I thought it would be fun to look back at the 2008 prospects list created in late 2007, just after the rule 5 draft by Futureredbirds readers and see where they are now.  This list is two years old so Wallace isn't on it, Kozmawas 11 (and I cropped it at 10 for now) and Morty was still new with Koz.  See the list after the jump.

All stats are from Fangraphs.com this morning.

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I think one of the most important questions to answer right now is who do we want to be managing the All Star game next year?

I am not entirely sure how the All Star game manager is decided if the current manager of a team leaves that team or league so I am assuming the WS managers will be returning to their respective clubs.

To you who presents the best option?  Who should get to manager the NL on our turf?

Torre or Manuel?

Who would you rather see manage the AL?

Francona or Maddon?

Take a vote!

Schedule

The Cardinals open the season on April 6th at home vs the Pirates for 4 games followed by Houston for 3 with no off days planned during that homestand.

They close out the regular season on Oct 4th vs the Brewers.

We play 7 in Chitown and 9 at home with the Cubbies.

They only have 2 trips with more than 2 cities or 7 games which is nice.

Lastly IL play will consist of: Royals Tiggers, Twinkies at Busch and going to Reyesland and KC

Beyond the Box Score did an analysis of this years CY award in both the AL and NL Link and used a formula to assign points to each pitcher based on typical "voting" categories.  Not necessarily the best categories to evaluate a pitcher by but what categories are most likely to be used by voters when choosing the award.

The formula is W*6-L*2+SV*2.5+SO/12+SHO+(5/9-ERA/9)*IP then 12 bonus points are added if your team is in first place.

BTBS only looked at pitchers with over 10 wins so Lohse, Looper and Wellemeyer from the Cards.  I started out wondering where Wainwright would fall if he had 10 wins and ended up calculating the score for all 5 of our main starters and some of our main bullpen arms.

Here are the points:

Lohse 100
Wellemeyer 94
Wainwright 79
Looper 76
Franklin 70
Perez 39
Pineiro 29
Springer 28
Izzy 26
Thompson 25
KMac 17

KMac is hurt by having one save, holds not counting and his high loss number compared to low wins.  I do find it funny though that Pineiro has been just as "good" in the eyes of voters as Springer just because one is a starter and one is a reliever. 

In the end it is just a neat little chart showing where we rack and stack.

If you have other names I can plug them into my spreadsheet or you can do it yourself and post them here.

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=3545338

Baseball Umpires and Owners have reached a deal to allow instant replay for boundary calls (fair/foul, homer/not homer)  I would assume all calls from now on will be fair/no homer to allow the play to unfold and then get overturned similar to the fumble rules in the NFL.

What is your take on this?  I can see this is a good thing and a bad thing.  As long as it is limited to close plays and not used consistently for balls and strikes I don't see it as a bad thing at all.

EDIT:  More information about it http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/columns/story?columnist=kurkjian_tim&id=3546044

This column has the actual implementation that is going to happen.  There will be a War Room that has all the video feeds available from both teams for the game.  That room will feed them to the Umpire reviewing the feed.  Replays can only be called by an Umpire, and only for Home Run call disputes, NOT for a ball landing on the foul line.  At least 1 Umpire will remain on the field at all times.

With the news that Piniero will likely miss his next scheduled start, and knowing that if he does hit the DL they can retroactive it to his last start, which leaves him eligible for his next turn through the rotation (thus he only misses one Saturday by hitting the DL).

If Joel does hit the DL that opens a roster spot.  The big question is who starts for him?  And also who fills the spot until then and after then.  The obvious starters are Reyes and Pairisi, but what about Boggs, Garcia, etc?  It would use up an option for some of the others which might not be a good thing.  What about Thompson?  So little has been heard about his status that it makes me wonder what he is doing.

For the bullpen arm before and after the start do you think they activate Izzy? 
Jimenez?  Motte probably isn't ready, but Worrell might be.  Lots of options and it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

Another option is to go a man short in the pitching staff for a few games and call up a bench player, Mather, Barden, etc.

So what is your take?  How should this roster spot be handled for the next 10 days?

Since everyone seems to be wanting the 2007 version of gameday I wanted to give you to tools to "build your own" links for every game.

Today's game should be the following:

http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/gameday/y2007/gd.html?2008_04_03_colmlb_slnmlb_1&brand=mlb

If you look at this link you will see 2 key elements, first is the date, second is the teams.  To make a working link you must change those fields to match the game you want.

Team Names are an oddity as well.  Notice we are not stl but are in fact sln (st louis national league).  For cities with two teams you usually find the use of A and N (NYA and NYN I beleive are the Yanks and Mets).

If you find an odd name please post it.

Teams I know for sure are:
mil=Brewers
chn=Cubs
cin=Reds
pit=Pirates
hou=Astros

col=Rockies

In exchange for Fukudome.  Cardinals GM John Mozeliak said "Fukudome will help our struggling offense and will fill a key gap in our lineup, at the same time Wainwright was just taking away starts from Anthony Reyes and I really wanted to see him in the rotation this year"

Edit: I changed the title so as not to confuse people browsing the archives or who just saw it this morning and didn't have enough coffee.

With our currently injured starters our rotation will be very different through out the year.  What do you guys think of our chances as people come back?

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So with the newest addition I think now would be a good time to look at what the projected roster is shaping out to be.

