Way back in the olden days befor YouTube(like 3 years ago), there was this thing called "public access television."  Some of you may remember it.

Here's a great Cardinals-related clip from "The Matt Sinopole Show" that some of my friends worked on.

The other clips posted are pretty good, but I thought everyone in these parts would especially get a kick out of this one.

Enjoy!

 

"Keeping the ball in the park" is most definitely a skill worth having for a major league pitcher.  The less homeruns allowed by a pitcher, the better his team's chances of winning the game.  Preventing homeruns is especially crucial for pitchers who don't strike out a lot of batters.  If a pitcher allows a couple of batters to reach base via base hit or walk, a homerun suddenly puts three runs on the board for the opposition.  (That's why a high strike-out rate/low walk rate pitcher like Johan Santana can give up a long ball now and then - 22 last season - and still have such a low ERA; those homeruns often were given up with few or zero baserunners.)

But what about giving up singles, doubles and triples?  Opposing slugging percentage takes all of these into account, in addition to homeruns.  The only problem with slugging percentage is that it measures as equal a light hitter who goes 4/4 with 4 singles and a power hitter who goes 1/4 with a home run.  Now, maybe these two players are equal sluggers, but equal power hitters they are not.    

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Point: Sean McAdam has doubts about the Cards' chances in '06:

Despite moving into a new stadium, the Cards have refused to increase their budget, causing them to lose a number of free agents, including outfielder Reggie Sanders and second baseman Mark Grudzielanek. Larry Bigbie and Junior Spivey, their respective replacements, can hardly be considered upgrades. Starter Matt Morris left for San Francisco, leaving a significant hole in the rotation, and adding Braden Looper to the bullpen may not be such a positive move.

Counterpoint: Adrian Mott at his Baseball Nuggets site "scratches his head" about McAdam's Cards blurb in an entry entitled New Stadium, New Outfield, Same Results and thinks the Redbirds are primed for another first place finish.  

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Here's an interesting STLToday piece on the Cardinals' approximate $90MM payroll ceiling for 2006.  Here's Dewitt from the article:

DeWitt says calls for a $100 million payroll are misguided and overlook the franchise's increased commitment to becoming more self-sufficient.

"It's not just what you spend on the major-league payroll," DeWitt said. "In the last year we've purchased a Double-A franchise (in Springfield, Mo.), paid more than double for early-round draft picks and opened an academy in the Dominican Republic. We've made a much greater investment in international scouting and player development. Perhaps those things aren't as apparent as major-league payroll, but they're there and they have tremendous significance."

I think this is an interesting point.  Jacking up the Major League payroll now may bring some instant gratification and short-term success, but putting that same money (or even a fraction of it) in player development could bring about returns exponentially larger than initial investments.

Any thoughts?  
 

This is cool.  Thanks to Baseball Info Solutions, it's now possible to compile by location pitches turned into hits for any batter.

For the sake of comparison, Pitch Zone charts for Albert Pujols and Corey Patterson are used.  While Albert is at-or-above league average throughout the strikezone, Corey has a lot holes.    

This Pitch Zone looks like it will be a really useful tool in evaluating hitters.  The person who wrote the THT article is David Appelman, who is also the creator of fangraphs, a site which to me is very addictive!

The Post Dispatch ran its first intallment in a series of articles concerning the Cardinals organization's re-institution of baseball academies in the Dominican Republic and Venezuela.

Especially interesting is the photo essay: young men (kids!) as young as sixteen working out and practicing in Cardinals uniforms, honing their skills and dreaming of the big leagues.

All in all, it's a very interesting piece, and well worth reading and following.

According to STL Today.

I didn't mind Hagin all that much, though I've heard good things about this Rooney guy as well.

I will miss the commercials for hand sanitizer that Hagin did.  For some reason that one always cracked me up.  

I wonder if that Todd Helton flap on Hagin's part had anything to do with his being let go.

What do all of y'all think??  

A friend of mine in the demo business sent me an inside shot of the demolition at Busch Stadium.  I put the picture in a yahoo album account, and here it is.

How quickly the demolition has begun!  When I went to my last game at old Busch, I didn't truly think it wasn't going to be there anymore.  

