Hey, everybody. Please forgive the late and rushed nature of this, but I've had a bit of an emergency come up today and I'm still dealing with it.
To review:
--Kind of cool to see David Freese hit his first home run. It's looking more and more as if the Cardinals are willing to let Mark DeRosa walk after the season, in which case they're going to need an internal candidate to step up. Freese would appear to be the lead guy at the moment, with Brett Wallace gone and Allen Craig in limbo and Joe Mather not really a third baseman.
--I hate the Cincinnati Reds. I also kind of hate the city of Cincinnati just in general, but that's a separate issue.
--It's a shame the Cards couldn't have tried to pry Homer Bailey away from the Reds when his stock was at its lowest. He still has a great arm and looks as if he may be putting it together. He isn't a finished product yet, by any means, but he's also still only 23 years old and extremely talented. A nice lesson to be had here in not moving talent just because it doesn't come along as quickly as you might have hoped.
-- I don't ever, ever, ever want to see Joel Pineiro face Jay Bruce again. Ever. I suppose we all knew Jo-El would eventually have a start like that, where he just couldn't keep the ball in the park, but I also thought when it happened it would be because he couldn't keep the ball down. Instead, the exact opposite happened: all the home runs Pineiro gave up last night came on pitches at the knees or below. I wonder if there's a lesson here as well, something about hitters becoming too comfortable when all of your pitches are in the same area. Or then again, maybe Jay Bruce is just good at golfing the ball out of the park.
That's all I've got, folks. Take care and I'll have an overflow thread up sometime around 7:30; I'm not expecting a huge traffic day here, as the doldrums of clinching and seeing the B team have set in.
Oh, a playlist. Here.
"All You Need is Hate" - The Delgados
"My Funny Valentine" - The Gerry Mulligan Quartet
"Hard Candy" - Rialto
"Winning" - Emily Haines and the Soft Skeleton