I enjoy Bill Simmons.  I don't feel I have to apologize...I think the guy was remarkably fresh when his columns first popped up, and I still enjoy his point of view, even if I disagree with his insane love of the NBA and his extreme Boston homerism. Anyway, with that out of the way, I was reading through his archive and came across this wonderful bit that really spoke to me.  I thought I would share it with the community... 

What I came across an exchange he had with writer Malcolm Gladwell about a variety of topics.  (LINKY HERE TO THE RELEVENT SECTION)  Gladwell has what seems to me a brilliant bit of writing in this exhange about why he would make a better GM than Isiah Thomas...it's because he actually knows LESS, and therefore would make painfully obvious moves and not outsmart himself.  He says it much prettier than I, because he's a bajillion times smarter.  This got the old wheels-a-turnin' in my head. 

I find this idea wonderfully applicable to baseball too.  Moneyball, which Billy Beane wrote to prove how smart he was (or not), deals a lot with the cloistered old boys club that Lewis saw in baseball, and how certain ideas that seem stale and tired at best and patently crazy at worst, at least to those who stop and think from an objective P.O.V., are or were considered conventional wisdom within baseball.  Examples:

• The strong chin
• Guys with physical tools make the best players, even if those tools never seem to translate to performance
• How teamwork and toughness and grit and fortitude overwhelms talent

I am sure that we can all think of many such examples we have encountered in our lives of baseball fandom.  As Baseball got smarter, it started to challenge these ideas and look at baseball in new and interesting ways.  To me, it is no surprise that some of the most dynamic, intelligent, and influential people within both Baseball and baseball analysis did not come from baseball backgrounds.  Bill James was a student of literature who loved to write and think, and first began doing so as a security guard at a pork-and-beans factory.  Keith Law, who is a bit prickly in my mind but has an exceedingly sharp baseball mind, holds undergraduate degrees from Harvard (sociology and econ.) and is a Carnegie Mellon MBA.  Paul De Podesta, who I think got a raw deal in LA no thanks to Bill "I AM the idiot" Plaschke, was a college athlete at Harvard but also got a degree from there in economics.  Theo Epstein studied American (American studies degree from Yale) and is a J.D.  

My point is this, and this ties back into what Gladwell was saying in his exchange with Mr. Simmons, is that sometimes a fresh, outside perspective is what is necessary.  In Gladwell's hypothetical GM of the Knicks scenario, he would use something of a KISS approach and make seemingly obvious decisions based on not-overthinking things.  In baseball's case, some of the most successful writers and franchises of recent years have been successful largely because of an outside perspective, because they let a smart person run things and said smart person was not corrupted by Baseball's collective conventional wisdom.  I am not one of those who finds that The Old Baseball Man and the Steely-Eyed/Copenhagen-chewing scout do not have a place in the game...their understanding of the minutae of actually playing the game is key and the collaboration of smart outsiders and experienced insiders can create a perfect storm of baseball awesome...however this is no prerequisite.  I reference you all to lboros's post from 2007 regarding the concept of Moneyball 2.0.  The teams may not be great, but the sentiment of drawing from both scouting and intellectual perspectives is.  

To conclude, I think this thought has some connection to our very own Cardinals and their endlessly comment-provoking manager Tony La Russa.  La Russa is someone who can be viewed as either conventional or radical, or perhaps even both simultaneously.  He is the man who hits his pitcher 8th regularly, who designed the modern bullpen as much as anyone could have (whether this is a good thing or not, I leave for another discussion), who juggles his lineups like a madman in pursuit of 9 perfect matchups, and so on.  He is also the man who refuses to hit Albert anywhere but second, who seems to have an affinity for known mediocrities over unproven talent (see the playing time handed to Miguel Cairo and Mike Gallego, for no apparent reason), the man who at times is prickly and unkind to anyone who dares broach the subject of advanced sabermetric analysis, and so on.  Many of his decisions leave us scratching our heads (cough13 man pencough).  To me he is a wonderfully thought-provoking character, and for the most part a very good manager.  I think within the person of Tony La Russa we see both a man willing to try anything and a man unwilling to try anything.  At any rate, he is ceaselessly interesting to those who love baseball and love the Cardinals.

I think all Cardinals fans can say that they were excited by Jason Motte's debut last season with the Birds on Bat.  It is not every day that you see such raw cheese being tossed by a pitcher, let alone one that suits up for Dave Duncan's Pitch to Contact Army.  He and Chris Perez look like they could be a two-headed relief monster for years.  However, the biggest knock on Mr. Motte has always been the fact that he really only throws one pitch: that upper-90's fastball. 

