When its all said and done Tony La Russa will be considered one of the all time great managers. Despite his many flaws (strong anti-Boog tendencies being among the most prominent) his career record is impressive, and it's unlikely that he was able to guide his teams to so many wins without having a positive impact overall. That being said, in his last few seasons Tony had far too much influence over front office decisions. GM Mozeliak made moves under obvious coercion, and it was nice to see him gain more freedom going into the 2012 season.

By and large, Mo had a great offseason. He made some poor minor decisions, such as giving contracts to both Skip Schumaker and Kyle McClellan, which seemed to be rusted with some of Tony's old influence. But those were dwarfed by his competent handling of the big issues going into 2012. Although I will miss Pujols, not offering him a 250 million dollar contract was definitely the right move considering future wins and losses. And replacing the void left by Pujols' salary and production with Carlos Beltran and Rafael Furcal were inspired moves (more so Beltran) and right in line with my cursory desires for the offseason.

Payroll now sits at around 110 million, more or less the same as last year, and by all indications the Cardinals are done spending. Curiously enough, despite seeing the departure of my favorite player, I'm more excited about the 2012 season than I have been about any other in recent memory. Maybe the fresh blood on the roster has perforated my baseball apathy, or maybe it's just awesome to see Matt Holliday, Carlos Beltran, Lance Berkman and Rafael Furcal all on the same team. In any case, in an attempt to pass the time until opening day, I thought I would take a look at how the Cardinals 2012 roster stacks up.

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Yay thread.

I'm sure Danup will appreciate the irony of Theriot saving our season today. 

Go Colby!

Bad news: Franklin is in the game.  Good news: Batista can't pitch again tonight.  Also, meat of the lineup coming up. Go Crads.   

This is awful.  

It is 8:15 AM on June 12th of 2010, the last day of school at St. Louis High School. Spirits are high as the students are just seven hours away from break and the school's baseball team, the Cardinals, have just won the division championship. The sun is shining and the birds are chirping, celebrating the success of their brethren on the field and the student's freedom. All of the students are gathered in the auditorium as Dean La Russa makes a speech.

La Russa: I'd like to congratulate you guys on the culmination of your school year! For some of you, this is your last year in High School [looks over to Adam Wainwright, Chris Carpenter, Albert Pujols and Yadier Molina, who are sitting in the back] and for others, you're journey is just beginning. You'll find that I am a tough, but fair, Dean and as long as you follow the school's honor code [gestures to a poster with a picture of David Eckstein and the single word "grit"] I can promise you that you will have an enjoyable High School experience

Now, on a more serious note... I have no doubt that there will be a party tonight - I can understand letting you're hair down a little after a long year.  However, I trust that there will be no drinking or doing drugs.

On an unrelated note, I'd like to introduce a new student, Jeff Suppan! [Gestures to Jeff standing on the side of the stage, a 37 year old man wearing stretchy tight jeans, a Duran Duran t-shirt, sunglasses and fingerless gloves]. He will be, uh, joining our class for this one day only because, uh...

Anyway, enjoy your last day of school!

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To sum up last thread: you suck Mo, you suck Tony, you suck Skip Schumaker, you're alright Ryan Theriot, 1 win is important, clubs may or may not suck, my up button works.  I miss Boog already.    

Cardinals going for the series shutout.  Tony's done his part by starting Miles and batting him second, but we can't do this without a healthy does of dejection from VEB.  C'mon guys I know you can do it! 

Cardinals at. Nationals

Kyle Lohse vs. Livan Hernandez

4.82 ZIPS ERA vs. 5.21 ZIPS ERA

Lohse didn't look great last time against the Pirates.  Despite only giving up 2 runs, he needed 97 pitches to get through 5 1/3, ran a decidedly average 4:2 K:BB ratio, allowed a home run, and more fly balls than ground balls.  Did I mention that he was facing the Pirates?  Still, he seems to have retained all the velocity he had before his injuries, and the control should improve soon.  

LIvan Hernandez has a 3.36 ERA this season, don't ask me how this has happened.  His strikeout to walk ratio is marginally improved from the past couple of years, but the biggest factor is Livan's .288 BABIP and 5.1% HR/FB. He''s a craft one, but is probably not a very good pitcher despite his superficially excellent numbers, and we should be able to do some damage.

