Cardinals First Basemen since 1960

In my last entry, I issued something of a cease-and-desist order on criticizing the Cardinals front office over the Albert Pujols contract negotiations.   This time, we’ll take a slightly different approach and try to put into perspective how privileged we are to see the big man playing first base in St. Louis.

Bill White (1957-1965).   24 WAR (20 offensive, 4 defensive)

There is no denying that Bill White could hit the ball.   Oh, could he ever hit the baseball.  The 4 dWAR for his time in St. Louis is a bit surprising because his defense seemed to be much better than that, as suggested by his  seven consecutive gold gloves.  The big man (for his era) was as graceful as a predatory cat, and his ability to track down a pop up over his head was as good as anybody.   I could recall some of my dad’s stories about watching him play, but instead I’ll reiterate: seven consecutive Gold Gloves between 1960 and 1966.

Ken Boyer may have won the National League Most Valuable Player award in 1964, but White’s second half turnaround was a big part of the Cardinals catching the Phillies in September.

George Crowe (1959-1961)   .5 WAR (.5 offensive, 0 defensive)

Bob Gibson, Stan Musial and Big George

Crowe had been an amazing athlete, playing both baseball and basketball before finally settling on hitting the ball instead of bouncing it.   He was a veteran of the Negro Leagues and one of the first wave of players to accompany Jackie Robinson in tearing down the color barrier in baseball.   The big man was at the end of his playing career when he came to St. Louis and was used primarily as a pinch hitter and backup starter when Bill White needed a day off, which wasn’t often.   Even at age 38, he managed to hit .301 in just over 100 at-bats – which included 8 home runs.   Yes, the man could hit the baseball.   Crowe’s biggest contribution to the Cardinals was as a role model for a some of the young players who were battling the early days of baseball’s integration efforts.   Bob Gibson recounts in 60ft 6in how Crowe helped him and teammate Curt Flood deal with some unfair events early in their career, and how to overcome them.   While he may be long forgotten as a player off the bench, his influences can be seen in the development and determination of Gibson and Flood.

Orlando Cepeda (1966-1968)  11 WAR (10 offensive, 1 defensive)

Like Bill White, Cepeda developed as a first baseman.   Unfortunately the Giants also had a youngster by the name of McCovey in their minor league system, which meant that Cepeda had to move to the outfield if he wanted to stay on the roster.   The wear and tear on his legs took a big toll, and the subsequent drop off in production allowed the 1966 Cardinals to swing a sweatheart of a deal, sending Ray Sadecki westward for Cha Cha Cha.   In St. Louis, he returned to his more comfortable position and the production came back with a vengeance.    Thanks to a freak injury to Bob Gibson in July 1967, Cepeda became the obvious choice as NL MVP, turning in almost Albert Pujols type offensive numbers.   A big drop off in production in 1968, probably due to an injury suffered late in the 1967 season, prompted his relocation to Atlanta and another return to All Star form.   He was a steady first baseman with soft hands, but when your infield consists of Julian Javier and Dal Maxvill, nearly anybody could play first base.

Joe Torre (1969, 1971-1973) – not gonna list his WAR breakout, just not gonna do it

Joe Torre was one of the best pure hitters in Cardinals history, but was a defensive liability at any position except catcher.   He moved from first base to catcher, back to first base, over to third and then back to first.   Those moves were all made to keep his ferocious bat in the lineup.   He would earn an NL MVP award in 1971 by hitting .363 and driving in a mind-boggling 137 runs.

Richie Allen (1970) 2.4 WAR (3.9 offensive, -1.5 defensive)

Speaking of defensive liabilities, that pretty much described the career of Richie (Dick) Allen.   But the man could hit, and hit, and hit.   Some of those moonshots he hit in the summer of 1970 still leave a mark in your minds eye.  Of his contemporaries, only Jimmy Wynn hit the ball harder.   The smartest thing the Cardinals did in 1970 was move Allen from third base to first, where he would remain for most of his career.   With the reduced defensive stress, his mighty bat could do the talking for him, and the rest is history.

Joe Hague (1971) 0.4 WAR (0.8 offensive, -0.4 defensive)

Joe Hague was the Allen Craig of his generation.   Hague was drafted in 1966 and developed in the Cardinals minor league system as a first baseman, to replace Orlando Cepeda when the time came.   Cepeda’s early decline caused the Cardinals to try a few other players at the position, before finally turning it over to Hague in 1971.   Hague just raked at Tulsa (AAA), but was a bit of a free swinger with more strikeouts than you would typically like to see for heart-of-the-batting-order player.  After two full seasons in St. Louis, Hague would be traded to the Reds for Bernie Carbo, a player the Cardinals gave up on far too quickly.

Matty Alou (1972) 1.3 WAR (1.4 offensive, -0.1 defensive)

Of the three Alou brothers, Matty was arguably the better hitter.  Felipe got more hits, but Matty had the higher career batting average.   He spent nearly two years in St. Louis, just at the beginning of his career decline.   When you were hitting .330 or better year after year, even your first few decline years were better than most players.   If the Cardinals had just left him alone to be the new Curt Flood, things might have gone better for the team in 1971 and 1972, but they didn’t.    With no good first base options, manager Red Schoendienst often used the 5ft 9in Alou at first, and it looked practically comical.    Ted Sizemore might not have had much of a problem throwing to Alou from second base, but to Dal Maxvill and Joe Torre, he must have been a tiny tiny target.   Of course, Maxvill spent 1970 throwing to Richie Allen, who wasn’t much taller.

He might not have been a defensive marvel in St. Louis, but Alou was a reliable .315 hitter in both seasons.   If the Cardinals had a legitimate power bat to play first base, perhaps their fortunes would have been better than a 75-81 finish.

Keith Hernandez (1974-1983) 40 WAR (31 offensive, 9 defensive)

After several failed attempts at finding a first baseman, the Cardinals struck gold with Keith Hernandez.   Was there a better defensive first baseman in the game ?   A National League Most Valuable Player Award in 1979 and 11 Gold Gloves (6 with the Cardinals and 5 more with the Mets) suggest that he might have been.  Nobody started a prettier 3-6-3 double play than Keith Hernandez.   He charged the ball hard, made a crisp throw from inside the base line, well away from the runner, and scampered back to first base in time to receive the return throw.  His presence on the field was much larger than his actual 6ft frame as he was the field commander, almost willing ground balls to be hit right to his teammates.

But Hernandez was not a one trick pony.   He was the perfect bat to go with Whitey Herzog’s running style of offense.   While he could hit with power, Hernandez’s greatest asset was some of the best gap-to-gap hitting we’ve ever seen in St. Louis.   When you have runners like Garry Templeton, Lonnie Smith and Willie McGee on base, those shots into the gaps produced a frightening number of runs.

George Hendrick and David Green (1984) about 1 WAR apiece

An “in the dead of night” deal in 1983, sending Keith Hernandez to the New York Mets for pitcher Neil Allen signaled that something was very wrong in the Cardinals clubhouse.   It would take another season for all of it to settle down so that White Herzog’s rabbits could return to the World Series.   In this transition, David Green and George Hendrick platooned as first baseman.   Both were converted outfielders, so the move to first base meant that neither were playing in a comfortable position.   And their play backed that up.   Hendrick had a cannon of an arm, but never got to show it off from first base.  Green could run like the wind, but that athletic ability was rarely seen on the right side of the infield.

Hendrick was just starting his late career decline, and before the start of the next season, he would have a new home.   That trade would would turn out to be one the best in Cardinals history as it brought left handed pitcher John Tudor to the gateway city.

For his part, Green never developed as Herzog had hoped.   An injury in 1982 opened the door for a youngster named Willie McGee, and Green found himself on the outside looking in.   With Andy van Slyke and Vince Coleman tearing it up in the minor leagues, his days with the Cardinals were numbered.

Jack Clark (1985-1987) 11.4 WAR (12.5 offensive, -1.1 defensive)

Another converted outfielder with a cannon for an arm.   Like George Hendrick before him, he didn’t get much of a chance to see it put to use.   His defense was much maligned in the day, but in retrospect that might have been more a function of the quality of the players surrounding him than his actual performance.   After all, when Ozzie Smith is the shortstop and Tommy Herr the other middle infielder, you are going to have to play like Keith Hernandez to even get noticed.

But that bat.  Just as with Orlando Cepeda, injuries had caused the Giants to give up on him and the Cardinals were able to get the slugger for a modest price.  Two of Clark’s seasons in St. Louis would be played relatively injury free, and the result were two trips to the World Series (1985, 1987).   When they pitched to Clark, the slugger made things happen.  Even in 1987, when pitchers didn’t even try to hide the fact that they were working around The Ripper, he still found ways to make the other teams pay dearly for any baseballs left close to the plate.   He would be the first man since Richie Allen to hit 30 home runs for the Cardinals, and the last until Ron Gant accomplished the feat in 1996, after some renovations that transformed Busch Stadium into a more home run friendly park.

Curiously, the Cardinals did not resign Clark following the 1987 season and he eventually signed with the New York Yankees.  Apparently the front office knew what they were doing as Clark never came close to the offensive production he’d shown in St. Louis in 1985 and 1987.