While watching the Rays dramatic rise through the playoffs, one figure in their bullpen really caught my eye: Grant Balfour.  Balfour is sort of a wiry bloke from the Land Down-Under (I wonder if that is his warm up song? Maybe it should be!) who has the arm that allows him to throw a strawberry through a freight train and the brain that makes him try to do it on every single pitch.  Fun guy to watch, for sure. 

I know I can't be the only person who saw similarities between these two...so let's take a look...

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Today, Cardinal Nation lost one of its icons.  George Kissell, a man known as "The Professor," died this morning in Florida as a result of an automobile accident.  Kissell, 88, dedicated his life to the Cardinals, spending nearly seven decades wearing the Birds on Bat.  He appeared at spring training 68 of the past 69 years, teaching and inspiring countless Redbirds along the way.  In his article over this topic, Derrick Goold notes that Kissell was forced to cut back on his role over the past few years due to his wife's health problems, however he still made his appearances, working with young players on various aspects of the game. 

Some other Kissell tidbits:

• He was on Tony La Russa's staff for the 2005 All-Star Game in Detroit.
• He won the King of Baseball Award in 1993 for his contributions to minor league baseball.
• He is commemorated with a plaque in Jupiter, which was unveiled in 2005.
• He was a mentor to Sparky Anderson, Tony La Russa, and Joe Torre, men with thousands of combined wins and more than a handful of World Series rings.
• He is credited with turning Ken Boyer into an MVP award-winning 3rd baseman

The list goes on and on...I don't have the time, nor does anyone, to fully list what this man has meant to the St. Louis Cardinals organization.

Kissell's passing is a great tragedy, one that I am sure will be covered more eloquently by others in the coming days, probably on this very blog.  However, as a lifelong Cardinals fan, I feel greatly saddened by this loss and felt I had to express my sadness to a group of people who would understand.

R.I.P. George Kissell...you will be missed by this fan of 33 years. 

Sources: Derrick Goold, The AP

About a week and a half ago, I made a post regarding the MVP, Cy Young, and Rookie of the Year Awards for the Senior Circuit.  A decent number of people responded, so I thought an AL version may be a good idea.  I went ahead and named two in each category: a should win, as in who really deserves the award, and a will win, as in who the writers are most likely to pick.  Once again, if you feel I am a contemptible moron, please feel free to say so!

Oh, here is the NL version if you're curious. 

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The 2008 regular season is, at this time, not yet over.  In fact, it's not really that close to being over.  However, given that our beloved Birds on Bat seem to be pretty much toast at this point, I've begun to put some thought into the award winners in the two leagues, and for the sake of brevity I'll just bang out my list for the NL today.  Obviously this is not a Cardinals specific topic, but I think we can all agree we're fans of the game first (or at least second), and therefore have at least a morbid fascination with who wins these awards.  Without any further ado, here is what I've come up with.  Feel free to ponder my idiocity in these particular picks, and I do not mind if you feel my picks are, for lack of a better term, dumb.  I don't mind!  Oh, and PS...I included a who will win and who should win category for each, as they are often not the same (see MVP race, 2007, Senior Circuit...)

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Maybe this isn't a good fanpost, maybe it is.  Frankly, I don't care...

A few weeks back, I made a FanPost entitled "An Escape from Life at Busch Stadium."  In it, I detailed the circumstances of my grandmother's final days and the events which surrounded me when I attended a Cardinals game the day before heading to South Bend to say goodbye to her.  I was astonished to see no less than 10 recommendeds on the post.  I just felt like writing out my feelings, explaining how an experience at Busch had helped me deal with the passing of someone I loved, and amazingly at least 10 people "recommended" it.  I hadn't expected that.

Anyway, back to the original reason for THIS FanPost.  My grandmother, Janette Gwynne Starr, passed away on a Sunday in June of 2008.  This was a woman who had survived the Great Depression, WW2 (as a relative of many who fought in Europe and the Pacific, with luckily no fatalities), the turbulent years of the 50's and 60's, and a bought of lymphatic cancer and the diabetes/heart attack of her husband of decades.  However, a second round of cancer was too much for her.  This particular strain spread up her spine and into her skull before the oncologists batted an eye or filled out a chart.  It would be easy for me to blame these folks for delaying in aiding a sick old woman, but my late grandmother would never allow that from me.  That's not who she was.  This was a woman who had had her own wedding hi-jacked by the whims of her stupid and insensitive soon-to-be in-laws, my great aunt and uncle, and yet went along with it to make her married life as happy as possible.  She was a tough and gritty woman, right up until the end, willing to stare death right in the face instead of attempting desperate, and clearly futile, efforts to prolong her life.  She was courageous beyond all belief, a woman who showed a great deal of love for her grandkids and great-grandkids, asking me how my own daughters were doing even as she lay dying, her body ravaged by a cruel disease. 