Lineup for the Crads tonight?  

Schumaker – 9
Lopez – 4
Pujols – 3
Holliday – 7
Jay – 8
Happy – 5
Anderson – 2
Boog – 6
Lohse – 1

Get well soon Colby.  

Wainwright vs. Maholm

2.06 ERA vs. 4.92 ERA

2.85 FIP vs. 4.48 FIP

We've got a tough one on our hands today boys...

I think it's safe to say that the three game sweep of the Reds has been the best moment of the year for the Cardinals. They won in convincing fashion, getting dominating pitching performances from their two aces (and another "bad stuff" day from Jaime) and even hitting a couple of bases loaded dingers.  Better (worse?) yet, a couple of the Reds most prominent players absolutely embarrassed themselves.  Brandon Phillips talked pre-series shit, and promptly went 2 for 14, and Johnny Cueto gave us a great image of what a little bitch really looks like (it's worth noting that the Cardinals were not very classy themselves, but at least their offenders, Carp and Yadi, manned up).  The Cardinals rolled into Cinci down by a couple of games, kicked ass, took names, and now find themselves atop the division standings.  Good stuff.  But celebration time it's over and now it's time to look forward onto the next series against the formerly Hated Rivals, the Chicago Cubs, with Jake Westbrook starting the first game.  

When the rumors of Jake Westbrook being a Cardinals first started to surface, Cardinals fans were a lot more excited than you'd expect at the thought of acquring a 33 year old pitcher with a career 4.33 ERA.  The reason being Westbrook was already an extreme groundball pitcher, and such a pitcher working with the groundball-groupie Dave Duncan seemed like a match made in heaven.  The Cardinals did end up getting Westbrook, and, although it was severly dampened by the loss of Ryan Studwick, the potential for a great groundball pitcher still existed.

In his first two starts as a Cardinal, Westbrook has indeed shown why people were so excited to pair him up with Dave Duncan.  His groundball rate in those two starts sits at an astronomical 75.8%, and his walks per 9 (throwing strikes being another Duncanism) at 0.69.  However, what is most amazing is that Westbrook has been striking out batters at a ridiuclous rate.  His 11.08 strikeouts per 9 mark with the Cardinals is entering Stephen Strasburg territory - and while it is certainly a small sample size, strikeouts are a stat that tends to reflect pitcher skill very, very quickly.  So it does appear that Westbrook is doing something differently with the Cardinals.  Using Pitch f/x (!), I'll try to find the smoking gun. 

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I have some stuff on Albert Pujols in the works that I'll be able to finish some time later today.  In the meantime, here is a fresh new thread so you don't have to use the last gamethread.  

See how much better this team is when Stavinoha isn't on it? 

I don't think I could have imagined a better way to start the second half of the season than with a 4 game sweep of the Dodgers.  In the first two games the Cardinals were able to score with ease against two of the better young pitchers in the game, Kershaw and Billingsley, and while on the third game they were effectively shut down by Hiroki Kuroda, Adam Wainwright was better yet.  After Saturday's victory there was suspicion that Tony La Russa would, er, take it easy in yesterday's game with the series outcome already decided and Jeff Suppan on the mound - and yesterday's starting lineup confirmed that suspicion - however, the Cardinals were able to "comeback from oblivion" to win the game.  Better yet, VEB mancrush Allen Craig was the hero driving in three runs in the last two innings.

So, with the Reds losing the final game of their first post-allstar break series, the Cardinals find themselves in first place despite what can only be classified as a disappointing first half.  Their next challengers are the Phillies - the reigning NL champions two years running.  Despite there recent success however, the Phillies have struggled this year and don't appear to be the powerhouse they were thought to be in the beginning of the season.  And with Roy Halladay being lit up by the Cubs last night of all teams, the Cardinals get to face the back end of the Phillies rotation in this series.

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Hello folks, due to some unexpected circumstances, I wasn't able to write up a full story for today.  Fortunately, the Home Run Derby is on tonight at 8 ET, with Matt Holliday as the Cardinals representative (would have really loved to see Colby Rasmus in this thing).  Anyway enjoy the thread, and I'll try to pitch in later today with some Shelby/Eduardo Pitch f/x from the Futures Game.

Reds lost today!  3-0!  Cards up 9-2!  Holliday and Pujols both productive!  