Bob Horner (1988) 0.2 WAR  (0.5 offensive, -0.3 defensive)

When Bob Horner and Dale Murphy broke in with the Braves in 1978, Atlanta thought they had captured lightning in a bottle.   They hoped that they could build a perennial contender with Horner and Murphy at the core.   Unfortunately it didn’t quite work out that way, although there were a lot of high points before injuries caught up with one of them.   Breaking his wrist in 1983 and again in 1984 sapped most of the power Horner had shown early in his career.   More than that, the ability to play a full season in the major leagues was just beyond his reach.   After failing to find a suitor for the 1987 season, Horner played baseball in Japan for one season before returning to the Cardinals in 1988, taking over for Jack Clark.   That didn’t last long as Horner would suffer a severe shoulder injury, ending his career.

But all is not lost.   This failure, through no fault of Horner’s, did open the door for a future fan favorite.   With the Cardinals in free fall at the non-waiver trade deadline, a deal was worked between St. Louis and Los Angeles.   The Cardinals would send fan favorite John Tudor to the City of Angles and in return we would receive Pedro Guerrero.

Pedro Guerrero (1989-1991) 2.9 WAR (6.7 offensive, -3,8 defensive)

Big Pete was well into his late career decline when he made the trip across the continental divide to finish out his career in St. Louis.  We didn’t see him at his best, for he was a beast of a hitter in his youth.  When Guerrero was healthy, a .320 batting average and a slugging percentage in the mid to upper .500s could be counted on out of the slugger.   If you missed him playing in Los Angeles, know that he also possessed some exceptional speed and twice stole 20 or more bases.   That all came to an end when he ruptured a tendon in spring training in 1986.  It cost him nearly the entire season, but he roared back in 1987 with some of the best offensive production in his career.

We didn’t know what to make of Pete when he came to St. Louis.  He always seemed to have some of that George Hendrick or Juan Encarnacion lack of hustle, but we soon found out that the big man played the game very hard and he gave us three outstanding seasons at the end of his career.    If not for an injury, we might have enjoyed him a bit longer.

Andres Gallaraga (1992) -0.4 WAR (-0.3 offensive, -0.1 defensive)

The Big Cat played first base as his nickname suggests.   He was a big man with soft hands and moved with the grace of Bill White.   Oh, he was slick.   And he’d won a pair of Golden Gloves with the Montreal Expos in 1989 and 1990.  A hamstring injury suffered in 1991 led to a poor year for both Galarraga and the Expos.   He became a Cardinal prior to the 1992 season.   He got off to a good start, until his was hit by a pitch and suffered a broken wrist.   As it so often happens, injuries to the hand area take a long time to heal, and he basically lost the ’92 season in St. Louis.

But Cardinals pitching coach Don Baylor was impressed with the big man, and when he became the skipper of the Colorado Rockies, he swiped Galarraga at his first chance.   And did he ever respond.   How about hitting .370 in the thin air in Denver ?  Injuries would slow him down there too, but he would also put together 5 consecutive seasons of 100 RBIs or more, the tops being 150 in 1996.   Big Cat indeed.

We saw just a glimpse of what Galarraga was capable of in that short season.   It would have been nice if the Cardinals front office had been just a bit more patient.

Gregg Jefferies (1993-1994) 6.9 WAR (7.3 offensive, -0.4 defensive)

Jefferies came to the Cardinals by way of the Kansas City Royals, but we were more than familiar with him from his days with the New York Mets.   It was hard to believe, but he was only 25 years old when he came to the Redbirds, but was starting his sixth full season in the big leagues.  He’d never shown much power and didn’t hit for much of an average, so we were a little bit nonplussed when the Cardinals acquired him.   Add to that a return to the little man at first base and we were all starting to wonder about the sanity of the front office.

Any concerns about Jefferies playing hard were quickly put to rest.  He turned in the two best years of his career in St. Louis, hitting .342 in 1993 and following that up with a nifty .325 average in the strike shortened 1994 season.   The Cardinals chose not to offer him a contract following the 1994 season and he moved on to Philadelphia.  Injuries and inconsistent play would bring about a premature end to his career.

We never saw it coming, but learned to appreciate the little man for those two seasons in the gateway city.

John Mabry (1995-1996) -0.3 WAR (-0.4 offensive, 0.1 defensive)

When the big man broke in with the Cardinals in 1995, he looked to be the second coming of Todd Zeile, but with a lot more plate discipline.   Perhaps that is a bit more prophetic than I had intended, because after a quick start to his career, Mabry began to struggle at the plate.   His average dropped from a steady .300 all the way to .249 before being released following the 1998 season.    But Mabry was a good baseball man and continued to keep his career alive, making his way across most of the major leagues before coming back to St. Louis for a swansong season in 2004, reclaiming some of that early glory.  Mabry was a big part of helping the Cardinals make it to the World Series.

He turned out to be the perfect Tony La Russa scrappy utility player, playing nearly every position except catcher.   The hardest thing for Cardinals fans was watching him end his career up Interstate 55, playing for the rival Cubs.

Dmitri Young (1997) 0.3 WAR (-0.3 offensive, 0.6 defensive)

All the while John Mabry was holding down first base, we kept hearing the name Dmitri (Da Meat Hook) Young and how he was tearing it up in the minor leagues.  He was going to be a masher at the plate and it was just a matter of time before National League pitchers retired rather than facing him.

In just one full season in St. Louis, he failed to live up to the hype.  Needing some help in the bullpen, the Cardinals traded Young to the Cincinnati Reds for Jeff Brantley.   Young would have several good seasons in Cincinnati, but still didn’t live up to the hype we had been given during his early development.   After a couple of good years in Detroit, Young would finish out his career with the Washington Nationals.

Mark McGwire (1998-2001) 22.5 WAR (26.3 offensive,  -3.8 defensive)

Tabling any discussions about the steroid era, Mark McGwire was a genuine basher.   One of the best.   From record setting rookie season when the red headed one would bash 49 home runs to a pair of seasons in St. Louis when he would hit over 60 homes, the man could bash with the best of them.   A closer look at his career will reveal a player that worked very hard at his craft, and a rising batting average later in his career was the result.   He would hit over .300 once, and just missed that one time in St. Louis.  Injuries seemed to be a part of nearly every season for Big Mac, and towards the end of his playing days, it was almost painful to watch him take a swing.

Big Mac will never go down in history has being one of the best defensive men to play the position, but he was sure a lot of fun to watch.  Especially at a time when baseball needed a couple of heroes to erase the memories of a strike in 1994.

Tino Martinez (2002-2003) 3 WAR (2 offensive, 1 defensive)

After the retirement of Mark McGwire and with no legitimate first baseman prospect in the minor league system, Tino Martinez seemed to be the perfect choice to take over first base when the Cardinals signed him following the 2001 season.  After becoming a star in Seattle, Martinez had been a big name on one of the biggest stages for baseball, Yankee Stadium.   When the Yankees opted not to sign him, the Cardinals moved quickly to secure the slugger.

Disappointing doesn’t begin to describe the two long years he was in St. Louis.   It seemed like everything he tried to do made things worse.   He would only manage 69 and 75 RBIs and his batting average that once floated near .300 was heading towards .250 in a hurry.   After the 2003 season, the Cardinals traded him to Tampa for a player to be named later, and they really didn’t want the player.

Martinez was such a professional, those two years had to be at least as hard on him as they were to the Cardinals fans.

Albert Pujols (2004-2010) 60 WAR  (51 offensive, 9 defensive)

And that brings us to Albert Pujols.   Do I really need to say much about “El Hombre” ?   I didn’t think so.

The purpose of this article, as long as it has become, is to make exactly 2 points.

1. In the last 50 years, every Cardinals championship team has a common characteristic.   They all had an MVP caliber offensive producer playing first base.   In 1964 it was Bill White.   In 1967 and 1968, it was Orland Cepeda.  Keith Hernandez was the offensive force for Whitey Herzog’s only championship team in St. Louis in 1982.   Two trips to the World Series, coming just a few outs from winning it all in 1985 and 1987 had Jack “The Ripper” Clark tearing things up.   And 2004 and 2006 had Albert Pujols leading the offense.

But it’s even more than that, every time the Cardinals had an offensive leader at first base, they eventually made it to the World Series.

2. When you think of the great glove men that manned the right side of the infield, you think of Bill White and Keith Hernandez.   According to the dWAR statistic, which claims to measure such things, Albert Pujols is every bit as good as those two defensive specialists, and perhaps just a bit better.

A slightly subtle sub-theme started developing as I typed out each of these paragraphs.   A single season of Albert Pujols, both on the offensive and defensive side of the game, is more productive than many careers of players who played the position before him.

Without nullifying my cease-and-desist notice from a few days ago, I really do suggest that Bill DeWitt and the front office pay the man what he is worth.   There hasn’t been anything like him in St. Louis for a very long time, and we really don’t know if we’ll see another any time soon.

Hey Bloggers, Leave that Exec Alone

Time to cue up some late era Pink Floyd and let the mechanical droning rhythms of The Wall bring out your inner child.   Or something like that.

Baseball exec or Cat in the Hat ?

In the last few weeks, impatience over the lack of an Albert Pujols contract extension is causing a lot of stress across Cardinals Nation, and it is just not necessary.   An increasing number of bloggers are turning negative towards the Cardinals executive team, and while there good reasons to do so, the Pujols situation is not one of them.  Criticize them relentlessly for the lack of depth on the major league squad and how the minor league system has been pillaged. Please call the fashion police every time John Mozeliak wears a scarf to a press briefing. But the Albert Pujols situation, not so fast.

Conventional wisdom suggests that they should have already signed Albert to an extension.   Why ?

