Two Birds, One Bat - your 2014 St. Louis Cardinals

i hope ZS didn't watch.

the bunting, my god, the bunting

sliding headfirst is AN EPIDEMIC

(well maybe, but it's def stupid)

"I'm not one to lecture younger players [more than anybody else]..."

xposts

i listened to tim mccarver, and also stayed up late to watch the cardinals get there asses handed to them. insult to injury.

speaking of, tim mccarver just said "well ah never really understood the term "foreign substance" - pine tar is a domestic product, you can get it in this country"

<3 willie to cards hof <3

Adam Wainwright has given up 11 runs on the year and 9 of them have been to the Cubs.

from BP chat --

Bill (New Mexico): What's your take on the Kolten Wong demotion? People seem to be reading between the lines on that one to an extent that seems excessive to me, but what do I know?

Jeff Moore: I was surprised, as were most people. It's early to give up on a player with his track record. The Cardinals are panicking a little, it seems. There's no upside to playing Mark Ellis. The hope is that Wong goes down, has some success in Triple-A (which he is), feels good about himself and comes back up and plays like they expect. It's not a bad idea and it might just work. I was just surprised. Doesn't seem like something the Cardinals would do.

<3 willie to cards hof <3

Coveted this card, not one of Topps' best:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-e4Mg3vc6zTo/TsxH8c5hWfI/AAAAAAAAAOY/LxGmoR5RRds/s400/49.jpg

majestic imo

Joe Sheehan also sees panic

The ’13 team won 97 games and reached the World Series in no small part because they had one of the greatest clutch seasons in recorded history, batting .330/.402/.463 with RISP. No other NL team batted higher than .271 in those situations! It was a clearly unsustainable performance that, nevertheless, helped power a divisional title.

The 2014 team has seen the flip side of that. After last night, it’s batting .227/.295/.341 with RISP. Allen Craig, clutch monster, is hitting .200 in the split, while new pickup Jhonny Peralta is at .115. These numbers don’t mean any more than the 2013 ones do, of course; batting with runners in scoring position isn’t a skill over and above “batting”, but when a team is hitting .330 with runners in scoring position, the narrative becomes that they’re the exception. The 2013 Cardinals were not; the performance was valuable, but it didn’t reflect any breaking of the code any more than the 2012 Orioles or 2007 Diamondbacks did.

What is frustrating is the Cardinals’ seeming inability to process this.... [They] have acted, to start 2014, as if everyone’s job is on the line. The amount of base-level panic driving wholly indefensible personnel management calls into question everything I said a year ago about Mike Matheny’s growth as a manager.

http://www.gammonsdaily.com/sheehan-mike-mathenys-terrible-choices/

matheny drives me absolutely fucking nuts

I don’t expect Mike Matheny to use RE charts from “The Book” to make decisions; I do expect him to manage people, and what he’s done so far this year is manage his people poorly. You can’t bury a rookie two weeks into the season because his batting average isn’t high. You can’t take a player who’s spent two years not knowing whether he was going to play or not and make him start guessing again in April. You can’t use two weeks of plate appearances to make decisions on anyone. Matheny has been the worst manager of any good team in baseball so far this season.

yep. matheny did the same thing to wong last season when he was called up. they made a big deal out of benching freese and moving carpenter over to third to make room for wong, and i got excited that wong would be given a fair shot. he struggled for about 3 games, and then for the rest of the season matheny decided to play wong sparingly, using him to pinch hit or pinch run every 2nd or 3rd game. it was the same shit as this season - he gave up on the plan before a week had even passed.

plus, unfairly or not, i just think he's dumb. as in, he's not smart. read any interview with him that's transcribed verbatim and it quickly becomes apparent that he doesn't use pronouns because he doesn't know they work

he doesn't use pronouns because he doesn't know how they work

and then there's his in-game managing, which is an entirely different sad story. examples abound, here's the latest:

Mathenaging: Why does St. Louis Cardinals manager Mike Matheny like to put the go-ahead run on base?

and the bunting. oh god, the bunting.

lol wong almost cycled for memphis last night

mozeliak said they want taveras to 'play a lot more cf' before calling him up, which kinda makes sense. at least until they bench craig for being unclutch