Enjoy.  

Going into Spring Training, the starting rotation was one of the biggest question marks for the Cardinals.  Although the 1-4 of Wainwright, Carpenter, Penny and Lohse looked solid enough, the 5th starters role was very much up in the air.  The early favorite seemed to be Kyle McClellan, with guys like Rich Hill in the periphery.  I, among others, clamored for the Cardinals to bring in John Smoltz who was very good for us last year and would have cost a pittance.  Nobody seemed to entertain the idea of Jaime actually winning the job out of Spring Training as nobody thought the Cardinals were crazy enough to put a pitcher just coming off of Tommy John surgery and with little experience in the high minors in the rotation of a contending team.  However, the Cardinals apparently were crazy enough to do just that and so far it has worked out.  

Through 85.1 innings pitched Jaime, and his shiny 1.79 ERA, has legimately been one of the best starting pitchers in baseball and easily the most promising left handed starter to pitch for the Cardinals since Rick Ankiel.  While Ankiel was successful by putting up absurd strikeout numbers, Jaime has been able to keep the ball down and avoid hard hit balls.  While Ankiel possessed a 95 MPH fastball and a kneebuckling curve, Jaime has an assortment of moving fastballs and offspeed pitchers (as well as his own kneebuckling curve).  Today, I'll like to go a bit more in depth as to how Jaime has been so successful this year.  

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A little over a third of the way into the season, the Cardinals have not played up to expectations.  Although yesterday's game was pretty exciting and the team showed excellent resolve coming back in the ninth against a decent closer, the fact of the matter is that given a Chris Carpenter vs. Edwin Jackson matchup and a healthy lineup this was a game the Cardinals were heavily favored in yet lost.  

This seems to have happened a lot over the past month.  The Cardinals were 15 and 8 in April, but have gone just 19 and 20 since.  They were swept by the Dodgers, losing both Adam Wainwright's and Chris Carpenter's starts, and lost two out of three to the very bad D-Backs.  Now the teams winning percentage is still .540, which puts them on pace for 88 wins, but that seems a bit underwhelming for a team with this kind of talent.  Before the season started I was cautiously envisioning a 90+ win season and after witnessing the first few fantastic weeks of play I was reminded of 2005.

This team isn't as good as we thought they were in the beginning of the year, but they aren't as bad as they have played over the past month.  Thus, when faced with a bi-polar team that invokes a similar reaction in it's fans, it pays to step back and objectively examine the big picture.  Using The Hardball Times' excellent projections, I'd like to take a look at how good this team projects to be the rest of the way.    

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Don't you dare try to run on Ryan sexy Ludwick.  Now let's get some runs!

You know what?  F**k that game last night.  We are paying Matt Holliday 120 million for the sole purpose of driving in runs and protecting Albert, and he strands two runners on in the bottom of the ninth in a tie game.  That by itself doesn't mean much, but, Holliday ranks around 100th in baseball in RBI's this year (seriously) despite playing virtually every game this year and batting 4th in all of them, and Pujols is on pace to set a career high in intentional walks.   

On the other hand, going into last nights game, Holliday was the proud owner of a .307/.388/.473 slash line and ranked around 20th in WAR per FanGraphs at a very solid 2.0, so the context neutral stats have him right where we thought he would be - good average and on base percentage, decent power and solid defense.  I have to say this though, I think I agree with the traditional stats on this one.  The cruel irony is that Ludwick and Holliday have been equally productive with the bat this year overall, however, the former has been one of the best in baseball at hitting with runners on base while the latter has been one of the worst.  It might be a good idea to switch the two in the lineup for the time being.

Anyway, the rest of the game wasn't that bad.  Yes Miles started, but he actually saved us a run or two with his defense and was pinch hit for at the first sight of a right handed pitcher.  Stav even got a bloop single, which surely extended his lease on a roster spot for another month, and the the new Veteran Presence Randy Winn delivered a clutch sac fly to tie the game.  And for all of Parra's strikeout induced dominance, we were able to hit a couple of bombs off of him (more on that later).

Most encouraging perhaps is that Rasmus continued his hot streak against lefties, which will hopefully lead to less Randy Winn in center.  Look Randy, I know you just got here and that you are one of the rare sub-species of Proven Veterans that don't suck, but if you get in the way of Rasmus and his > .400 OBP playing everyday you will have a special place next to Nick Stavinoha in my heart.    