At this point, we are getting the best player in baseball at a significant discount.   That is easy to say now, after he has nearly fulfilled his current obligation with a consistency that only a draftsman can get with a straightedge.   There was plenty of risk in the early years, and the Cardinals front office bore all of that.  It all worked out, but an injury or premature decline in production would have put management in a very precarious position.   The last two or three years of the current agreement is their payout for bearing the early risk.

Some will suggest that Albert’s value has gone up and the front office should have already pounced to lock him in.  But has it really ?   Really ?   Sure, the Ryan Howard deal last year added some interesting fuel to the fire of debate, but they have known for the last three years that Albert is a $25-30M/yr extension.  Knowing this, the best tactic would be to wait and see what happens.   He’s under contract, he’s the ideal professional and won’t play out his option year pouting like some prima donna’s have done in the past.  So where’s the urgency ?

There are three more things in play that give the front office reason to take a big picture view of this contract extension.

1. A new TV deal with Fox Sports Midwest.   In 2011, FSMW is now the exclusive TV carrier of all the Cardinal broadcasts.   This gives Bill De Witt Jr and III some interesting negotiation room in the latter years of a Pujols contract extension.   FSMW wants Albert to stay in St. Louis just as much as we fans do, and they may have a financial incentive to assist paying the big man.

2. A new collective bargaining agreement is just around the corner.   It does not seem as contentious as some of the other sports, football in particular.   But there is always a chance that a new agreement can have a big financial impact on a team.   The executives have a much better idea what the new agreeement will look like now, compared to a year ago, which was better than two years ago.   Said a different way, they may be more willing now to offer a long term contract to a player of Albert Pujols’ stature than at any time in the past.

3. Ballpark Village.   A sore subject for some, this is part of the deal that led to the construction of a new baseball stadium in St. Louis.  While the stadium is a beautiful attraction, one that the city should be proud of, the area around the park that was to be developed for shopping, offices and living has been largely ignored.   Again, this presents an interesting case of leverage.   It can be as simple as asking the city officials whether they want to pay Albert Pujols or build out Ballpark Village.   Of course the answer is both, but it may open the possibility of scaling back the Ballpark Village construction plans, and that is already happening.  Every dollar that the ownership does not put into Ballpark Village this year is an extra dollar that they can spend on Albert’s out years in what will likely be an 8-10 year $240-$300M deal.     We might take exception to this, but that does not change the fact that huge sums of money are involved in this either way, and this is the way that some business gets done.

I respect how both sides have acted in this situation, conducting the negotiations in private.   This is as it should be.   Albert Pujols has earned that, and the front office is smart enough to honor it.   Where this gets tricky is when local and national media step in and fight for your mindshare.   They know that printing anything about Albert and his contract will spread through the midwest faster than an August brush fire in West Texas.   Sources will report something, conclusions will be drawn from that, and pretty soon ESPN or STL Today’s web hit counts are soaring.   “Oh my gosh, did you read what <fill in the blank> wrote about Albert ???”   The only ones who make out in this are the advertisers.

The front office has consistently stated that they want to see Albert remain a Cardinal, and we should take them at their word.   Albert Pujols has continually reaffirmed that he wants to stay in the St. Louis area, and we should take him at his word.   The fact that there is no contract extension news means exactly that – there is no news.   It doesn’t mean that there are irreconcilable  differences and that the two sides will not ultimately reach agreement.   While Albert has publicly indicated a deadline of the start of spring training, do you really think that if the Cardinals come back with a reasonable offer in the middle of spring training, before the first home game of the regular season (as they did with Ozzie Smith) or on an arbitrary Tuesday in May, that he wouldn’t sign the contract ?   Of course not.

Even if it gets as far as free agency, it doesn’t mean that the Cardinals are out of it by any means.   Sure, it might be a little more expensive at that point in time because cash rich teams like the Angels might make it hard on the Cardinals, but it can still be done then.

All we know is that there is no agreement.   I’m not getting all wound up by some sports writers longing to sell newspapers or pad their web hit counts.   I won’t get upset until I see Albert at a press conference in a city other than St. Louis.

No, this is not the real contractual crisis facing the Cardinals.   That will happen in 2013 when Adam Wainwright is playing out his option season.   We haven’t seen a pitcher like Adam Wainwright in a long time, and that’s the one that I worry about.   But I won’t start worrying until 2013.   If the Mayans are right, we’ll have much bigger problems before we get to that point.

Help me rename this blog ….. please!!!

Yes, I think it is time to give this blog a sensible name, and I’m asking for your assistance in doing just that.

When I started this Cardinals blog, it was just meant to store a couple of stories that had been posted in a Google Wave in the event that they shut it down.   And they did, but then they didn’t.

There was no plan to continue writing, and certainly not as a contributor to I-70 Baseball, so there was no real need to come up with a cool blog name.  Now I wish I had.

Oh, there are some great blog names out there.  Viva El Birdos (great historical reference), Pitchers Hit 8th, PAH9 (Play a Hard 9, but I like it better as Pitchers Always Hit 9th), Bleed Cardinals Red With Me, Welcome to Baseball Heaven, RetroSimba (there’s that historical thing again).  Even Aaron Miles Fastball makes me laugh each time I read it, just by it’s name.

So I think it’s time for Throatwarber to be designated for assignment (DFA) and sent packing.   The name has absolutely nothing to do with baseball, the Cardinals – heck, it’s not even an American reference.

I’ve given this some thought.  OK, it was over a diet coke last night at dinner, but that’s not the point.   The names that I came up with all sound overly pretentious or stuffy and that’s why I’m asking for your help.   The only condition is that that the name needs to be available at WordPress.com.

My *yawn* initial thoughts were

• Cardinal Tales

• Redbird Tales (ok, so I’m not very creative)

• And there he goes (I can’t tell you how many times I heard Harry Caray and Jack Buck say that – and That’s a Winner is way too pretentious)

• Tony’s Doghouse (does that really need any explanation???)

This is where you all come in.  Please send some suggestions (or pick one of those four) and help me name this blog.   If you don’t want to put your ideas in the comments, feel free to send me a Twitter DM to @Throatwarbler (which will probably go next).

Cardinal Nation’s New Public Enemy #1 is …….

Not Brandon Phillips.

Yadi the Enforcer

As much as I love that photo, and the memories of the Cincinnati series last August, Phillips is not a problem for the Cardinals in 2011.   Yes, he did spout off his mouth, like many competitive players do.   Sure, we took extreme exception to those comments, as we were meant to.   But, Phillips owned up to them like a professional and pretty much laid an egg against the Cardinals – how about a line of .236/.276/.292.  Nope, I don’t think we’re going to hear much more out of Mr Phillips for a while.  Not that I admire him, I don’t, but he didn’t complain while laying that ostrich sized cackleberry.

So, if it’s not Brandon Phillips, who is the new Public Enemy No. 1 of Cardinals Nation ?

That’s right, Johnny Cueto.

We need to have a long memory, Cardinals fans.  Let’s not forget

This is the Johnny Cueto that we need to remember for the next few seasons.  The one that ended Jason LaRue’s season, and ultimately his career.   The one who kicked violently at other Cardinals, including Chris Carpenter.   The one who just signed a contract extension, meaning he will have plenty of chances to play against the Cardinals for the next few seasons.

The proper response

Before we all start talking basebrawl or suggesting that a Cardinals pitcher throw at Cueto or any member of the Reds, please take a look at this article from I-70 Baseball where we look at the consequences of bean-ball.   That is just not good baseball, and Cardinals Nation is all about good baseball.

It was an unfortunate situation for all players involved, including Cueto.  It all happened quickly, and nobody really knows how they would have reacted in a similar situation (although kicking an opposing player in the head wouldn’t be in my top 10, but that’s easy to say while typing at a computer).

The proper thing to do as a Cardinals fan is make him welcome at Busch Stadium.  Let’s hear 40,000+ voices all shouting out his name (and whatever else you choose to append to it).   Over and over and over and over.   If  he walks a batter or throws a bad pitch, make sure that he knows that we are an observant audience, and pay it the respect it deserves.   In the 1980’s, the sound of the crowd chanting “Darryl” had to get under Darryl Strawberry’s skin, and Strawberry was a pretty tough customer.  That’s just the thing that we need to hear again in 2011, but to a repetitive chorus of “Johnny”.

Oh, this is going to be a wonderful season of baseball.  I can hardly wait for it to begin.

Top 5 headlines to expect in 2011

Is it really the end of January ?  It seems that just a few days ago,  we were rushing around trying to finish up our Christmas shopping, and all of a sudden, another United Cardinal Bloggers project is due.   I guess the bright side is that we’re that much closer to when pitchers and catchers report to spring training.

So the project this month is predicting the top 5 headlines of 2011.

#1 Albert Pujols signs record breaking contract

Is there anybody out there that doesn’t think this (a) this is the biggest news item in baseball and (b) that it’s really going to happen ?   Rest assured, it will happen, and when it does, it will make news for a few milliseconds and then the national media can turn their attention back to the Peyton Place that is the American League East.

At the risk of turning this into a long editorial, just consider

• Albert Pujols *IS* the face of the franchise.  Not John Mozeliak, Bill De Witt Jr or III, or Tony La Russa.   It’s Albert.   He is this generation’s Stan Musial.
• Players like Albert Pujols come along maybe once in a generation.   The last in St. Louis was Bob Gibson.
• Albert’s trade value was the highest last July.  If he was to be dumped, it would have been then, when the Cardinals were in free fall.
• It’s not like this is a surprise, ownership has known this day would come.  They have a plan (see above) and it’s just a matter of working out the details.
• You don’t become a multi-billion business by being stupid and throwing your customers under the bus
• Some highly paid players will be coming off their contracts (Carpenter, Lohse, Westbrook) in the next year or two, and that creates all sorts of financial options
• While the experts might not value the Cardinals farm system, there is existing talent that can help fill out a competitive team

I’m satisfied.  Albert will be a Cardinal through the end of the decade.

