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Cardinals news and notes: Scoreboards, Sinkers, and Jimmy Ballgame

Busch Stadium will have a beautiful new scoreboard next year to broadcast all of the Hall of Fame speeches from non-Cardinals.

By Alex Crisafulli

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Jeff Curry-USA TODAY Sports

On Sunday Jenifer Langosch reported on her MLB blog that new HD LED videoboards will arrive next year at Busch Stadium.  Per Langosch:

As a result, the new main videoboard will be almost three times bigger in size, with twice the resolution and brightness of the old board. The out-of-town scoreboard will be about 2.5 times bigger, also with twice the resolution and brightness of the previous one.

"We'll be right up there with the best of them now," said Joe Abernathy, vice president of stadium operations for the Cardinals. "It's amazing how technology has evolved in 10 short years. Technology has progressed considerably since we put this in back in April 2006.

"But we did get upset actually when the Cubs had a better videoboard than us. Especially with how it ended [in the National League Division Series] and all they're doing now, we don't want to be sitting behind the Cubs in anything."

The Cardinals might handily lose all of the free agents to the Cubs but they're not going to lose the scoreboard wars without a fight.  Of course, this is actually great news.  I went to the Cardinals/Cubs season opener at Wrigley Field last April when the bleachers were still inoperable (not to mention the bathrooms), but the new scoreboard hovering over the outfield looked wonderful, even in a quaint, traditional park like Wrigley.  Related, I also went to Games 6 and 7 of the 2011 World Series - peak "rally squirrel" time.  Whenever the Rangers were making a pitching change the Busch Stadium scoreboard would fire up this 8-bit image of a squirrel doing some sort of shuffle which only consisted of two moves repeated over and over.  It wasn't good.  So yes, the sooner the Cardinals can replicate the Cubs in this area the better.

Here's what you missed yesterday at VEB:

Repertoires in review

  • Joe Schwarz broke down who throws the best sinker ball on the Cardinals' staff.  As of this writing, Carlos Martinez is running away with the poll at the conclusion of Joe's piece.  Speaking of which (sort of), I will never be able to break down pitching like Joe can.  Just like I wouldn't have been able to come up with Dan Szymborski's ZiPS projections formula in a million years.  I'm grateful I'm able to read and learn about baseball from people who see the sport from a place where few do and where I certainly don't.  Murray Chass' recent widely-shared column mocked Szymborski for being a proponent and user of advanced statistics.  There's nothing wrong with admitting you don't understand how certain metrics are formulated.  Dismissing them as invalid because they involve umm, math, is silly at best and ignorant at worst.  It's a glorious time to be a baseball fan and encountering someone who sees the game differently is an opportunity to learn and that's always good.

Hall of Fame

  • Lil Scooter explored whether Ken Griffey, Jr., will be the first baseball player unanimously voted in to the baseball Hall of Fame.  So far, so good.  Whatever happens, it should be unanimous that Griffey was on one of the greatest baseball cards of all time.
  • Craig Edwards looked at all of the former Cardinals who are on this year's ballot - from the "this guy has no chance" to the "this guy should be in but for this archaic system" - and whether any of them have a legitimate shot at induction.  As Craig noted, Jim Edmonds is likely to fall off the ballot after one year and that's a damn disgrace.
  • Piggy-backing off that, I offered another VEB look at Edmonds and why he was such a special player to watch.  Long live Jimmy Ballgame.

A Tweet I liked


Sigh.

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