More photos » by Lenny Ignelzi - AP

Los Angles Dodgers' Manny Ramirez, center, walks with agent Scott Boras, right, and Boras' staff member Charlie May, through the upper decks of Petco Park to enter the facility avoiding fans and media prior to the Dodgers' baseball game against the San Diego Padres on Friday, July 3, 2009, in San Diego.

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Boras once again did a bit of lobbying when he met with reporters on Wednesday. He reiterated his stance that the Cardinals are entirely able to sign Holliday and accomplish a new deal with superstar Albert Pujols.

"I always say, these are owners' decisions," he said. "I just say that I think the fans need to know these are choices."

The more I hear about Scott Boras, and more particularly from Scott Boras, the less able I am to conjure, for blogging purposes, plausible reasons that he is a good salesman. I have heard this particular line of reasoning this bluntly one other time, in recent memory: at a state fair exhibition floor, from a second-rate carnival barker selling an as-seen-near-TVs sushi-rolling contraption.

He'd just started his sales-pitch, and our small group, alone, stopped to listen; my girlfriend speaks Japanese and is fond of both Japanese culture and bad infomercials, and the confluence of circumstances seemed too much to resist. But his pitch is not geared for four people who know each other—he's obviously familiar with the complete Ron Popeil oeuvre, and his laugh lines, as he shows off his kitchen gadget, are meant for large studio audiences. He begins, addressing us directly, by assuming that we don't know the difference between sushi and sashimi. The correct pronunciation, whispered into my ear, follows, and given how Boras-ly he responds to this usurpation of his authority I can only imagine that this is how all Scott Boras conversations really start.

Having been told, implicitly, that we know more about his product than he does, he gets outwardly hostile. It is, for a while, as though he is attempting to justify his purchase to us. If there were more people I honestly think he would have told me that I couldn't be cool unless I was rolling my sushi with the push of a button—that supplies were going fast, and I, who could win the admiration of his friends and enemies and the girl on his arm with this simple device, should not, must not miss out. But with just the four of us there he said, his Popeil-voice breaking into a kind of heckler-in-reverse yell, that we looked like we could afford this thing, didn't we?

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More photos » by Eric Risberg - ASSOCIATED PRESS

San Francisco Giants starting pitcher Brad Penny has an enormous wrist in the first inning of a baseball game in San Francisco, Sunday, Sept. 13, 2009. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

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The Brad Penny deal is (as of this writing, one year, $7.5 million with various performance bonuses)... fine. Typical, I'd say, both for the market and for the Cardinals, who have once more opened up a Hot Stove season by making the exact move that the inventors of the DeWallet name expected. I can only imagine it was an ugly day for Post-Dispatch comment moderators.

Penny throws a sinker, which is usually code—it says "this guy doesn't strike out as many people as you think he does." But it surprises me every time that Penny's career strikeout rate is 6.3, and his walk rate 2.9. Those numbers just don't seem right for a guy who's 6'4" and, ha, ha, 200 pounds, who has 33 Google results for his name and the phrase Country Hardball. That's, I don't know, a good Sidney Ponson? A better Jason Marquis? I can't tie the guy who reared back in the first inning of that all-star game and threw fastballs past Ichiro to the guy whose strikeout rate last year was lower than Doug Davis's.  

Penny has always been more exciting than his peripherals, and according to Fangraphs his stuff hasn't yet taken a hit; his fastball still averages 94 miles per hour, and he still throws it 71% of the time, more often than any starter older than 25. Then, of course, there is the lens through which we must view all Cardinals pitching transactions at this point: It's a Dave Duncan move, and that fastball is a sinker.

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More photos » by Anonymous - AP

In this 1986 file photo, St. Louis Cardinals manager Whitey Herzog relaxes with a narrowly cropped adult beverage after the American League beat Herzog's National League squad in baseball's All-Star Game. The Veterans Committee announced the voting results Monday, Dec. 7, 2009.

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Congratulations to Whitey Herzog, the newest Hall of Famer-elect, and maybe the most universally loved Cardinals figure whose nickname isn't a variation on The Man. Whitey presided over one of the most exciting effective teams in the history of baseball, yolking a desire for speed at all positions to a group of speedsters who, saints be praised, could also use that speed to play defense and get on base. When people talk about baseball As It Should Be Played they aren't really talking about the lumbering fifties or the dynastic seventies, even if they inadvertently reference those players—they're talking about Whiteyball. 

Forget Jack Morris—if one figure defines baseball in the eighties, in all its powder-blue, polyester glory, it's Whitey Herzog, who created a style of baseball that was perfect for the era's enormous, astroturfed cookie-cutters and rode it to three pennants and World Series championship. 

by Charles Rex Arbogast - AP

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Current state of the official rumor of the weekend, that the Cubs were about to trade Milton Bradley and sign Mike Cameron: no no-comment. Cameron for Bradley isn't a major upgrade, but after a season in which Bradley was declared The Problem the Cubs are more or less forced to make it. 

