Now, a word from J.D. Drew on the Yadier Molina suspension

[While I'm minimally connected to the internet: a guest post dictated just kind of whenever, courtesy of J.D. Drew, who was an okay outfielder for the Cardinals. Full-sized posts return Monday, when I have a full-sized computer for the first time in two months.]

Guys, I'm not--I don't think they--okay, okay. It was a pretty good game for the St. Louis Cardinals yesterday. Albert Pujols hit then ball really far, and it's pretty good when he does that. As he ages it seems like he should eventually start hitting home runs as a bigger chunk of his offensive value, like, since he can't run without wincing and he doesn't really hit the ball to the opposite field anymore, and periodically I guess it seems like he's going to start doing that. It kind of has, but not really, which is okay--after bouncing between 33-ish and 40-ish percent for a while it's up past 50% this year. Which, I guess people were hoping it wouldn't happen with the same amount of home run value as usual and less of everything else, hehe. 

Then there was Kyle Lohse, oh, yeah! Since June his control has still been kind of great, like, he's not walking anybody, but he's also stopped striking anybody out, and with that has come a really high slugging percentage. If his comeback means he's just an average pitcher again that's still great news, but the Cardinals as we knew them in April and May were kind of predicated on some outstanding pitching performances from Kyle Lohse and Kyle McClellan, who yesterday managed to combine for a quality start. Getting the real Chris Carpenter back and adding Edwin Jackson is actually a pretty dece strategy for replacing that production, but I guess we'll see what happens. 

So I think I got assigned this post because your blog guy wanted to make a contrast between my kinda-thereness and Yadier Molina's five game suspension, which sucks pretty bad. Molina got all intense and now the Cardinals only have two catchers on their roster. Obviously if Yadier Molina gets suspended for five games every 900 it's not a big deal, like, not even for people who think in terms of big and small deals. 

But what does that do? Did the Cardinals win yesterday because of Yadier Molina getting suspended? Is Albert Pujols's wrist safe because Jason Motte threw at somebody else? This all seems kind of dumb--kind of outside the game of baseball, like when hockey stops and everybody starts fighting and the officials, I don't know what they're called, all just kind of stand there even though the benefits seem unclear to the fighting teams and the whole thing is clearly against the rules and if you just suspended the next 10 guys who fought for 10 games, bam, no fighting.

What I'm saying is that you guys--who, thanks for valuing defense and on-base percentage and all that, 50 bWAR is super nice--have questioned a million things that were seen in years past as clearly important to some semi-understood momentum component of baseball: The bunt, stealing bases willy-nilly, mustaches. Being a baseball-hardass and players policing the game seems like it could be another one of those things, maybe. I don't know.