Equally courageous was my grandfather, a man who did not fight in the war himself because of crippling pain in his left knee caused by a misdiagnosed torn-ACL that went untreated for 10 years.  He did nothing for a month but comfort my grandmother, call the hospice folks, and handle phone calls from concerned relatives, all in order to make everything as comfortable as possible for my grandmother.  He was a man raised in an era which forbid men from crying for any reason, and yet openly wept at the prospect of losing the woman who had given him three wonderful daughters (including my mother), and with whom he had spent nearly three-quarters of a century.    

I will never forget my grandmother, nor will I ever forget the kindness that some of you showed here on this web forum devoted to such an extraneous thing as the St. Louis Cardinals.  I thank everyone who took, or will take, the time to read either of these FanPosts, and I ask only that you remember that some things go beyond baseball, and that this glorious game can act as a crutch to help us hobble through the darkest of times in our lives.  Thank you so very much, and I hope that you all never have to deal with anything this painful in your own lives.  A truly hopeless wish, and yet...

I've not written a Fanpost/Diary in quite some time, and with good reason.  I feel I generally don't have anything worth creating one about, considering the wonderful job our regular posters (Lboros, Azru, et al) do creating interesting "main" threads and generating discussion within them.  I also don't have time, as the majority of my life is devoted to more important things, like my family and whatnot.  However, something has come out that is only slightly baseball related that I wish to share with the entire community.  So here it goes:

Two years ago, my grandmother was diagnosed with cancer.  She underwent surgery, chemo, radiation, physical therapy, and a great deal of embarrassing examination by a series of doctors.  Eventually she was declared "cancer-free," and while she still had some difficulties involving uncomfortable swelling everything seemed to be quite fine.

Sadly, cancer isn't always that pretty.  Roughly a month and a half ago she returned to her oncologist for a routine checkup and discovered the cancer had returned and had attached to a lymph node.  After rushing around to a series of oncologists and radiologists and other-ologists, the cancer seemed to be relatively treatable.  She had a strange setback involving extreme hunger, dehydration, and some powerful sleeping pills, and also underwent another surgery, but as of ten days ago everything seemed to be turning around.  But then something came down like a ton of bricks.  Her surgery scar ripped open, revealing cancerous growths (I'm not doctor, so the exact term escapes me) inside the muscle tissue.  Biopsies revealed the cancer had spread remarkably rapidly, and by eight days ago the sonofabitch had spread up her spine and into the bones in the back of her skull. 

After some scrambling about, my courageous grandmother interrupted a radiation treatment and asked the doctor how much time she had left.  "Not much," was his reply.  Immediately she called off all radiation, chemo, etc., and asked to be transferred home.  She told my mother and her sisters that she had no regrets, and that she was perfectly content and ready to pass on.  In the time since, things have accelerated rapidly.  She's had serious bowel issues (i.e. no BMs for nearly two weeks), and is beginning to slip in and out of conscioussness more and more rapidly.  How much time she has left is questionable, but it isn't much.  Tomorrow, my wife, mother (it's my maternal grandmother FTR), and myself are driving to South Bend to see her and spend what precious little time we have left together.  But there was one thing we had to do first...

Today, my father, sister, and myself traveled to Busch III to take in the Cardinals and Phillies at Busch the Third.  We sat in section 170, in row 18, and watched as the St. Charles West (the HS of which I am an alum) choir sang "God Bless America."  Then the game began, and Adam Kennedy of all people pops a home run into the right field seats to put my boys up 2-0.  Lohse pitches a beautiful game, failing only against Pat Burrell, surrendering a two-run home run to make the game 3-2.  However, the BOB held on from there, sealing a win. 

Clearly I was thrilled at a Cardinals victory.  However, to me this game meant far more.  It was a chance to escape the nightmare cancer has brought to my family.  It was a chance to temporarily escape the fact that my grandmother, such a witty, bright, and loving woman has been trapped inside her failing body and a hospice bed that will likely be her last place on Earth.  It was sort of a last gasp of normality before traveling to see my grandmother for the last time. 