Jaime Garcia, despite not having much in the ways of stuff or command was able to work around an error and some BABIP luck to pick up a quality start (2 earned runs in 6 innings).  His ERA is now 1.47 in nearly 70 innings.  We are getting to the point in the season now where the Livan Hernandez's of the world start to regress and you don't just see guys like into sub 2.00 ERA's.  There are only two other starters this year with at least 50 innings pitched who are in Jaime territory: one is the silky smooth Ubaldo Jimenez and the other is Cliff Lee.  Of course there is NO WAY that Jaime finishes the year with an ERA this low, as it would be one of the best seasons in baseball history.  However, Jaime is already at 67.1 innings.  Assuming the Cardinals only let him pitch 150 this year, if he's able to put up a 3.5 ERA the rest of the way, he'll end the year with a 2.6 ERA which would place his season amongst the best among rookies of all time.  Jaime truly is a huge story for the Cardinals this year, and given his interesting mix of pitches, a Pitch f/xer's wet dream, so you will hopefully be hearing more about him next Monday.   

In the meantime, Jaime isn't the only pitcher in the Cardinals rotation, and there is a decent argument to be made that he has not even been the best.  Another tall lanky fellow by the name of A.D.A.M. has allowed nearly as few runs per 9 as Jaime this year, all while pitching more innings per start and putting up better peripherals to boot.  

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Jaime vs. Bronson

1.14 ERA vs. 4.30 ERA

3.06 FIP vs. 4.62 FIP

Modest legkick vs. really annoying one

Two old school veteran managers managing an important series of division rivals.  What could possibly go wrong? 

As of writing this the Cardinals are winning 6-1 vs. the Cubs and Fat Miles has just grounded out, once again confirming my belief that he is the worst player in the history of baseball.  Despite that, this game has been amazing for the Cardinals.  Wainwright continues his streak of ridiculous consistency, Pujols hits two three bombs and raises his seasonal OPS to just under 1.000 which is hilarious given his massive struggles this year (don't EVER question Albert), Matt Holliday got a hit with runners on and picked up an actual RBI, and the Cards were able to salvage a series win against the Hated Rivals, in which they played amazingly in two out of the three games.  

However, the game in which the Cardinals did not play amazingly is the one I'm interested in writing about today.  On Saturday, the Cards lost 5-0 to the Cubs in a game that featured two very interesting storylines.  Firstly, Adam Ottavino made his major league debut, and secondly, Carlos Silva pitched seven shutout innings allowing just two hits, no walks and struck out 11 (!) batters.  Both performance deserve more in depth analysis   

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Sorry guys, no post today.  I've had a very busy weekend so far (my little brother became a Jewish man!), and haven't had time to work on anything.  

Some topics for discussion...

• Graham's series of primers at LL.  There is some good stuff those, and anyone who has questions relating to the topics discussed should speak up. 
  
• THT unveils their forecasting system based off of Brian Cartwright's Oliver projections.  There are many features available including 6 year forecasts for over 7,000 players, over 1,300 player comments provided by team bloggers (including LBoros for the Cardinals) and weekly updates during the season.  It costs 14.95 for the whole year, but in my opinion, it's worth it (especially if you do a lot of Fantasy) and you can think of it as a way to give back to a website that provides a ton of good content for free.  /end marketing ad
  
• Wanna get Pitch f/x data?  Dave Allen has answers.
• The Met's snatched up Kiko Calero, so it appears the only useful free agent left is John Smoltz.  Given our hilariously tenuous health circumstances in the rotation, I have no idea why we haven't signed him yet. 
  
• Giveml had a really good FanPost recently about the Cardinals and the BA's top 100 prospects list.  Basically, our minor league system isn't great right now, and some possible improvements could come from more high risk picks in the draft as well as tapping the foreign markets.  I don't necessarily think that a good farm is going to be very important for the Cards over the next couple of years, given the stability of our roster; however, once Molina, Wainwright, Pujols, et al, start to get more expensive, we are going to need a good farm to sustain success (or raise payroll).  However, I can say that I have full confidence in Luhnow to revamp the system.
  
