St. Louis Cardinals links: Mike Matheny's collision decision and Matt Carpenter's sixth-man award

We've reached the strange in-between moment in the Spring Training season when games are being played every day—real games, with box scores and everything—but most of the interesting news is still happening on practice fields and in interviews. With that in mind: A typically muddled set of St. Louis Cardinals links awaits you in Wednesday's VEB Monitor!

(If you have a link you think would be of interest to VEB readers—yours or someone else's—and you're not selling something, feel free to e-mail me. If you're a VEB regular who thinks collating a semi-regular link-dump sounds pretty neat, also feel free to send me an e-mail.)

FanGraphs: Daily Notes: Best Players per Steamer Without Starting Roles
The good news is that Matt Carpenter is the most valuable player on this list who didn't appear in Moneyball. The bad news is that he's tied with Russell Branyan.

RetroSimba: Jason Motte chases Cards standard set by Lee Smith
This is perhaps the only early-1990s Cardinals standard worth chasing, unless you're looking to become the Cards' most unconventionally skilled first baseman since Gregg Jefferies.

Baseball Nation: Kyle Lohse can't get work because ... well, just because.
Rob Neyer attempts to figure out the Cardinals' effect on veteran pitchers (and Kyle Lohse's free agency bid) and is nearly driven mad in the attempt.

Derrick Goold and Matthew Leach on Mike Matheny's new anti-collision stance.
It's worth reading both of these articles about Mike Matheny's attempt to push for a ban on collisions at home plate; they're about the same topic, but they cover different angles. Goold writes up Matheny having to admit to Tony La Russa he was right, which fascinates me on a personal level; Leach includes an interesting Matheny quote re: the ban also protecting baserunners who might feel pressured to come in hard under today's rules.