As you read this, if you're reading it Thursday morning or afternoon, I'm on a plane bound for St. Louis or momup's car bound for Springfield. That means it's time for our ever-irregular look at the other content you might be missing if your VEB experience involves tunnel-visioning the main blog. Such as:
- On SB Nation I tore myself from wall-to-wall Rams coverage long enough to take a look at the largest contracts on the 2011 St. Louis Cardinals. My hope (and fear) is that a month or two from now this will be, relatively speaking, a nostalgic look at a time when baseball players didn't make very much money at all and St. Louis hadn't been renamed Pujols Valley. After they extend Pujols—I'm going to be optimistic, and stop using if—I fully expect the Cardinals Hall of Fame to look like an El-Hombrefied version of the Biff Tannen Museum.
- Speaking of Albert Pujols, in the fanposts section tarakas uses two similar-player lists to arrive at some idea of how Albert Pujols might age. For these players the edge of the table seemed to be around the age-35 season, which leaves me hoping Pujols's agents are benchmarking the Alex Rodriguez contract's AAV, more than its length. Check out the comments section for some great discussion on the topic.
- After the post-season fanposts trough things seem to be picking up again. A few days ago Aranathor put together the 2010 League Minimum All-Star Team, which features three Cardinals (and will need, after Albert Pujols converts Laclede's Landing into a stately pleasure-dome, to feature several more.) And last week Solanus assembled a fascinating All-Star Team of his own. The stipulations: One player chosen for each year, and each team had to be represented by one player. There's also this crosspost from Cardinal70, a Cardinal Christmas Carol. If you read this blog, you're in its target-market.
- And if you want to be really depressed, Cards Fan in Chitown offered us a comprehensive analysis of why Brendan Ryan must start at shortstop for the St. Louis Cardinals. I like the idea, but I'm not sure we'd be able to pry him from the Mariners...
New episodes of Viva El Birdos resume tomorrow morning, at their usual timeslot.