• Here is a cool article looking at whether or not a pitcher's velocity has a predictive effect beyond his stats.  Basically, are the slow throwers more likely to under-perform their projections than the hard throwers?  The answer will probably not surprise you.  This study only scratches the surface of what is the next frontier of sabermetric analysis, which is, in my opinion, the reconciliation of stats and scouting.
• Finally, some time in the next couple of weeks, I will be answering 5 questions about the St. Louis Cardinals for THT.  LBoros did them last year.  I think I am supposed to generate the questions and answers myself, but that seems kind of boring to me, so I would rather take questions from you guys.  So if you want to help, just indicate that you are asking a question, and if it's interesting, it might appear in the article.            

So, while I was working on the Wainwright piece, writing queries to figure out the exact increase on his slider percentage in pitcher's counts, and other fun stuff like that, the fan in my laptop went into overdrive and the computer became very hot.  Given that I am "un hombre", if you catch my drift, that was a very painful sensation for me, so I immediately got up and threw my laptop into the wall.  My loins were unharmed, thank you for asking, but I was unfortunately not able to finish my piece.  And if you don't buy that then my dog ate it.  

Anyway, if you're tuning in for insightful sabermetric analysis and cool graphs, you are going to be disappointed.  Instead, today's post is a romp around the internets, searching for some cool studies and news of this past week with a vivaelpujols commentary added on.  Bullet points!

• The Royals are amazing.  And by that I mean they are terrible.  So bad, in fact, that dedicated Royals fans are walking around and a pile of their own Ankiel induced misery longing for the days of Emil Brown.  Fortunately for us, in that misery comes some truly exception writing.  Take Rany's 5,000 word screed back in September, or this much recced piece by Will McDonald a month later.  You can just taste the misery!  Anyway, this most recent nugget by Will doesn't have the passion of some of his other ones, but it is just depressingly beautiful.
• I guess I should say a few words about the Lopez deal.  I love it.  Despite being around replacement level for two years in Washington, a ~.380 wOBA and + defense at third makes it exceedingly likely that he is in fact a good player.  CHONE projects for 2.3 WAR, while the fans on FanGraphs project for 2.4 WAR.  Assumign those projections are within reason, we've got a league average player on our hands.  Given that we are signing him for somewhere between 1 and 2.2 million, I'm going to go ahead and call this one a fantastic deal - and kudos for Mo for taking advantage of the F.A.T. market. 
  
• In some revolutionary BPro news, EqA is officially changed to TAv (for True Average).  The stat is exactly the same, but they changed the name.  Folks, this is marketing at it's best.
• Dave Allen at Baseball Analysts has a post up on pitch sequencing with the slider and the fastball.  Basically, when looking at RHP vs. RHH matchups, he finds that doubling up on the pitch (fastball then fastball or slider than slider) is more effective than mixing it up.  Most interesting to me is how much worse a slider is when it follows a fastball compared to another slider.  On average, it's .5 runs per 100 pitches worse, which is a pretty huge effect.  You'd expect that a slider is more effective when set up with a fastball, but that doesn't appear to be the case.  I look forward to part 2 of his analysis, looking at location and movement.
  
• Finally, some interesting developments on how Front Offices may view online fielding stats.  First, Theo Epstein, in an excellent interview with Full Count, mentions that, in relation to Jacoby Ellsbury's fielding performance last year, a "certain number that people use online" was undervaluing his defense and their own system has him above average.  One can only assume that he is referring to UZR; however, as Tango shows, ALL of the fielding metrics have Jacoby having a bad defensive year in 09.  My position is that UZR and +/- are basically as good as it gets when it comes to evaluating defense with the current batted ball data available.  Therefore, if the Red Sox do have a system that is better than the public ones, it must be using a better source of batted ball data or include stuff like fielding positioning and whatnot.  At any rate, you should really read the interview (or PodCast it in the link above), as there are a whole host of nuggest of information on how the Red Sox value players.

So, I hope you enjoy some of these links, and I apologize for the light post this week. 

Sorry guys, no big analytical post today.  I decided to get out of my mother's basement and actually do something this weekend, and didn't have time to complete my loosely scheduled post.  In case anybody cares, I had the idea to look at how in the hell Adam Wainwright was able to add 2 strikeouts per 9 last year, with his walk and ground ball rates completely unaffected.  Pitch f/x was my tool of choice to investigate that.  Wainwright is much easier to deal with than Penny, as he throws 4 distinct pitches and it's much easier to sort through his data.  So I was able to make some good headway on the post.  Should make for an interesting read next week!