After Ryan Franklin retired the final Philadelphia batter, a wave of emotions crashed over me.  It occurred to me then and there that my next task in life was to say goodbye to "Gramma S" as I used to call her.  I began to openly cry, in a section full of fans.  My father and sister joined in, and we all had a big cry right there in our seats.  I have no earthly clue how long we sat there, just watching people file past and watching the Cardinals take their handshakes and clear out of the dugout.  After it was over, all I could think to do was to whisper a thank you to my grandma for being such a wonderful woman, and to whisper a thank you to the St. Louis Cardinals for giving me something so pure to hold onto while I hope to muster half the courage my grandmother has shown over the past few weeks.

After the recent Torii Hunter signing, I sat around and contemplated the worst contracts in baseball.  I'm not talking "Oh gosh why are we paying Rolen that much?" type deals.  I'm talking franchise-crippling, mind numbingly dumb contracts, ones that make people like Keith Law punch themselves repeatedly in the face.  I'm talking ones that make you want to take a stack of money and light it on fire, b/c that heat would be more valuable than the player involved.  Here's my 1-8 (these aren't really seeds, per se, just the order I found them), and they're going to duke it out for All-Albatross honors:

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Everyone's favorite writer Keith Law has made his way onto ESPN.com today with his Top 50 free agents list.  I gotta say, it's pretty bleak.  David Eckstein is his #15, and Mr. Law isn't exactly high on him.  

Two guys do pop out as intriguing however: Bartolo Colon and Kenny Rogers.  

Colon's name has been bandied about here before, mainly b/c he definately has plus-stuff when healthy.  I also read an article over at USS Mariner that made me think he wouldn't be a horrible guy to gamble on.  Basically, the argument they made in support of him is that if he's healthy, he's a horse w/ plus stuff.  Also, his ERA has been inflated over the past 2 years b/c he was really unhealthy in 06, and in 07 he had a super poor strandrate and an abnormal BABIP, despite improved stuff.  Now, of course Colon is a huge risk.  There is a pretty good shot he'll never be healthy again due to his not-exactly-dogged approach to his conditioning (think a more-talented Sidney Ponson).  However, I think given his issues he could be had for about one year, 10-11 million.  If the Cards could run some tests and make sure he was fully healthy, and manage to bring him aboard, 10 million bucks for a pitcher of his caliber is a steal, considering what Kyle Lohse is likely to get this offseason.  With Wainwright figuring to be a horse again, and with Piniero filling in as at least an innings eater, and with Mulder and Carp giving some kind of contribution somewhere along the line, I think that Colon could fit in even if he only goes 150 innings or so.  

Rogers intrigues me as well.  I feel that his case is similar to Colon's in that his injury issues last year (+ age in this case) make him unlikely to receive a large contract.  However, Rogers has been pretty reliable in recent years.  From 02-06 he made 30 starts every year and had an above-league-average ERA every year but the one he pitched in the Homer Dome.  A lot of interest has been paid to Tom Glavine, and I see Rogers as a poor-man's Glavine.  He's primarily a fastball-changeup pitcher (w/ an occasional plus curveball, which Glavine doesn't have) who relies on execution, not stuff, to get guys out.  Switching leagues couldn't hurt either, and he wouldn't exactly be going into a brutal division.  I think he could probably be had for a relative bargain as well.

I also want to point out a line in Law's piece that got my attention.  In regards to Josh Fogg, Law writes "His 'Dragon Slayer' rep will also help him, at least among general managers who confuse baseball with World of Warcraft."  I thought that was a decent attempt at humor, and it is something that Fogg will probably be able to cash in on...I won games vs. good pitchers, so give me a big contract!  Since, of course, pitchers win games by themselves just by their mere presence I suppose.  

So according to the story, Joel Zumaya was helping his folks move some stuff out of their home while a massive wildfire was bearing down.  So this jerk writer comes out and says that Zumaya should have been more careful with his arm.  

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071102/SPORTS02/711020408/1048/SPORTS

While I understand the point that Zumaya should play less Guitar Hero so he can stay healthy and whatnot...But he was being stupid HELPING MOVE STUFF OUT OF HIS MOM AND DAD'S FREAKING HOUSE SO IT DOESN'T GET BURNED UP?  What a jackass.  Some things are more freaking important than pitching a few baseball GAMES.  I realize this isn't really diary worthy...but it just made me so freaking pissed.

I know that this is a Cardinals-based site...But seeing as how the Cardinals aren't playing anymore and the Rockies's insane white-hot run of amazingness is almost over, I thought I'd get some thoughts on something I've been debating amongst some of my baseball-fan coworkers lately:

Ryan Braun vs. Troy Tulowitzki

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