I don't doubt, at this point, that team chemistry is important in some vague capacity, and starting from that viewpoint it's impossible to avoid counting Milton Bradley among the members of the un-sainted Dick Allen class. But I think the Cubs—and the Red Sox, the Yankees, the Mets—have a particular disadvantage when dealing with ostensible clubhouse cancers. Everything Milton Bradley did for an entire disappointing year bounced around among the fans and the media and the postgame comments until his exit became inevitable. In less demanding markets it's easy for a bounce-back year or a winning team to obscure things like this, but Chicago needed stories, and Milton Bradley became the big one. 

Cameron is, of course, one of the potential bargains of the offseason, and the Cubs, who trotted out three tweener corner outfielders last year, are in need of someone who can unquestionably handle center field. It would have been nice to see him playing right for the Cardinals, and spotting Colby, too young to be platooned, against the proverbial Tough Left-handers", but that was probably always wish-casting; I don't see any reason for him to play a corner so long as at least one suitor wants him in center. 

Meanwhile: I'm not sure this is a good thing, but the decision to offer arbitration to Mark DeRosa—uncertain after the Braden Looper non-move last year—is shaping up to be one of my favorite moves off the Cardinals off-season. Take a look at the friendly Rotoworld box and then follow the jump. 

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More photos » by Gene J. Puskar - AP

If it weren't for Connie Mack having managed until he was the last surviving man to put a space inside the word "baseball", Tony La Russa would be two and a half seasons from becoming the winningest manager of all time.

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It says something about the current state of managerial analysis that Chris Jaffe's work on Evaluating Baseball's Managers began with a presentation about how "lucky" and "unlucky" certain things were. This is how he describes his discovery of the Birnbaum Database, one of the primary analytical tools in his book: 

The idea for this book first popped in my head when I saw Phil Birnbaum give a presentation at the annual SABR convention in 2006. He created a database to determine how much teams under/overachieved in a given season. He termed the disparity luck. However, while luck is certainly one factor that explains why a team would do better or worse than one might expect, it's not the only reason. For example, looking at the results it was amazing how "lucky" teams managed by Earl Weaver always were, or how "unlucky" Don Baylor's squads were.

Jaffe found that one man's luck—relative performance of hitters and pitchers, expected wins and losses, and expected runs scored and allowed—correlated more closely to managerial career length than one would expect if sample sizes and true talent were at issue.

The final result of his end-run around the typical manager analysis stumbling blocks is this book, the first major work on the topic since the regrettably out-of-print Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, which we looked at briefly in August. It's a big deal anywhere; it's an even bigger deal here in St. Louis, home of one of the most managerially influenced teams in baseball.

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by Tom Gannam - AP

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Today's front page post is running long, and you know what that means—an unconvincing promise that there will be a full front page entry up some time between two and five. There will be a front page post up between two and five! It's about Chris Jaffe's new book, Evaluating Baseball's Managers; he was kind enough to provide me with the sections that deal with the Cardinals' most illustrious managers. Non-surprise: Tony La Russa is among the best managers of all time. Surprise: He's among the best managers of all time... at lineup management. Running late also means... bullet points: 

• Does Joe Strauss hate to be the bearer of bad omens, and do it anyway, having read The Human Comedy at an impressionable age, or does he live for this? I think it's debatable. But it's true that with no working idea of what Albert Pujols is looking to retire on devoting a franchise-player-sized chunk of payroll to your Scottie Pippen of choice is something of a crapshoot. I don't pretend to know what's best for Albert Pujols, but as the team remaining competitive goes the looming and unsurveyed massiveness of his contract extension is a serious hindrance to long-term planning. 
• Well, at least ranking 29th in the recent SI.com/Baseball America team prospect power rankings meant that the Cardinals got a full-sized blurb. For me the Mark DeRosa trade will always—this is a provisional always, due to be edited out surreptitiously in 2015 should Brett Wallace become the player I thought Daric Barton was—sting worse than the Holliday move. DeRosa was theoretically an extremely useful player for the Cardinals, at least until they acquired Holliday and Lugo and pinned him to third base, but Chris Perez and Jess Todd were the last pieces of lumber on the 2008 Relief Depth Stockpile. 
• That said, I'd be interested to know where the Cardinals' system would have ranked had Wallace stuck around; they did, after all, graduate Rasmus, Perez, Boggs, and Motte, and Daryl Jones and Pete Kozma, not to mention most of the Adam Reifer-y sleepers, had disappointing years. The problem isn't just the Holliday trade; it's the relative weakness of the 2007 draft as the 2005 draft graduates. Choosing Adam Ottavino and Pete Kozma in consecutive years has, to this point, made it much more difficult to say goodbye to the Walrus. 
• But at least there's Shelby Miller. I'll admit it right here: The Cardinals' top prospect being a pitcher has, in post-Anthony Reyes America, made me extremely nervous. The Cardinals' Top Prospect pitchers of the decade, according to Baseball America: Anthony Reyes (2005-2006), Blake Hawksworth (2004), (2003), Jimmy Journell (2002), Bud Smith (2001), Rick Ankiel (2000.) Welcome to the club, Shelby. I hope you can hit!