At any rate, with just a few days before spring training, there has been some surprisingly interesting stuff going on over the past few days.  In fact, just enough for me to drag it out into a notes style post.  That, of course, means bullet points.

• This weekend's "what?!" bit of news comes courtesy of the Astros and their decision to resign Ed Wade through 2012.  Over the past three years, the Astros have won 48% of their games and have finished no higher than 3rd place in any of those years.  CHONE and PECOTA project them to win 72 and 77 games respectively next year, with the latter projecting a last place finish.  Keith Law's recent prospect rankings have them the proud owners of the 28th best farm system in baseball.  To top all of that off, the newly acquired basically-Ryan-Fraklin-but-for-3-years-and-15-million Brandon Lyon recently had a cyst in his shoulder removed and is already behind schedule.  To be frank, the Astros are in crummy shape as a franchise right now.  I don't know enough about Ed Wade to comment on his extension, but he hasn't done much of anything in during his time in Houston so far, and had a pretty mediocre offseason this year by most accounts.  Whatever Dayton, it's your ridiculously high valued franchise. 
  
• In another bit of intra-division news, Carlos Zambrano has apparently decided to drop his cut fastball.  As Harry Pavlidis shows, his cutter has been one of his best pitches over the past three years, consistently being over a run better than league average per 100 pitches.  As Harry states, it's possible that throwing the cutter is causing arm discomfort for Zambrano that could result in an injury.  If that is indeed the case, than Z might just have to sacrifice some effectiveness for improved health.  I wonder if Chris or Hazel have any opinions on the matter
• Matthew at FanGraphs has been doing some work recently on how ground balls correlate with other aspects of pitcher (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 - don't worry about the quantity, the articles are very quick reads).  Basically, he finds that as a pitcher's ground ball rate increases, other aspects of a pitcher's game are affected as well, including his runs allowed, which goes improves by about a half a run per 9 for a pitcher with a 55% ground ball rate vs. a 35% ground ball rate.  However, the R^2 of that relationship is very low, and it's likely not highly significant.  When doing my own investigation of ground balls, I found results that somewhat contradicted Matthew's.  Furthermore, David Gassko concluded four years ago that having a high ground ball rate, in and of it self, is not of huge importance for major league pitchers.  The thing to take away from this is that there is no clear judgment on the advantages of being a ground ball pitcher, and any such advantage would appear to be very small. 
  
• Over at Beyond the Boxscore, Jeff Zimmerman uses Josh Hermsmeyer's newly released injury database to investigate the effective salary loss of each team due to injuries from 2002-2009.  Despite the Cardinal's much maligned medical staff and their penchants for fucking over the team with last minute surgery decisions a week before spring training starts, the Cards are in the middle of the pack in terms of salary lost due to injury, with roughly 15% of their total payroll going to the dead weight.  Interestingly, at first glance, there appears to be little relationship between a teams healthiness and their success.  To be honest, that's shocking to me, as I would have thought injuries to be one of the biggest factor in a team's performance.
  
• Graham at Lookout Landing has a series of mini primers on the basics of Sabermetrics.  He uses a very readable and organized format, and the series looks to be very promising so far.
• John Sickels recently wrote a post regarding the current state of Sabermetrics.  From what I surmised, he felt that some of the more recent advances were simply not interesting to him, and he did not enjoy reading about them.  As a prospect maven, John is probably more selective about what stuff he finds useful for his work than the average writer so I don't necessarily think his complaints should be taken as an indictment of the current work done.  However, it is clear, like with all subjects in life, there are fewer major advancements to be made, and a larger percentage of the research is going to be dealing with more granular and esoteric subjects.  That isn't a bad thing, as better accuracy and presentation is always a good thing; however, it does have the possible side affect of causing more disinterest in that work.
  

So as a writer/researcher myself, I am going to ask you guys what you would like to see more of in current Sabermetric research.  Please be as specific as possible (and I swear to god RiverRat if you mention Penny I will banish you to BCB), and don't be afraid to insult everyone but me.