According to the P-D (via ESPN.com), Yadi has the 5th most pickoffs since 1987, even though he's only been in the league for 4 years.  I wondered, who is ranked ahead of him?  I couldn't find pickoff leaderboards on baseball-reference.com, and I guess I'm too lazy to hunt down other sources.  Does anybody know where I could find that information, specifically in a freely available web-based source?

Jerry Crasnick at ESPN says:

Shortstop David Eckstein is a serious long shot to return, and Cardinals fans would love Kennedy to leave town right along with him. But the Cardinals owe Kennedy $7.5 million over the next two seasons, so it appears they're stuck with him.

The new hot rumor has the Cardinals pursuing Braves shortstop Edgar Renteria, a local favorite who left St. Louis as a free agent in 2004. Renteria, who's hitting .333, is dispensable with the emergence of young infielder Yunel Escobar in Atlanta. But the Cardinals won't trade Rasmus, who's in line to replace Edmonds as their center fielder in 2009, and they don't appear to have enough young pitching to match up with the Braves.

Renteria is the sentimental pick, and I know we're known for embracing our former players, but think back to '04 when Edgar defected to the Red Sox for supposedly a few million dollars over the course of a 4 year contract.  I realize the details of those negotiations can never be fully public, but I still believe he left for close to if not less than $1M/yr, and took a shot at the organization on his way out.  I can't find the exact quote, but something about how he felt more "loved" by the Red Sox.  That didn't sit well with me, and obviously I've held a grudge.  Maybe that makes me the exception amongst Cards fans.

In one year, Eckstein seems to have gone from fan-favorite scrappy World Series MVP to injury-prone wimpy old veteran.  Am I missing something?  Look at what Eckstein has done.  His health has been inconsistent this year, but he's hitting .307 where his previous career high is .294, and he's only 32 years old.  His FP and RF are down, but that is likely a result of his back problems.  You could make an argument that those very problems are enough to make him too risky, but I'll leave that up to the team doctors to decide.  I think if he's healthy, I'd love to see him back on a 2 year deal at around $3-3.5M/yr, maybe with a 3rd year option.

A couple months ago when Haren was on track for a Cy Young award, a lot of people re-hashed that trade that sent him to Oakland for Mulder and talked about how badly we made out in that deal.  I didn't think much of it, mostly because it took 3 years for him to get to this point.  Haren was a combined 28-25 in '05 and '06.  Besides, you have to give up something to get something in trade, and while some will work out to be a loss, others work out to be a gain, and I think Jocketty's track record shows many more instances of the latter.

Anyway, many have noticed that Wainwright has steadily improved this year, but I haven't seen any mention of Haren's struggles in the 2nd half.  I thought I'd show them side by side for comparison.  Full stats after the jump.

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There was a graphic during the pregame show last night that noted how Wainwright and Zambrano are the only pitchers who have improved their ERAs every month since the beginning of the season.  Wainwright secured an improved July with his start last night, so I thought I'd take a look at the rest of his numbers as well.  Then I wondered about our boy Rick Ankiel, and whether he was showing any improvement on the plate discipline so many fear he hasn't mastered well enough to hack it in the majors.  Hit the jump for all the numbers.

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I know it's already decided that we probably won't see Reyes again until September, but I was going over Anthony's splits at Baseball-Reference yesterday and found something interesting.  He seemed to have a pretty significant catcher split (.238/.329/.377 vs .275/.336/.532).  I didn't even realize they had those splits.  Baseball-Reference gets better every day!  Anyway, I did some more figuring on my own, and here's what I came up with...

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I got to thinking about Yadi's improbable performance at the plate lately, and considering the lack of offense we've had at catcher of late, I thought it might be interesting to see how his streak compares to other Cardinal catchers.

Turns out, pretty good.  Baseball-Reference's game logs only go back to '57, but since then, there have only been 5 hitting streaks by a Cardinal catcher that were longer than Yadi's 13 games.  And 4 of them belong to Ted Simmons.

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According to stltoday.com, Carp "experienced tightness" in his elbow, and was examined by Paletta today.  No word on the seriousness of the condition, so hopefully it's just precautionary.  No need to risk him when we haven't even made it through a full rotation yet.

There's a lot of chatter about it on Cards Talk already, but nobody seems to have any additional info.

There was a bit of discussion about this already on a previous main page post, but I'd be interested to see how some of the silent VEBers feel about this.

I myself am a non-smoker, and about as anti-smoking as it gets, but I'm not sure I'm in favor of this plan.  I'm not about to start a letter writing campaign, but I don't see what was wrong with having designated smoking areas.  They were there last year, and I don't recall being bothered by them.

Also, one point that's been seldom raised, but (I think) we can all agree on, is that they should have made this announcement before tickets went on sale, so smokers would have at least known what they were getting into.

Multiple selections are allowed, so feel free to say you're in favor of the ban, but you think smokers should be able to see/hear the action, or that you don't really care about the ban, but think they should have atleast announced it before tickets went on sale.

In the middle of the P-D's article today about Schmidt, Carp's contract details are listed.

2007 $8.5M
2008 $10.5M
2009 $14M
2010 $14.5M
2011 $15M
2012 $15M (or $1M buyout)

It appears the original report was off just a tad, as the total value is now $63.5M, or $77.5M if the option is exercised.