I think one of the most important questions to answer right now is who do we want to be managing the All Star game next year?

I am not entirely sure how the All Star game manager is decided if the current manager of a team leaves that team or league so I am assuming the WS managers will be returning to their respective clubs.

To you who presents the best option?  Who should get to manager the NL on our turf?

Torre or Manuel?

Who would you rather see manage the AL?

Francona or Maddon?

Take a vote!

Schedule

The Cardinals open the season on April 6th at home vs the Pirates for 4 games followed by Houston for 3 with no off days planned during that homestand.

They close out the regular season on Oct 4th vs the Brewers.

We play 7 in Chitown and 9 at home with the Cubbies.

They only have 2 trips with more than 2 cities or 7 games which is nice.

Lastly IL play will consist of: Royals Tiggers, Twinkies at Busch and going to Reyesland and KC

Beyond the Box Score did an analysis of this years CY award in both the AL and NL Link and used a formula to assign points to each pitcher based on typical "voting" categories.  Not necessarily the best categories to evaluate a pitcher by but what categories are most likely to be used by voters when choosing the award.

The formula is W*6-L*2+SV*2.5+SO/12+SHO+(5/9-ERA/9)*IP then 12 bonus points are added if your team is in first place.

BTBS only looked at pitchers with over 10 wins so Lohse, Looper and Wellemeyer from the Cards.  I started out wondering where Wainwright would fall if he had 10 wins and ended up calculating the score for all 5 of our main starters and some of our main bullpen arms.

Here are the points:

Lohse 100
Wellemeyer 94
Wainwright 79
Looper 76
Franklin 70
Perez 39
Pineiro 29
Springer 28
Izzy 26
Thompson 25
KMac 17

KMac is hurt by having one save, holds not counting and his high loss number compared to low wins.  I do find it funny though that Pineiro has been just as "good" in the eyes of voters as Springer just because one is a starter and one is a reliever. 

In the end it is just a neat little chart showing where we rack and stack.

If you have other names I can plug them into my spreadsheet or you can do it yourself and post them here.

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=3545338

Baseball Umpires and Owners have reached a deal to allow instant replay for boundary calls (fair/foul, homer/not homer)  I would assume all calls from now on will be fair/no homer to allow the play to unfold and then get overturned similar to the fumble rules in the NFL.

What is your take on this?  I can see this is a good thing and a bad thing.  As long as it is limited to close plays and not used consistently for balls and strikes I don't see it as a bad thing at all.

EDIT:  More information about it http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/columns/story?columnist=kurkjian_tim&id=3546044

This column has the actual implementation that is going to happen.  There will be a War Room that has all the video feeds available from both teams for the game.  That room will feed them to the Umpire reviewing the feed.  Replays can only be called by an Umpire, and only for Home Run call disputes, NOT for a ball landing on the foul line.  At least 1 Umpire will remain on the field at all times.

With the news that Piniero will likely miss his next scheduled start, and knowing that if he does hit the DL they can retroactive it to his last start, which leaves him eligible for his next turn through the rotation (thus he only misses one Saturday by hitting the DL).

If Joel does hit the DL that opens a roster spot.  The big question is who starts for him?  And also who fills the spot until then and after then.  The obvious starters are Reyes and Pairisi, but what about Boggs, Garcia, etc?  It would use up an option for some of the others which might not be a good thing.  What about Thompson?  So little has been heard about his status that it makes me wonder what he is doing.

For the bullpen arm before and after the start do you think they activate Izzy? 
Jimenez?  Motte probably isn't ready, but Worrell might be.  Lots of options and it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

Another option is to go a man short in the pitching staff for a few games and call up a bench player, Mather, Barden, etc.

So what is your take?  How should this roster spot be handled for the next 10 days?

Since everyone seems to be wanting the 2007 version of gameday I wanted to give you to tools to "build your own" links for every game.

Today's game should be the following:

http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/gameday/y2007/gd.html?2008_04_03_colmlb_slnmlb_1&brand=mlb

If you look at this link you will see 2 key elements, first is the date, second is the teams.  To make a working link you must change those fields to match the game you want.

Team Names are an oddity as well.  Notice we are not stl but are in fact sln (st louis national league).  For cities with two teams you usually find the use of A and N (NYA and NYN I beleive are the Yanks and Mets).

If you find an odd name please post it.

Teams I know for sure are:
mil=Brewers
chn=Cubs
cin=Reds
pit=Pirates
hou=Astros

col=Rockies

In exchange for Fukudome.  Cardinals GM John Mozeliak said "Fukudome will help our struggling offense and will fill a key gap in our lineup, at the same time Wainwright was just taking away starts from Anthony Reyes and I really wanted to see him in the rotation this year"

Edit: I changed the title so as not to confuse people browsing the archives or who just saw it this morning and didn't have enough coffee.

With our currently injured starters our rotation will be very different through out the year.  What do you guys think of our chances as people come back?

Continue reading this post »

So with the newest addition I think now would be a good time to look at what the projected roster is shaping out to be.

Continue reading this post »