#2 Adam Wainwright joins Joaquin Andujar and Bob Gibson with his second consecutive 20 win season

And he still may not win the Cy Young Award, which would be a shame.  If Adam Wainwright stays healthy, and there is little reason to think he wouldn’t, he will win 20 games.   If you consider that Bob Gibson didn’t really hit his stride until age 28, and that’s how old Wainwright was when he won 20 for the first time, there is a lot to be excited about.

#3 Jason Motte becomes the Cardinals closer

I don’t know if it will be a slider, a change-up or mixing seams on his fastball, but Jason Motte will develop a second go-to pitch before the start of the regular season, and he will be the next closer. It won’t take much because of the giddy-up on that heater, but a second pitch will transform him into the next Todd Worrell.

#4 Kyle Lohse wins 15th game

Yes, I said it.  And I may be in the minority here, but I think Kyle Lohse will make a comeback in 2011.   He will go 15-10, and that 5 win differential will be the difference at the end of the season, propelling the Cardinals into post-season.

#5 Jaime Garcia throws a no-hitter

What can I say, I’m a fan of pitching.   I’m also a big Jaime Garcia fan.   I watched or listened to Larry Jaster, Steve Carlton and Al Jackson come close, and at this point in his career, Garcia’s pitches are better than all three.  The first time I saw Garcia throw a baseball in 2010, my first thought was “he is going to throw one – not if, but when”.

There were a few more that are worth mentioning, but didn’t make the top 5.

• David Freese chokes on an olive and is out for 2 months because of broken ribs suffered when teammate performance Heimlich maneuver
• The return of Aaron Miles
• Albert Pujols actually stops at third when base Jose Oquendo gives him a stop sign
• Colby Rasmus hits for the cycle (this started as a satirical comment about Yadier Molina, but heck, Rasmus could actually do it)
• After hitting for the cycle, Colby Rasmus traded to the Kansas City Royals (they do have the farm system to support this kind of trade).

So those are my top 5 headlines for 2011.  You can find the complete list over at the United Cardinal Bloggers web site.  Now, what are some of yours ???

Pitching will be the key to success in 2011

In an attempt to keep one of my New Years resolutions (keeping things brief), I have broken up a long and rambling article about trying to handicap the 2011 Cardinals into two pieces.  Here is the second part – certainly shorter and I hope less perambulate.

Viva el Birdos 2.0

Of all the championship teams, the 1968 Cardinals were unique in their ability to shut down the opponent, night after night.   Not just wins, it was complete and total domination.  Historians are too easily fixated on on Bob Gibson’s historic season and miss the real story here.  While the offensive struggled most of the year, the pitching simply lights out.  Not just Bob Gibson, the entire staff.  Ray Washburn, Steve Carlton and Nelson Briles pitched some of the best baseball of their careers, and in the few games that they did not go the distance, Joe Hoerner and Wayne Granger shut things down very quickly out of the pen.  If  the ’67 Cardinals were Go Go El Birdos, the ’68 team should have been called Throw Throw El Birdos.

How good were they ???

I struggle to find a superlative to adequately describe the pitching staff of 1968.   The closest comparison would be White Herzog’s ’85 Cardinals (John Tudor, Joaquin Andujar, Danny Cox, Ken Dayley, Todd Worrell), but even they fell far short of what the 1968 Cardinals accomplished as a staff.  All you need to know is:  30 shutouts, 31 games where they allowed just 1 run, and 21 games allowing 2 runs.   If you add all of those up, and please place a pillow under your jaw before you do, that’s 82 games allowing 2 runs or less.  Or let me put this another way, for half of the 1968 season, the Cardinals pitchers held the opponents to just 2 runs or less.   Not the starters, not earned runs – those are total runs allowed by all pitchers.  To put this into context, the 2010 pitching staff held opponents to 2 runs or less in just 57 games, which is actually pretty good.  Herzog’s ’85 staff did that 66 times.

Can the 2011 hurlers even come close to this ?

Of course not, but let’s not give up quite so fast.   Let’s line up the pitchers and take a closer look.

Starter (1968)	W	L	ERA	Starter (2010)	W	L	ERA
Bob Gibson	22	9	1.12	Chris Carpenter	16	9	3.22
Nelson Briles	19	11	2.81	Adam Wainwright	20	11	2.42
Steve Carlton	13	11	2.99	Jaime Garcia	13	8	2.70
Ray Washburn	14	8	2.26	Jake Westbrook	10	11	4.22
Larry Jaster	9	13	3.51	Kyle Lohse	4	8	6.55

While nobody is expecting a Bob Gibson like performance out of Chris Carpenter in 2011, taking a couple of steps back from the details might help us find our early indicator of success in 2011, and it’s not where I was first looking.

Barring injuries, Chris Carpenter and Adam Wainright can come close to matching  Gibson and Briles in 1968 – perhaps not the microscopic ERA and embarrassing WHIP’s Gibby and Nelly thew up, but certainly they can come close to the win/loss totals and differential.

If you want to use Steve Carlton as a predictor for Garcia, know that in his second season (1969), Carlton went 17-11 with a 2.17 ERA.  Ummm, yay!!!!  Can Garcia match Carlton’s 1969 season ?  Absolutely.   The real question is whether or not Tony La Russa lets Garcia go deep enough in games so that the youngster doesn’t have to rely too much on the bullpen.   In Carlton’s sophomore year, he pitched 12 complete games.  I’d be surprised if  there were 12 complete games in the last decade of Cardinals baseball, so it’s not reasonable to think that Garcia will come anywhere near that.   But if Garcia can reliably get into the seventh inning, he might have a chance to duplicate Carlton’s production.

Cardinals Nation should exhale in unison when looking at Larry Jaster’s 1968 season.   He didn’t pitch poorly, in fact quite the opposite.  Unfortunately Jaster did not get much run support from the anemic offense that the Cardinals put on the field that year.   Of course, he could not complain too much about lack of run support because Bob Gibson had a 1.12 ERA and lost 9 games.    If Jaster had received some better run support from his team, his numbers might have looked more like they did in 1966 (11-5) and 1967 (9-5).   What does this mean for the 2011 Cardinals ?   Even if Kyle Lohse lays an egg, which many of his detractors like to predict (endlessly), it might not be the death blow that many fear.  Heck, even some of the most cynical Lohse critics project him in the vicinity of Jaster’s 9-13 mark for ’68.

That leaves us with Jake Westbrook, and where we need to look for an early season indicator for 2011.   This is also the time to cue up Rod Serling and the theme song to The Twilight Zone as the parallels between Westbrook and Ray Washburn are absolutely spooky.  Both are veterans that had success early in their career – to be fair though, Washburn had Don Drysdale like success until injuries slowed him down.   After missing several seasons due to injury, both pitchers re-invented themselves as pitch-to-contact types, keeping the ball low in the zone instead of trying to strike every batter out.   If Westbrook can keep pace with Washburn’s 1968 season, and 15-10 is an optimistic but not unreasonable projection, the Cardinals may actually have a good chance at winning the NL Central.

Barring injury.

Now let’s look at the bullpens.

Reliever (1968)	W	L	ERA	Reliever (2010)	W	L	ERA
Joe Hoerner (l)	8	2	1.47	Ryan Franklin	6	2	3.46
Wayne Granger	4	2	2.25	Kyle McClellan	1	4	2.27
Ron Willis	2	3	3.39	Jason Motte	4	2	2.24
Dick Hughes	2	2	3.53	Mitchell Boggs	2	3	3.61
Mel Nelson (l)	2	1	2.91	Trever Miller (l)	0	1	4.00
Hal Gilson (l)	0	2	4.57	Brian Tallet (l)	2	6	6.40
				Fernando Salas	0	0	3.52

This is not quite as easy to compare as the starters because the bullpens are used much differently now than in the 60s.   But that doesn’t mean we can’t find a few things to help us prepare for 2011.

If Jake Westbrook is the litmus test for the starters, Ryan Franklin will that for the bullpen.   Simply put, the bullpen needs to be as good as they were in 2010 to win in 2011, perhaps just a little bit better.   There is no reason to believe they won’t be, other than just a bit of pessimism that a lot of Cardinals fans seem to have heading into every season, perhaps fueled by an excess of doom and gloom from some  local and nearly all of the national sports media.

If Franklin is good, then so will be the hopes for a NL Central title.   To help take a bit of worry out of that last statement, we held our collective breaths every time Joe Hoerner went to the mound in 1968, and things turned out just fine.   Part of what got us through the ’68 season was a closer-in-waiting, just in case we needed him.   In 1968, it was hard throwing Wayne Granger.   More Twilight Zone music – in 2011 it will be the hard throwing Jason Motte.   If you still have not exhaled, perhaps you would like to know that Wayne Granger won the Fireman of the Year award in 1969 and 1970, leading the league with an amazing 35 saves in 1970.   If Motte can learn to master the sinking fastball like Granger did, and the front office is smart enough to hold on to him, there is reason to be optimistic beyond 2011.

What about the other 8 guys ?

Here’s where things start falling apart.   First the bad news.