Hey LB, I have a more high-res type pic of this.  Email me matty_fred at hotmail and I'll send it to you.  (The details in the higher res pic are pretty interesting; seems the demolition workers put up some graffiti ...)

Cross-posted at my weblog.  I took a look at Albert's amazing numbers through the lens of the new fangraphs website.

Fangraphs is a cool new website that provides daily-updated graphs of major league player performance going back to 2002. The graphs remind me a bit of those stock indexes one would find in the business section of the newspaper. Check out the graphs for Tampa Bay Devil Ray Aubrey Huff. Looking at how his on-base and slugging performance climbs high in the second half of each season, Huff's reputation as a "second-half player" appears well-earned.


From a fan's perspective, I love these graphs, simply because I can look up favorite players and see how they've performed over the years.  From a fantasy baseball manager's perspective, these graphs could prove very useful, much in the way stock indexes can give a Wall Street speculator valuable information on stock performance. If, for example, you know a player like Aubrey Huff consistently starts the season sluggishly only to hit the heck out of the ball after the All-Star break, you can buy him low mid-season and expect a high return for the second half.  Likewise, if you have a player who the graphs show consistently to start strong in the first half but diminish in the second half, you can trade that player for, say, an Aubrey Huff.


Another cool thing about this site is viewing the graphs by season for a player like St. Louis Cardinal Albert Pujols. As the OBP, SLG and AVG points show, Pujols has produced at a remarkably high and remarkably consistent rate. What's further impressive is the yearly decline in strikeout percentage and the yearly increase in walk (BB) percentage, suggesting that his pitch recognition has only improved over time. An already high "upside" is only getting higher for "El Hombre."

Cross-posted at my weblog.  As a recent transplant to the East Coast from St. Louis, I miss watching my Cardinals!  Plus, if you think the East Coast teams bias drowns out Cardinals news in the Midwest, try getting non-Yankees/Sox news out here!  Anyway, I thought I'd share my thoughts.

Are the YES Network and NESN really necessary?  It seems to me that the Yankees and Red Sox dominate Fox and ESPN baseball coverage so much that only a handful of games would need to be televised on the local New York and New England networks.  This weekend, both Fox Saturday Baseball and ESPN Sunday Night Baseball televised the Sox-Yankees game at Fenway.  Now, I'm sure from a business standpoint (albeit a short-term inspired standpoint) this makes a great deal of sense in terms of ratings.  Still, I'm becoming increasingly annoyed with the idea that all of America's baseball fans are expected to care about the two richest, most expensively staffed franchises in major league baseball history engaged in a rivalry whose epic pose conflates its essential provinciality.

Baseball fans would better have been served on Sunday if ESPN had televised the Houston Astros vs. the St. Louis Cardinals.  For starters, it was the Astros' ageless wonder (and last season's NL All-Star starter) Roger Clemens vs. the Cardinals' lights-out ace (and this year's NL All-Star starter) Chris Carpenter.  The Cardinals and Astros met each other last year for the National League Pennant in a series just as nail-bitingly close and dramatic as the Yankees-Red Sox Series that Fall.  While the Astros had a horrible start this season, they had lately been resurgent, grinding their way into playoff contention at mid-season just as they had done the year before.

Add to all of this a ready-made backstory:  Carpenter, who grew up in New Hampshire, also grew up idolizing then Red Sox phenom Roger Clemens.  When rookie Chris Carpenter joined the staff of the Toronto Blue Jays, who but the recently-signed Blue Jay Roger Clemens was there to take Carpenter under his tutelage?  Now, Chris Carpenter, ace in his own right as a St. Louis Cardinal, would face his old mentor.

The game was a pitching gem.  Both hurlers combined for one earned-run, two walks, 8 hits, and 10 strike-outs.  Carpenter pitched a complete game shut-out, giving up just three singles.  Both pitchers were so dominant, the game lasted only 1 hour and 59 minutes.

And the former apprentice had defeated his former master.  "He just did a number on us,'' Clemens said. "I don't think we really posed a threat to him.'' Other than perhaps a costly two-run throwing error by Astro's first baseman Mike Lamb, it was what Tony LaRussa would call beautiful baseball.

Too bad most baseball fans didn't get to see it.