The Out of Town Openish Thread

Morning, all. I hope you're having a really lovely Independence Day weekend; for our UK brethren I hope you're enjoying a very nice High Treason Day weekend. Either way, I'm sure we can all agree it was nice to see the St. Louis Cardinals end their rather ugly skid of losing yesterday afternoon, right? Of course we can! Also, we can probably all also agree it would have been even nicer to see them do it in more convincing fashion than struggling to scratch out a scant pair of runs against the lowly Padres. Beggars, however, can rarely be choosers, and considering the scarcity of runs the last week, I think we fit fairly comfortably in the beggars category, if only for the moment.

I'm out of town at the moment, celebrating the birth of our nation -- hmm, perhaps I shouldn't use that exact phrasing? -- in the wilds of Eastern Missouri, hanging out at a lakey, woodsy sort of cabin, wondering to myself how likely it is Jason Voorhees will wander along and kill us all before we leave this place. I'm also regretting my decision to come on this expedition, as I managed to wander into a nest of chiggers yesterday morning, and am currently trying not to flay the skin from my lower legs due to this truly maddening itch. I hate nature.

Anyhow, the connectivity here is almost complete shit, and I'm having a rather tough time getting this particular post written. I apologise; I didn't expect to have so much trouble of this sort. (I'm working on my third draft at the moment; the first never saved at all, and the second auto-saved after the first paragraph and then not again, refusing to manually save and forcing me to start over from the beggars/choosers bit.

So I'm going to keep this brief. It's an early game today, and Sunday mornings are generally slow, and I have to imagine there are at least a few hangovers being nursed right now (I managed to avoid that particular pitfall, wonder of wonders), so let's just treat this as an open discussion thread, shall we?

I will leave this here: as of this moment, Jason Heyward is actually ahead of Shelby Miller in WAR for the season, 2.1 to 1.9. Well, by FanGraphs WAR, anyway; Baseball-Reference still has Shelby with a comfortable lead, due to his remarkably luck in suppressing runs this year despite peripherals that suggest he is very unlikely to continue at such a pace. Given that truth of the moment, is everyone feeling better about the offseason deal than they were, say, a month ago? Or has your opinion remained relatively unchanged, either for good or for ill, in spite of the small sample size shenanigans going on with both players' productions?

And at this point, considering where Jason Heyward sits, roughly on pace for a 4.0-4.5 win season, how are you feeling about a potential long-term extension? How many years, and how much money, would you be willing to go to ensure the big right fielder is anchoring this Cardinal team for the foreseeable future?

Beyond those questions, feel free to discuss amongst yourselves. Possible topics include: how badly we need a new first baseman, which outfielder(s) should be on the trade block, considering the somewhat absurd depth of the positions, and the fact Carlos Martinez is awesome.

Okay, I'm done trying to type on this phone. The VEB editor was not made for this. Enjoy the rest of your weekend, everybody, and let's hope the Redbirds can grab the sweep today and, more importantly, get the offense jump-started before they head into Wrigley for what feels like a much more important series than it probably actually is.

Oh, one last thing: it sure would be interesting to see what would happen if Tommy Pham could stay healthy, wouldn't it?