Up the middle

Much of the Cardinals pitching success was due to particularly strong middle defense.   Curt Flood was one of the best defensive center fielders to play the game, and the infield combination of Dal Maxvill and Julian Javier were as good as any in Cardinals history.  Very little rolled it’s way though the center of the infield, and if a ball was hit into the outfield, it had to be on a rope to get down between Flood and Lou Brock in left field.

I may be stating the obvious, but Ryan Theriot, Colby Rasmus and whoever Tony La Russa will throw in the lineup at second base will fall well short of Flood, Maxvill and Javier.   At least there is an offensive upside for 2011 if Colby Rasmus can keep his swing under control and be more Keith Hernandez than Dave Kingman.

Fortunately, that’s the end of the bad news.   That must mean there is lots of good news – and there is.

Left field

The corner defensive positions (1B, 3B, LF, RF) of the 1968 Cardinals were average.   But, and this is a big but, none of them were an embarrassment at their positions either.   Lou Brock could be inconsistent at times, and did not possess a good arm, but more times than not he made up with those deficiencies  with his legs.  Of course, he might run across the entire outfield and totally miss the ball, or overthrow the cut-off man by 100ft, but he was hardly a bad defender.   Comparing Lou Brock to Matt Holliday would take up an entire blog, so for the sake of brevity, I’ll point out that there have been very few offensive threats in Cardinals history that can match Holliday’s production so far in his career.   And Big Matt is just entering the prime of his hopefully long career, so whatever defensive runs might be lost to Brock will be more than made up for at the plate.   Many times over.

Slight advantage to the 2011 Cardinals.

Right field

Roger Maris had been a Gold Glove outfielder in New York, and should have been with Kansas City too.  By the time he got to St. Louis, the wear and tear on his legs took away a lot of his speed, but he still played smart baseball.   He also had a pretty strong arm and always hit the cut-off man with his throws.  There weren’t too many times when he laid out to make a brilliant catch, but he was a consistent defender in right field.   There is no reason to believe that Lance Berkman can’t play just as well as Maris, and the Big Puma’s bat is much more potent than that of Maris at this point in their careers.   When Maris needed a day off, Bobby Tolan would take over and we would have a plus defender in the field.   The same way that Skip Schumaker or Jon Jay will spell Berkman in 2011, but both Schumaker and Jay have shown much better offensive production than Tolan did for the Cardinals.

First base

Albert Pujols is the best player in baseball, Orlando Cepeda wasn’t.   Cepeda had a good year in 1967, but so did Curt Flood, Dick Hughes and Bob Gibson.   If the MVP voters had any courage, they would have given the award to Gibson even though he missed two months of the season.   But we’re getting off track here.

Cepeda had a very good year in 1967.   It was Jack Clark good.   It was more than Keith Hernandez good.   It was about 500 times better than  Tino Martinez good.   As good as it was, it was not even close to an off year from The Mang.  But we’re not talking about 1967 Cepeda, we’re comparing 2011 Albert Pujols and 1968 Orlando Cepeda.   That Orlando Cepeda (.248/.306/.378 16 home runs, 73 RBIs) wasn’t even Tino Martinez (.262/.337/.438 21 home runs, 75 RBIs) good.   Even if the Cardinals management fail to sign Albert Pujols to a contract extension and trade him at the non-waiver deadline, he will likely have produced more offense in 2011 than Cepeda did in 1968.   And there’s more to it than just at the plate, while Cepeda was a good first baseman, Albert Pujols is a two-time Gold Glove first baseman.

Let’s give that one to the 2011 Cardinals.

Third base

Mike Shannon vs David Freese at third base.   Oh, this is hard because there is a variable here well beyond our control.   In all but one aspect, Freese is a superi0r player to Shannon, but that one is a big one – durability.   You could count on Mike Shannon to go out there 150 times or more a year, and produce at a consistent level.   He was never flashy, but he didn’t seem to slump for long periods either.   What he lacked in physical ability, he made up with mental toughness and sheer desire.   If David Freese can stay healthy, the 2011 Cardinals will have a huge plus in their lineup.

Conditional advantage to the 2011 Cardinals.

Backstop

Thanks to his broadcasting career with Fox Sports, most baseball fans know the name Tim McCarver.   While his broadcasting can be amateurish and sometimes just plain goofy, his play behind the plate was nothing to laugh about.   He is a vastly underrated signal caller.   It is important to note that Bob Gibson’s scoreless inning streak in 1968 was interrupted by a passed ball in a game caught by Johnny Edwards, not Timmy Mac.  He didn’t have a particularly strong arm, but it was good enough to gun down all but the best base stealers of the day.   And he was productive at the plate as well.   Not a prolific home run hitter, he did manage to hit more than his share of baseballs into the gaps, resulting in more triples than you typically associate with a catcher.

Yadier Molina is a defensive freak of nature.   Nobody has an arm like his, and he’s not afraid to throw to any base.   He occasionally gets a bit lackadaisical behind the plate, especially when the team is not playing well, if it is a must win situation, like three games in Cincinnati last August, there is nobody that is more clutch than Yadier Molina.

Let’s call this one a tie, with some upside for Molina if he had a good year at the plate.

Conclusion

The 1967 and 1968 Cardinals were the best team that the Cardinals have fielded in my lifetime.  Whitey Herzog’s rabbits in the mid-80’s came close, but perhaps only a gashouse team from another era could have beaten Red Schoendienst’s two-time NL Pennant winners.   That said, when comparing them to the 2011 Cardinals, there is a lot to be optimistic about.   And don’t bring up the level of the competition, those Giants, Reds and Cubs teams (yes, the Cubs) were tough to beat, just has hard as the current crop of Phillies, Giants and Braves.

The 2011 offense should be fine, certainly strong enough to win the NL Central.   If, and that’s a big if, David Freese (and Yadier Molina) can remain healthy.   That’s where the Cardinal have their greatest exposure, and frankly the “Plan B” is a little bit thin.   As long as we can stay with Plan A, things will be fine.

Defense and pitching is where the division will be won, and the two are always linked.   This is also where our optimism will be put to the test, because the Dave Duncan pitch-to-contact approach will stress the defense, in particular that of the middle infield.   If extra hits are allowed, and the defensive runs allowed projections seem to suggest this will be the case, it will place extra strain on the pitching staff and a possible change in approach.   The additional stress will burn out the starters more quickly, and that may expose some depth in the bullpen.

Can the 2011 Cardinals keep pace with their 1968 ancestors ?  On paper, it would seem so.   Will they ?   That remains to be seen.   Check back with me in early July, we should have a good read on them by the All Star Game.   I don’t see a Tony La Russa team being a good at come-from-behind baseball, so if they haven’t built up a nice lead by the All Star break, we might all be paying more attention to the Rams pre-season in August.

What will a Cardinals win look like in 2011 ?

In doing some research for my next batch of I-70 Baseball articles, I started thinking about how some of the great Cardinals teams in the last few decades won their division.  One thing led to another, and pretty soon I’m wondering how this cast of characters that John Mozeliak has assembled will do in 2011.  If you are looking for an analytical approach, you are probably in the wrong place – what follows is going to be totally anecdotal, and terribly burdened with the optimism of a long time fan.  Should you desire a more technical (and perhaps even unbiased) treatment, check out our friend Pip at Fungoes or the fine folks at Gas House Graphs.

Come from Behind

For my money, this is the most exciting brand of baseball not involving a Bob Gibson pitching duel.  An aggressive running game, some timely hitting, the sound of Ernie Hayes banging on the keyboards and the crescendo of crowd noise – if this doesn’t make you a baseball fan, nothing will.  The only thing better than watching it on TV or listening on the radio is being there, adding to the cacophony.   While all championship teams must display a certain ability to overcome adversity, some recent teams were better at this than others.

Today, these teams are easy to spot.  All you need to do is look at the number of wins (and losses) out of the bullpen.  A good example is Whitey Herzog’s only World Series Champion, the 1982 Cardinals.  1/3 of the Cardinals 92 wins came from the bullpen, which helps explain how a World Series winner didn’t have a starter with more than 15 wins.   Some unfortunate injuries (Andy Rincon) played a role in that, but Joaquin Andujar’s 2.47 ERA just doesn’t match up with 15 wins, unless the offense was inconsistent.  And it was.  But the real tell is Bruce Sutter’s 9 wins.   Herzog would only bring him in close games, and in 9 of them the Cardinals scored the winning run in the last 2 innings (ok, maybe once or twice in the 7th inning).   In looking back at 1982, one of the unsung heroes was Dave LaPoint, but we’ll talk more about him in a future article.

Of all the come-from-behind teams, the 1964 Cardinals may have been the best.   Not only did they win many of their games in the late innings, it was an unbelievable surge in August and September that propelled them to the World Series.  This was not the first time they had rallied late in the season either.  Johnny Keane’s Cardinals almost pulled off a similar upset in 1963, falling just a few games short of the Dodgers in the end.   If Branch Rickey had not played the role of puppet master in the summer of 1964, there might be more pennants blowing in the wind in St. Louis.  ’64 was no fluke, and Johnny Keane is a very underrated (and unappreciated) manager.

The key to the ’64 Cardinals success ?  Mischief at the top of the batting order and then the big names coming up big.  Curt Flood and newcomer Lou Brock terrorized National League pitchers with their hitting and base running.   It would not be the only time they did this, but in 1964, the middle of the order was brutally consistent in the second half of the season.   Ken Boyer and Bill White challenged each other down the stretch, with Boyer winning the NL MVP in the end.   The few runners that this duo left on base were quickly driven in by Dick Groat, Tim McCarver or a new local kid named Shannon.   There were some great role players on the team as well.  Dal Maxvill, Carl Warwick and Bob Skinner all made big contributions, especially in the World Series, but it was the every day players that brought the pennant to St. Louis in 1964.