Background

Ray Lankford is my favorite player of all time, and were it not for the unpleasant way in which he first left the Cardinals I would not be blogging about baseball, now or ever. I couldn't find it in the archives, but if you find a run of Rob Neyer's ESPN.com columns circa August, 2001 you'll catch the first time I read those gateway letters O-P-S in sequence. Neyer, maybe the champion sabermetric pied piper of the decade, was using them to defend Ray Lankford, who I'd enjoyed watching for what to this point were completely nebulous reasons. That was the beginning of my baseball education: finding ways to defend my favorite player. If I'd been a Kerry Robinson fan I might, right now, be trolling this very site. 

So being a Ray Lankford fan made me a line-toeing internet seamhead. It also made me extremely unscrupulous. To be a Ray Lankford fan was to be constantly, incrementally disappointed—in Lankford, in the Cardinals' handling of him, in the teams' finishes around him. He began his career at the end of Whiteyball and ended it in 2004, watching from off the playoff roster while the Cardinals got killed by my least favorite team ever, the Jimmy Fallon-era Red Sox. As a Ray Lankford fan one must find one's own ways of being satisfied by baseball. These ways might be disingenuous; they might detract from your social enjoyment of the game, as when a casual-fan friend of yours praises the little things that someone who cannot hit is apparently doing and you must, to avoid striking him, leave the room; but they are necessary. 

Proposition

Ray Lankford, new to the ballot this year, is a Hall of Famer.

No, no—that isn't it. I will make myself believe Ray Lankford, new to the ballot this year, is a Hall of Famer, using arguments I know intuitively to be false. This is closer.

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[ed. note: I suppose I should schedule this for 5 AM instead of 5 PM in the future...]

Here's the thing about the Cardinals' first big-ticket move of the offseason, resigning Jason LaRue for one more season—if Matt Pagnozzi wasn't good enough to take the job now, with LaRue coming off a season in which he not only put up a .615 OPS but also had the rest of the Cardinals rip off his whole mustache thing, why is he still around, sucking at-bats away from Bryan Anderson? 

Backup catchers are not very important, goes the refrain, and ideally that's true; but if a backup catcher were to become important, the 36 year-old who's hit .194/.286/.323 over the last four years isn't going to step up and fill in. It's an odd choice, and an odd scenario; Bryan Anderson might be the fourth string catcher in this organization, but should Molina get hurt he seems like the only real medium-term option. 

I can only assume Jason LaRue has some intangible value to the team; perhaps he has spent all winter in seclusion, coming up with a new and even more off-putting method of facial hair solidarity. 

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Ruben Gotay was near the top of the this year's crop of would-be Ken Phelps All-Stars, and while I might have preferred the Cardinals jump on PCL Three True Outcomes king Dallas McPherson, who went to Oakland, it's good to see the Cardinals exhausting all options at positions other than backup catcher.

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Our look at the dominant St. Louis Browns of the 1880s could not have been better timed, apparently; up today at the Hardball Times is an excerpt from Chris Jaffe's monumental work on evaluating baseball's managers, Evaluating Baseball's Managers, that posits as an explanation for their success Charlie Comiskey's early focus on defense. It's worth reading if you're interested in managers in general; this is, as far as I can tell, the first serious, book-length attempt to understand managerial value since Bill James's more than a decade ago, and it looks extremely promising.

Pull-quote, chosen for maximum present-day relevance: 

Control pitching plus great defense equaled a dynasty for St. Louis in the 1880s.

The question arises how much credit Comiskey should be given for devising this strategy. Looking at the historical record, this philosophy originated in St. Louis in the 1880s. There were virtually no deep strategic concerns for the game prior to this period. As late as the 1890s, elemental bits of baseball fundamentals such as the cutoff play had not been worked out. [...] Other teams may have contained control pitchers and good fielders before, but none intentionally built their game around these twin pillars of run prevention until St. Louis.

Pitching to contact, defensive competence... Dave Duncan, whose out-of-office message on Outlook said he was "[...] questing for the palace of this 'Silver King'", could not be reached for comment.

I'll hand it to baseball for this: It does its best to drag the news cycle, which at this point is neither kicking nor screaming nor breathing, all the way into December, when the trade and free agent markets give it a lift. Friday the Hall of Fame ballots were announced, warming the cockles of sportswriters everywhere. There have been interesting ballots and there have been Chinese-curse interesting ballots, but try as I might, there is almost no Cardinals news to wring out of them, save for the return, from storage, of labored, indignant paragraphs about Mark McGwire's Hall of Fame candidacy.

But baseball news is baseball news, at this point, right? And discussion is discussion. So in the grand tradition of blogging, I'd like to show you this weird thing I found: Jack Morris, apparently inevitable Hall of Fame mistake, vs. two Matt Morrises stacked on top of each other. (This is more interesting, I assure you, than Lee Smith vs. two Bud Smiths stacked on top of each other, although height-wise that would be much closer.) 

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