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http://www.stltoday.com/blogzone/bird-land/bird-land/2008/02/camp-cards-tony-gets-the-led-out/

JUPITER, Fla. -- Cardinals manager Tony La Russa promised the assembled fourth estate a juicy scoop for report day, and he would have delivered, too -- had his pitching coach not apparently threatened him with harm.

See, La Russa had planned to christen a new closer.

"Chris Carpenter," the manager said.

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http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/business/stories.nsf/story/3166DADDBC99B0A6862573DA0017649B?OpenDoc ument

It seems now they are finally admitting that they won't finish Ballpark Village on time.  What took them so long?  It didn't take me that long to figure out that if you don't start construction that you can't finish it.

"A few months of delay isn't the end of the world, Bill DeWitt III said.

"I just don't know if there will be anything open by July 2009; it will be a push," DeWitt said. "(But) we need to resist the temptation to think of this project as a showcase for the All-Star Game. It is more than that; it is the future of St. Louis.""

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/sports/stories.nsf/cardinals/story/2D3C043CAF5D75BA86257393002570CD ?OpenDocument

Several more front office moves were announced yesterday.  A few of these have already been announced I think. I like the moves:

Jaron Madison from Padres front office to second in command under Lunhow

Mike Girsch from amateur scouting director to director of baseball development, basically moving the stat geek from under Lunhow to under Mo

Brent Strom (former pitching coach for Stros and Royals) will work under Dyar Miller as a roving pitching instructor focusing on minor leagues

Mark Riggins has decided to decline the shift from pitching coordinator (Miller's new job) to the Memphis pitching coach.  Riggins is going to be the Cubs coordinator now.

This leaves Memphis pitching coach open.....please enter Matheny to see if he can handle it.

It appears the Cards are down but not out on Taguchi, they have declined his option but aren't saying the door is closed for him to return.

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/sports/stories.nsf/cardinals/story/48F09069179BA0A58625738B001E42BA ?OpenDocument

So this is something that should make most of us happy.

http://www.stltoday.com/blogs/sports-bird-land/2007/11/molina-pujols-snag-fielding-awards/

Molina and Pujols were recognized for being the best defensively at their position in all of baseball in the second ever Fielding Bible Awards.

I wonder what this means for the Gold Gloves.  Goold also throws in the line that Molina is the favorite right now for Catcher and we know Pujols has some competition this year.

Personally this is how I see the NL GG going down for positions that I paid attention too:

C: Martin
1B: Helton
SS: Rollins with Tulo very close
3B: Rolen (though it could be close and he could miss it badly I just don't know)
OF: Griffy, Jones, not sure

Bernie took a look at new manager candidates in his most recent blog at http://www.stltoday.com/blogs/sports-bernies-extra-points/2007/10/if-la-russa-leaves-next-manager-is /
He explains each choice over there so before you rag him for his options I suggest reading the blog for those.  What I wanted to do here was vote using a poll on who you like best out of these options.

His list of names includes:

JOSE OQUENDO
TERRY PENDLETON
JOE GIRARDI
JIM RIGGLEMAN
BOB BRENLY
WHITEY HERZOG
OZZIE SMITH
MIKE MATHENY
ANDY VAN SLYKE
RON ROENICKE
BILL MUELLER
DAVE DUNCAN

For this poll I took out Duncan and Herzog, for reasons stated by Bernie in his blog.

Again I am unsure of Tony's path and supposedly this weekend will decide it but it is never too early to start thinking about the future.

The Cardinals and general manager Walt Jocketty have "parted ways," according to a source with direct knowledge of the situation.

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/sports/stories.nsf/cardinals/story/32456B7DBB9EEC44862573690069E6D7 ?OpenDocument

Assistant general manager John Mozeliak has been named interim GM by Cardinals chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. and is a candidate to succeed Jocketty on a full-time basis. Ok, who should the new GM be? Post Ideas once we have enough I will post a poll, keep in mind the Lunhow is not a candidate at this time.

Update [2007-10-3 16:42:56 by lboros]: i promoted this from the diaries section and deleted the duplicates --- thanks to everybody who posted this news, i'm rather late to find it out. i'm stunned, frankly; didn't see it coming. walt did great things for this franchise and ranks among its all-time front-office luminaries. rather obviously, the difference of opinion about the direction of the franchise came to a head. it's just over 1 year since luhnow was promoted at the expense of bruce manno; apparently walt never got over that, and couldn't live with the implications. he was reportedly unhappy all season, and the revelations of the last couple of days (particularly the comment in joe strauss's article that farm-system personnel were afraid to talk to luhnow's guys, for fear of reprisal from the jocketty camp) paint a pretty stark picture of an unworkable marriage.

I figured since the season is now officially over a small recap of the stats for this team would be in order.

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Dear Diary,
I wasn't sure this was worth an entry at first but when I thought about it for a second time I decided that I had a lot to say about this article I recently found linked from sabernomics.com.

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Several people have brought up the idea of having a modified 6 man rotation for September, charting out predicted starts this is how it would end up.  Some positives to note 1)Wainwright gets to pitch every 5th day 2)Wainwright gets 2 of the 5 Cubs games 3)Mulder gets one Cubs game and they have problems against lefties.

Some issues though are the possible problems Reyes might run into with "too much" rest and if that is an issue then I say either pull him or slot him in every 5th day if he is doing good.

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Seeing as how people keep bringing up our "big" Sundays I wanted to investigate this a little.  First off how many wins and losses have we had on Sundays and what our overall run differential was on that day along with how many blowouts we had.

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