Red Schoendienst’s 1967 Cardinals were a similar team in many respects, but it was the role players making the different.  It seemed that every night, a different player stepped up and drove in the winning run late in the game.  Unlike last season, we cheered the late inning bench players coming up to bat.  Ed Speizio, Bobby Tolan, Alex Johnson – and who could forget Harry Caray spitting out the name Phil Gagliano, as only Harry could do.

In recent history, Tony La Russa’ s 105 win 2004 team fits into this category.   They are an unusual team in that no pitcher had a losing record, not even in the September callups.   Even though the starters accounted for about 75 of their wins, high ERAs plus relatively low innings pitched meant that the bullpen were eating a lot of innings and consequently also picking up a lot of late victories.  This is a typical pattern in a Tony La Russa managed game – as the bullpen goes, so go the Cardinals.

The 2011 Cardinals don’t seem to be built for a come-from-behind type of game.   Late inning defensive substitutions, such as Skip Schumaker or Jon Jay replacing Lance Berkman in right field, remove a huge offensive threat from the game and make the 2011 Cardinals look a lot like the 2010 Cardinals.   And we know how that ended, don’t we ?   Not exactly the poster child for “come from behind” wins.   No, we must look elsewhere to see how the next season will play itself out.

Methodically winning, night after night

While “businessman-like” seems an odd adjective for a team that ran with the wild abandon of Whitey Herzog’s 1985 Cardinals, it does accurately describe how they navigated the NL East on their way to the World Series. Joaquin Andujar started the season on fire, so much that “30 wins” was starting to get thrown around at the time of the All Star Game.   Of course, that didn’t happen.  John Tudor and his historic turnaround, going 19-1 after an abysmal 1-7 start was the personification of “businessman-like”.   Shutout after shutout.  Methodical, indeed.   Let’s not forget Danny Cox.  He was steady as a rock with a career high 18 wins and never losing consecutive starts during the regular season.   Unlike Andujar, Cox was a rock in post-season.

As thrilling as their style of play was, the outcome of the ’85 season was anything but.   It was “businessman-like” and the first place finish was a rather h0-hum event.   Only an injury was going to derail this methodical leviathan, and that did not happen until a rainy night in October.   A bad trade doomed the team in 1983 (Keith Hernandez for Neil Allen) and injuries took care of 1984 and 1986, but in 1985 they remained healthy and were able to outlast a very good Mets team.   An automatic tarp and a very good Royals pitching staff ultimately beat them, but even then it went down to the wire.

Shut you down

A special case of the methodical winners were the 1968 Cardinals.  Of all the championship teams, they were the only ones that just shut down the opponent, night after night. Not just a little bit, it was complete and total domination from the first inning until the last out.  It is far too easy to become fixated on Bob Gibson’s historic season and miss the real story here.  While the offensive struggled most of the year, except for the engimatic Dal Maxvill who had a career year at the plate, the pitching staff was lights out.   Bob Gibson, Ray Washburn, Steve Carlton and Nelson Briles pitched some of the best baseball of their careers, and in the few games that they did not go the distance, Joe Hoerner and Wayne Granger shut things down very quickly out of the pen.  If  the ’67 Cardinals were Go Go El Birdos, the ’68 team should have been called Throw Throw El Birdos.

In an attempt to keep one of my New Years Resolutions, I’ll take a closer look at the ’68 Cardinals to see if there if we can find anything to be optimistic about in 2011.   Fortunately, there is, but that will have to wait for part 2.

Just hang on

In 1982, the Cardinals theme song was “Celebration” by Kool and the Gang.  The 1985 Redbirds went with Glenn Fry’s  “The Heat is On”.  Although they were fun in the beginning, we would soon tire of both songs.   Had the Cardinals chosen a theme song for the 2006 World Championship team, it might have been Frankie Vallie and the Four Seasons’ “Let’s Hang On”, because that really described the way the season went.   They built a small lead in the NL Central in May, but gave all of it up in early June.   Without really falling behind, they managed to regain their lead later in the month, just to have it evaporate as the calendar turned over to July.    More oscillation in August and one more hot run early in September gave the Cardinals a seven game lead with just 15 to play – a lead they would all but squander before the end of the season.  Let’s hang on, indeed.

La Russa’s ’06 team isn’t the only one that did that.  Facing more adversity than any team in recent memory, the 1987 Cardinals played just about every type of baseball imaginable.   They overcame the loss of John Tudor for half of the season, Tony Pena for the first two months, and the only legitimate power threats in the batting order: Jack Clark and Terry Pendleton at the end of the season to come within a few outs of a World Series Championship.   How they accomplished this is fascinating.   In the first half of the season, they outslugged, outhit and outran everybody.   They were scoring  6 runs a game and really didn’t need the pitching staff to be all that good to win games.  They ran away with the NL East by the All Star Game.    Then the offense fell apart and it was a painfully long summer as we watched the Mets and Expos coming ever closer.   Unlike the 2010 Cardinals, most of key injured players were beginning to return to the lineup and for the most part were able to pick up the slack from the struggling offense.  They did hang on and win the division.    They also outlasted a much healthier San Francisco Giants in the NL Championship Series – one more round of Frankie Valli’s falsetto before getting pummeled in the Metrodome.

Overcoming adversity

For all of the positive things you can write about Tony La Russa’s Cardinals, the ability to overcome adversity is curiously absent from the list.

With the loss of Darryl Kile on June 22, 2002, the Cardinals had a lot to play for.  Some of this covered in Buzz Bissinger’s Three Nights in August, so well done that Cardinals fans cannot read that section without shedding a few tears.  Win it for DK became somewhat of a battle cry, but that’s not what really drove the 2002 Cardinals to the division title.   It was a healthy Woody Williams returning to the rotation in late August, plus a brilliant late season trade, acquiring Chuck Finley for his Major League swansong.    The Cardinals should have defeated the San Francisco Giants in the NLCS, but the inability of the bullpen to hold leads in Games Four and Five kept the Redbirds out of the fall classic.

Since 2004, the Cardinals have demonstrated even less ability to overcome injuries.   Three first place finishes in 2004, 2005 and 2006.   Coincidently, those were three seasons when Chris Carpenter was healthy.    The big right-hander missed 2007 and 2008 with an injury, and the Cardinals in turn miss post-season.  Healthy again in 2009, and a brief appearance in the NLDS.   While Carpenter was healthy in 2010, and had a very good season, injuries to Brad Penny, Kyle Lohse and David Freese totally derailed the team.   Whitey Herzog overcame this in 1987, thanks to a minor league system that produced some quality replacements when players went down (Curt Ford, Tom Pagnozzi) and some plucky veterans (avoiding the term scrappy due to it’s unfortunately attachment to some unproductive players in 2010).  John Mozeliak’s depletion of the farm system and Tony La Russa’s questionable loyalty to veteran players don’t seem to be a good combination to overcome a lot of bad things that can happen to a team in a long season.

If you are looking for a team that overcame adversity, both Red Schoendienst’s 1967 and Whitey Herzog’s 1987 Cardinals did just that.   In 1967, Red had to deal with the loss of starters Ray Washburn, a relatively common thing, and Bob Gibson – both for a long period of time.   In their absence, some youngsters stepped up and filled in admirably.   In Washburn’s case it was Jim Cosman.   When Bob Gibson went down, Nelson Briles stepped up and pitched some of the best baseball in his career, but we should not forget the role that Dick Hughes played in all of this.  Hughes, the 29 year old rookie, became the ace of the staff in Gibson’s absence and set the tone for the team in July and August.

Even in a small way, Schoendienst’s ’68 Cardinals overcame an early season disappointment when Dick Hughes injured his shoulder in spring training.   That is another story that is lost in the continual recounting of Gibson’s 1.12 ERA and all those shutouts in June and July.    The 68 team managed 31 shutouts without Hughes – it is frightening to think what their record might have been if he had been healthy.

No, the 2010 Cardinals get an F- in overcoming adversity, and we would be foolish to expect anything else in 2011.

What about 2011 ?

If the 2011 Cardinals are going to play beyond the regular 162 game schedule, they are going to have to do it much like Red Schoendienst’s team did in 1968.  In many respects, they are built like the ’68 Cardinals and have the ability to play like them, but it is unreasonable to believe they can run away with the division title like Red’s team did. Thanks to some off-season improvements by the Brewers, Cubs and Pirates – perhaps even a young re-tooled Astros, La Russa’s Redbirds will also have to play a bit of  “Let’s Hang On”.

What I can say with some confidence is that the 2011 Cardinals are nothing like Keane’s ’64 Champs, due in large part to the differences in managerial style between Keane and La Russa.  If the Cardinals get down early in the season, don’t expect an August/September miracle.   Similarly, if the Redbirds fall behind early in the game, don’t expect a late inning comeback.   Come from behind wins will happen, to be sure, but they will be the exception and not the rule.

Top Five Cardinals Stories in 2010

And just when I thought I was done blogging for the year, another United Cardinal Bloggers project deadline is approaching.  This one is the Top 5 Cardinal Stories for 2010.

