.