Cardinals news and notes: Stanton, arbitration, and the podcast

Hello, fine readers of Viva El Birdos. My name is John, as anyone who bothered to read the byline on this post knows—I’m sure this was many, but not all, of you. After all, Viva El Birdos is its own brand—anything that goes on this website isn’t a (fill in name of author) post as much as it’s a Viva El Birdos post. It is at once humbling, relieving, and terrifying to consider. So I usually don’t.

Today marks the two-year anniversary of my first post on Viva El Birdos—it was a post about how weird I thought it was that Peter Bourjos was not tendered a contract yet the Cardinals were able to receive some value via trade for Tony Cruz. I had written it the night before, checked my phone at around 10 a.m. because it was a Friday and I was trying to arrange social plans for that night, checked my phone again around noon, and my Twitter had blown up with notifications. It was a crazy day.

It’s been an amazing experience writing for Viva El Birdos (I’m not quitting, I point out because I’ve had like three posts where people thought I was quitting because of the reverential tone towards VEB in it) and I just want to take a moment to thank everybody who supports me and who supports the website. Writing becomes a bit of a routine and sometimes I forget how crazy it is that I get to do this. And thank you to Craig Edwards for hiring and, to this point, not firing me.

Here are the articles you may have missed over the weekend at VEB.

• Craig wrote about Giancarlo Stanton, as writers on Viva El Birdos are wont to do, and how the structure of his contract, notably that he can opt out of his contract after 2020, makes the contract less valuable because it limits the potential upside of teams trying to acquire the Miami Marlins slugger. Craig was, however, not the only baseball person on the internet churning out Stanton content over the weekend, as news about him potentially being traded continued to pour in (by news, I mean unprovable rumors that destroyed my ability to concentrate on anything else). Sirius XM’s Craig Mish reported on Sunday that the Cardinals had offered Sandy Alcantara as well as more money than the San Francisco Giants.

He later reported that we should be expecting a no-trade clause related decision from Stanton sometime soon.

• Randal Grichuk, Tyler Lyons, and Michael Wacha are arbitration-eligible, and the Cardinals tendered contract to all three of them. Josey Curtis covered this story.
• We did a new podcast yesterday. Heather Simon and I were joined by Tyler Kinzy and As You Van Slyke It to discuss the results of reader-voted MVP, Cy Young, and Rookie of the Year awards for the St. Louis Cardinals.

I’ll be back with another post in a couple hours. Just glad to be here.