United Cardinal Bloggers Year in Review

Before I get to my selections, a quick note about a great piece of work some of the UCB contributors have put together.   Ten of our favorite writers have collaborated and put together a single documents titled “The Year in Cardinals Baseball.”    What I like about it is that each of the contributors looks at what happened from a different perspective and there is very little overlap, making it a thoroughly enjoying read.    You can read about the project (including the list of writers) at this United Cardinal Bloggers article, or just download the Year in Review.

Now for the stories.

#1 Yadi the Enforcer

 

Yadi the Enforcer

OK, this is really just another excuse to post my favorite picture from the 2010 season.   Looking at it still puts a smile on my face and makes me sit up just a bit taller.   What a great moment for Yadier Molina, and the rest of the Cardinals organization.   While they did not achieve their goal for the season, they did send a loud and unambiguous message on this particular occasion.

Instead of trying to describe this story (which all of you know so well by now), let’s just watch it.  Again and again and again.

It was one thing for Molina to get in Phillips’ face, after all he was wearing the armor.   It’s what he did after the brawl that makes this the top story for the year: calming down rookie starter Jaime Garcia and allowing the young man to get back into the game plus all of his offensive contributions (home run, game winning RBI, stolen base).

If you want to read more, here are a couple of articles from back in August

Yadi the Enforcer

The Day the Designated Hitter Died

 

#2 Bruised, Broken and then Ultimately Beaten

May 21 was the day that the Cincinnati Reds won the NL Central, it just took a few months for everybody to realize it.  That was the day that Brad Penny’s grand slam swing put the big right-hander on on the disabled list.   For the rest of the season.  Up to that point, everything in 2010 was going according to plan.   David Freese had shaken off his early season (and pre-season) troubles and was settling in as a productive third baseman.  Jaime Garcia was beginning to look like the big league pitcher that we had seen the previous fall in Memphis.  Until Penny did his best Mark McGwire impression and end his season with a pulled muscle.

The next day, another Cardinals starter went down to injury.  Kyle Lohse also left his game early due to arm troubles.  Unlike Penny, Lohse did return but to less than stellar results.

The final weight to drop (ok, that was a painful pun – ok, that was another – I’ll stop now) was on June 5 when David Freese had to be removed from a game against Milwaukee after sliding into second base awkwardly.   He would return to the lineup and struggle until running out an infield grounder in Kansas City on June 27.   His minor league rehab came to an abrupt end and he would soon have surgery to repair both ankles.   He has also managed to drop a weight on his foot, breaking his big toe and narrowly missed getting hit in the head with a puck while attending a St. Louis Blues hockey game.

Injuries are a part of the game and championship teams are expected to overcome them, even if they happen to the star players.   Either the farm system is expected to replace them or the front office must find players by way of trades.   This is where the Cardinals season ended, because neither happened – at least immediately.   Maybe if the Jake Westbrook deal was done shortly after Lyle Lohse *OR* Brad Penny went on the disabled list, but it happened at the trade deadline when it was too late.  Instead of retooling with energetic minor league talent wanting to make a name for themselves in the big leagues, retreads that had been released by other clubs were signed and they filled the roster spots with little fanfare.

The impact of these injuries wasn’t obvious in the beginning.   Like Whitey Herzog’s managerial miracle in 1987, the 2010 Cardinals initially played well, even building a small lead in the NL Central.     At the same time, they were playing lots of hard innings, using up whatever reserves they had.    Unlike Herzog’s team, the injured players didn’t return and carry the team when the others ran out of gas.  The 2010 Cardinals all ran down together on a brutal road trip in August with one embarrassing loss after another.

#3 The Emergence of Jaime Garcia

Jaime Garcia was supposed to spend 2010 in AAA at Memphis, building up strength for his surgically repaired left elbow.   Somebody forgot to tell the rookie left-hander.

Just like Garcia was supposed to take it easy last fall when he returned from Tommy John surgery.   He was just there to throw a few innings to get his mechanics back into form.   What he did was pitch his team to the AAA World Series, throwing inning after inning of brilliant shutout baseball.   Anybody who followed him at the end of the the Memphis 2009 season already had him inked in as the 5th starter when the Cardinals would break camp in 2010, no matter what the coaches or sports writers said.

And he did not disappoint.   We hadn’t seen a rookie pitcher like this since Steve Carlton’s breakthrough season in 1967.    Consider the following three pitchers rookie seasons (ok, I threw in a 4th because it’s still an amazing story).

	Age	W	L	W-L%	ERA	GS	CG	SHO	IP	WHIP	SO/BB
Pitcher A	22	11	5	.688	3.26	21	6	5	151 2/3	1.114	2.04
Pitcher B	22	14	9	.609	2.98	28	11	2	193	1.218	2.71
Pitcher C	23	13	8	.619	2.70	28	1	1	163 1/3	1.316	2.06
Pitcher D	29	16	7	.727	2.67	27	12	3	222 1/3	0.954	3.35

Here are the pitchers.

Larry Jaster in 1969

Pitcher A is Larry Jaster (1966).   He reminds me the most of Garcia with an upright stance and the ball disappearing behind his head, keeping his shoulders up and level.   When he was pitching well, he kept his front shoulder from flying open, and the result was four effective pitches to both right handers as well as lefties.

Pitcher B is Steve Carlton (1967).   Although he looked nothing like Garcia on the mound, “Lefty’s” rookie campaign was a lot like Garcia’s in 2010.   The two differences were in the number of complete games – more of a sign of the times and the number of strikeouts.   Carlton was still a work in progress at this point in his career, and had yet to master the slider which would serve him well in his Hall of Fame career, but even early in his career, he was a strikeout machine.

Pitcher C is Jaime Garcia (2010).   His line is still impressive some 3 months after his season ended.   As we marvel at his rookie record, a bit of praise should be given to Dave Duncan and Tony La Russa, neither of whom are generally associated with rookie success stories.    Not only did they keep him in the rotation, but they carefully managed his innings and made his outings as positive an experience as they could.

The mystery pitcher D is the only right-hander in the bunch.   It is Dick Hughes (1967).   I only included him in this discussion to point out how dominating he was – especially since he wasn’t even in the rotation at the start of the season.    Hughes had one of the nastiest sliders in the game and his sub-1 WHIP shows that he was relatively unhittable.

Let’s hope that Garcia builds on an amazing rookie season and has an even stronger sophomore year.   Jaster and Carlton both made improvements in their second year, and it took a torn rotator cuff to keep Hughes from being one of the best pitchers of his era.

#4 Aligning the Major and Minor League philosophy

Perhaps this will also be a top story for 2011, but the promotion of John Vuch to Director of the Farm System, overseeing all of the player development throughout the minor league program, should give Cardinals fans reason to be optimistic about the future.  Vuch is an old-school Cardinal with ties to George Kissell and Dave Ricketts, and this should bode well for a minor league system that will focus on development at least as much as they have the draft.   One of the first things that Vuch did in his new capacity was to reach out to the major league coaches to insure that both parts of the organization are working to a common goal.

#5 Pardon Me, There’s a New Ace in Town

Adam Wainwright’s continued development into a bona fide ace is one of the best stories in 2010, to be filed right next to Garcia’s rookie season.   Since the first time he took the mound as a September callup in 2005, we knew he was going to be something special.   Interestingly, his major league debut came in relief of the last apprentice to become a staff ace, Matt Morris.

I remember flying into St. Louis on business, just before the 2005 season, and listening to a radio show where they were introducing the team.  One of those youngsters was Adam Wainwright, and even then, he was being praised as a future top of the rotation type pitcher.

If there was still any doubt about Wainwright, that should have come to an end on September 24, when he earned his 20th win of the season.   As if scripted, that victory was against the Chicago Cubs.

Wainwright became just the 11th Cardinals pitcher since 1960 to win 20 or more games.   Barring injury, there is no reason to suspect that he will not repeat that in 2011 or 2012, making him the only Cardinals pitcher to do that since Joaquin Andujar in 1984 and 1985.   Considering that Bob Gibson was 29 when he had the first of his five 20 win seasons, maybe even that record will be in jeopardy before Wainwright’s career is over.

Rather than go on more about Wainwright, feel free to take a peek at these articles in the archive to get more perspective on just how unique the young right-hander’s career has been.

Move over, there’s a new ACE in town

Chris Carpenter and Adam Wainwright are among the elite pitchers in the game

Passing the Baton

There were many other great stories, but the rules say I have to stop at five.   I thank you for taking the time to read mine, now tell me some of yours.

New Years Resolutions for an Obsessive Cardinals Blogger

It is the time of year when we all reflect on the last 12 months of our lives and take stock of where we are.   We then, with all good intenti0ns, outline several life changes that we will make, and maybe they will last until the final college football game is played.   I see no reason why an obsessive Cardinals blogger shouldn’t do exactly the same thing.

So here are my New Years Resolutions for 2011

1. Learn to love the designated hitter

Yeah, I’ve been so close minded on this topic, going all the way back to when it was first proposed in 1966.   Pretty much all of my notions about baseball go back to that period, and that’s just wrong.  What does a 6 year old know about anything ?   I didn’t realize that the Lance Berkman signing was John Mozeliak’s way of getting me to change my mind about the most divisive rule difference in baseball.  Thanks, John.  All I needed was a little push, and I am so grateful that he did that just for me.

Yes !!!! Edgar Martinez for the Hall of Fame – and I can’t wait for David Ortiz to become Hall eligible!

