After reading Fourstick's excellent fanpost on the Cards future payroll obligations and the subsequent discussion, I found myself wondering about what kind of compensation could be heading the Cardinals way in the 2010 Draft. I'm not very familiar with the whole process, but I think I have a good grasp on it after doing some research. If I happen to miss something or make a mistake somewhere I'd appreciate the feedback. Here are the links to the sites I will be referencing in the post:

http://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2008/07/free-agent-comp.html - This is an old post but it does a nice job of stating the rules for the draft compensation of free agents.

http://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2009/07/elias-rankings.html - This post is a projection of Elias player rankings up to July 12th. Obviously these rankings can change and are just a projection, but it is a nice starting point for looking at the 2010 compensation possibilities.

http://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2007/10/stats-used-for.html - This post gives a rundown of the stats used to compile the rankings.

Any salary information is taken from Cot's baseball contracts.

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There has been a lot of gnashing of teeth over the Cards defense so far this season, and I wanted to take a look at just how bad, or not bad it's been. I consider defense to be about run prevention, so I'm not going to look too much at individuals but the team as a whole. Lets see how good we are at preventing runs and how we compare to the rest of the league in various catergories.

These stats are as of May 15th and were taken from or created from information on fangraphs.

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