Some Cardinals-Cubs Palate Cleansers

For your let's-get-out-of-that-game-thread-forever pleasure, and my Intranetwork Synergy Initiatives™, some SB Nation St. Louis features from this week worth their Friday afternoon links:

1. Legopiece Theater: Dugout Abbey returns with an episode in which late night talk show host Adam Wainwright welcomes Chris Carpenter back to the rotation and does not have his best on-air performance.

2. Yours truly gets confused about who Shelby Miller is, exactly.

As for the actual Chris Carpenter, I was pretty happy about his performance—he was in the zone and didn't look very much like a guy who hasn't pitched in months and wasn't supposed to. The Cardinals' rotation is crowded with difficult-to-evaluate starters who might be difference-makers down the stretch, which has made the Carpenter return, already unexpected, almost impossible to contextualize in terms of the Cardinals' ability to actually hold on to their almost-postseason spot. Friday afternoon was a pleasant reminder that Carpenter could be something more than that.

As for Fernando Salas, today might have dinged my credentials as a Bullpen Prognosticator.