2. When using Cub as a noun, don’t automatically follow with the verb Suck

It is time to put all of the animosity towards the Cubs in the past and bury it forever.   Time to admit that you love Cubbie Blue and you really wished the Cardinals outfield consisted of Alfonso Soriano, Kosuke Fukudome and Milton Bradley (oh why oh why did my new beloved team trade away Milton Bradley – he was so close to becoming my new favorite player).    It is time to embrace the Zambrano and admit that your legs twinge every time Ryan Dempster does that little glove flick in his delivery.   And finally, you have to admit that you miss Thom Brenneman, Bob Brenley, Dewayne Staats and Steve Stone – and you would love it if they brought back Chip Caray, just so you could hear another round of “fisted into left field” – that’s music to my ears.

I might even get carried away and start a Cubs historical blog, just to show my appreciation for a team that has given me so many wonderful memories.

Once again, a big thanks to John Mozeliak for working so hard during the winter meetings, acquiring a former Cub, Ryan Theriot, so that I have a reminder every day of how much I love the Cubs and what a fool I have been this last half century.

3. Learn to love the long ball

We all know the phrase “chicks dig the long ball”.  Well, maybe it’s time that we dudes do the same thing.   Nothing says baseball like watching a muscle-bound Michelin Man hit a baseball into the night sky and watch it vanish into nothingness.   Oooooh ahhhhhh, that’s baseball.

That form is so .... 2011

Kevin Costner’s character in Bull Durham got it right when he said, “strikeouts are boring.  Besides that, they’re fascist.” And with the new infield the Cardinals will be sporting in 2011, we will all fall in love with the ground ball, nearly as much as the Adam Dunn moonshot.  All of those years when we could have appreciated his at-bats in Cincinnati and Washington, now he will play with the White Sox and we’ll never get to see him swinging for the fences again.

2011 will be a new year where we will all eschew the 1-0 pitchers dual.   Those are boring, like watching paint dry.   We’re going to fall in love with the 4 hour entertainment extravaganza that only the Red Sox and Yankees can deliver with regularity.   We will yearn for the 12-10 blast-a-thon, hanging on to every pitch hoping that someone hits it to that little vanishing point in the darkened skies.

4. Embrace SABR advanced statistics

After all, baseball is best played on a calculator and spreadsheet and not in the neighborhood playground.   Fantasy baseball is so much better than the boring thing that the National League calls a game.   I just can’t wait until the random number generator comes up 0.9821024084389481985912385308 and my simulated cleanup hitter hits the simulated ball out of the simulated park.   That’s what makes fantasy baseball -e ^{i * pi}.   I think I’ll call my new simulated team the Euler’s  (ok, if you aren’t a mathematician, you might have to look that one up).

Bwahahahahahahahahahahaha

Yeah, right – like any of these are going to happen ????  Not a chance.

Some time for some real resolutions – ones that I might actually have a chance at keeping.

1. Tweetups

I have to make it to some more tweetups or other social media gatherings.   It’s been a blast meeting some interesting folks on Twitter, but it is time to turn more of those into real friendships and sit around a real table having a real discussion.   In the last year or so, I’ve only met a few tweeps and I cherish the times we’ve been in the same room, and the subsequent conversations.   They take on a different dynamic when you know there is a real person behind the avatar.

A good start will be the Writer’s Conference that Bill Ivie from I-70 Baseball (and Baseball Digest) will be putting on in February.   I hope to meet many of you at that event.

Quite frequently, business takes me to St. Louis and I get a chance to take in a Cardinals game or two.   Maybe with a little bit better planning, we can do some additional tweetups, battl or some other social gathering.

2. Attend a Spring Training game

Last year I came close to pulling this off, but close doesn’t count.  This year it will be different.  Somehow, someway, I will find my way to Jupiter or some other neighboring planet to catch a spring training game.

3. Read at least one non-Cardinals baseball book per month

This will start with Roger Maris: Baseball’s Reluctant Hero – that counts, right ????   OK, at least let me ease into this one.

4. Don’t add to the Cuss Jar

I’m glad there isn’t an August resolutions tradition – this one would have been broken immediately.   My daughter has asked me to do this frequently, and in her honor, I shall.   Fortunately, this one is a lot easier to do today than before the Insight Bowl game last night (the jar runneth over in the last five minutes) !

5. Hit blogging deadlines and learn to be brief

I have to give a big thanks to Bill Ivie for giving me an opportunity to contribute at I-70 Baseball.   I love the work that the other contributors do, and I’m proud to be a tiny little part of that.   I also have to give Bill a huge thanks for being so understanding when I don’t hit deadlines – which seems to be about every week.   For a historical writer, there’s absolutely no excuse – it’s not like these things just happened !   Oddly enough, it is frequently something in the news that triggers an idea, but there’s no reason not to have a cornucopia of articles ready to go, so Bill doesn’t have to stay up late and do his editorial things to my work.   After all, he has an infant and sleep might be somewhat high on the priority list for the new mom and dad.

Another thing I’m trying to learn is brevity, and it’s hard.   There is always so much context that you want to share, but too often it gets in the way of the actual story you are trying to tell.   I know from my own experience that I’m less likely to read a blog that goes on and on and on (sort of like this one, at almost 1200 words right now).  So I’ll start this resolution now and close.

But before I do, I want to thank all of you that take the time to read the material here and over at I-70 Baseball.   It means a lot, and I do appreciate it. I am even more grateful for those of you that take the time to leave a comment, especially one that kicks off a discussion here or someplace else like Twitter or the Google Wave.

And now, my final three words for 2010 ……

Happy New Year

Looking at Hit by Pitch rates over the last half century

As I was researching my latest article for I-70 Baseball (yes, I really do research when I write – lots of it), I found a most unexpected trend in the number of batters that were hit by a pitch.    In fact, it was the exact opposite of what I would have expected, so I had to dig in a little bit more and see if I could come up with an explanation.

Here is a chart showing the average number of NL batters hit by a pitch between 1960 and 2010.   For the two strike shortened seasons, 1981 and 1994, I extrapolated the numbers to a full 162 game schedule.   I did the same for 1960 and 1961 when the NL only played 154 games.

HBP data courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com

 

Let’s take a look at the assumptions that I had as I started this little project.

More players were hit in the 60s than now

Well, clearly from the data, that is not true.   There was a little bit of a blip in the early 60s that I will write off to the impact of expansion, but generally there is a downward trend in the data until the early 80s when the numbers started steadily rising.   I am not going to argue with the data, but there is no question that pitchers used to throw a lot more inside than they do now.   If you even looked like you were thinking about reaching towards the outside corner then guys like Don Drysdale and Bob Gibson would soon test your reflexes, and courage.   Surprisingly, for all of those pitches that were thrown inside, not many of them made contact with the batter.

Expansion means more AAA pitchers

I expected to see a much larger increase shortly after the league expanded in 1962, 1969 and again in 1993.  Each time the league added two teams, and that meant that about 25 pitchers would be throwing in the major leagues that wouldn’t have been the year before.  Maybe it is worth looking at strikeout rates and k/bb ratios to see more of an impact, but there is nothing in the data to suggest that expansion lead to more batters being hit, immediately or over the next few years.

Maybe I’m looking at this from the wrong direction.   Maybe these 25 AAA pitchers couldn’t hit a batter with any more regularity than they could the strike zone.   Nah – there may be something in expansion, but not the big trend shift that was expecting to see.

Umpires taking control

This is the one that gave me a huge chuckle because I generally dislike rule changes “to make the game better.”   The league started phasing in warnings when pitchers were throwing at batters in the early part of the 1980’s, reaching the mandatory state we have today in 1994.   It clearly has had the desired effect – ABSOLUTELY NOT!   I love it !!!!

The average number of batters being hit by a pitch had been steadily decreasing since a high of 40 in 1965 to a low of 21 in 1984.   After the rule changes, the numbers started going up year after year, with the rate significantly increasing after the mandatory warnings were instigated.

Equipment changes – the batting helmet

Improvements in protective equipment has led to a more ferocious game in hockey and football, so why not baseball ?   Well, mainly because there just isn’t that much protective equipment.   The league made batting helmets mandatory in 1971, but most players were either using them already or wore small protective inserts under their regular cap.   The rules changed again in 1983, requiring the use of batting helmets with ear flaps.

Perhaps if we stretch a bit, the ear flaps might have some impact (ok, that was a pun).   But we’re not buying this, are we ?   No, this is like the classic marketing data example of correlating diapers and beer, drawing the conclusion that babies drink beer.  No, ear flaps did not lead to an increase in HBP rates.   Maybe all of the arm, elbow, knee, shin and foot protection some of these modern day gladiators wear might make them less able to get out of the way of an inside pitch, but that is largely moot because the pitchers just don’t throw inside like they used to.

What is it, then ?

One possibility is that pitchers today just don’t have the control as those that played the game before them.   I’m willing to give this some merit.   I’ve seen Mitch Williams pitch, and while Al Hrabosky used a similar Tasmanian Devil windup, the results were remarkably different.  Hrabosky could paint the corner with just about every one of his pitches, and all you could say about Williams is that the ball was generally headed in the direction of home plate.

There’s another more plausible explanation.   What started appearing in baseball in the early 90s, got real popular after about 1998 and then fell off sharply after 2005 ?

I’ll give you a clue.   It’s an 8 letter word that rhymes with spairoids (if that were an actual word).

It might be just as simple as that.   It might be simple retaliation for batters hitting some moonshots that they weren’t capable of in prior seasons.   Maybe just a little bit of chemically induced rage might make a pitcher throw at a batter in anger when he wouldn’t have under different circumstances.

We will never know, but it is fun to try to speculate the cause behind the effect.