~poof~

craig not in lineup tonight

peter bourjos homer, tho

pushin' buttons

#mathenaging slowly finding way back to lineup orginally handed to him

grichuk back down, joey butler up

look who got clutch again

dammit

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BnOQNVzIEAASZ-K.jpg

not a bad AAA lineup!

return of the wong

now that he's overcome adversity by being sent down to minor leagues by his dipshit mathenager so that old man ellis could suck ass at hitting a baseball for a few weeks while he went on a hot streak in non-major league counting games, i predict that kolten wong is primed for a great career. but he better not have 3 bad games in a row or he's done for!

that was exactly like fantasy baseball, where all you accomplish is missing the upswing in production.

lol wong is sick with stomach flu, won't be available tonight anyway

<3

http://www.sbnation.com/2014/5/15/5717272/sb-nation-reviews-willie-mcgee

great article. god i love willie mcgee.

You may like an athlete because they happen to be very good at what they do. You won't love them for this, though, or at least not without combining it with other variables that make them unique. There were players as good as Willie McGee, but none were as entertaining to watch based strictly on quirk and the apparent misery that every step caused him. That misery was only part of it, though. McGee chose the odd set of options in life in every facet of the game, a switch hitter who looked equally strange from either side of the plate, a superb center fielder prone to rare but grandiose mistakes in the field, and a man who could not take a baseball card portrait without looking like you had just:

a.) bought him the most adorable rabbit in all the world

b.) made it his only and best friend

c.) slaughtered this rabbit in front of his horrified eyes

d.) put a bat in his hand, and pointed him toward the DonRuss artist while tapping at your watch

http://cdn1.vox-cdn.com/imported_assets/2198899/86Donrussbaseball-WillieMcGeeDK_medium.jpg

ugh, yesterday was a tough one.

ban matheny.

but garcia seemed like he did relatively well, and if motte can come back and be effective that'll help the bullpen fiasco.

@keithlaw
Matheny's #smrtbaseball move was really egregious: he had a great RHP intentionally walk a hitter with a career .278 OBP vs righties.

E Gattis intentionally walked.
J Schafer walked, F Freeman scored, R Doumit to third, E Gattis to second.
C Martinez relieved T Rosenthal.
M Ellis at second base.
R Doumit scored, E Gattis to third, J Schafer to second on wild pitch by C Martinez.
R Pena walked.
J Heyward grounded out to first.

and as part of that same stupid sequence, double switching out wong for ellis.

it didn't end up mattering, but why??

matheny has some uh limitations and can't manage around his key guys not performing. you can't blame him for Craig and Holliday hitting like crap, or for the bullpen getting wild. Mike doesn't seem to really know what to do to manage around those issues though :/

btw cool strike zone
http://t.co/MViMujQQkk

apparently the gameday strikezone mapper thing was a bit off compared to other mappers. here's brooks baseball's version of the same plate appearance:

http://cdn1.vox-cdn.com/imported_assets/2203367/numlocation_php_medium.png

damnit. did you see the one of the called strikes on carpenter? dude has gotten screwed.

https://twitter.com/AugieSports/status/467295904865988608/photo/1

ugh, that's awful. anecdotally it seems like he's been getting repeatedly fucked this season but it's nice to see the data to back it up

St. Louis Cardinals ‏@Cardinals 21m
#STLCards recall OF Shane Robinson and option OF Joey Butler to the @memphisredbirds. @SUGASHANE43 batted .371 (23-for-62) while in Memphis.

fine, i guess

but i really don't understand what the reasoning is. why did robinson go down in the first place? did they actually want to give butler a fair shot or did robinson have to go through some Matheny-endorsed Adversity(tm) so that he could be better? piscotty/taveras/grichuk's playing time in AAA was curtailed while robinson played every day.

i just don't understand what the goal is

man, i love to see them fail to bring in a winner.

Motte looks more like a crazed hillbilly fuck that any player i've ever seen.

i know it's only one game, but the velocity of Jaime's fastball from his last start is encouraging:

http://www.fangraphs.com/fgraphs/8137_P_FT_20140518.png

fastest average velocity he's ever had in a game, and highest peak velocity as well.

oh, oops.

http://i.imgur.com/bgVvlXA.png

bourjos sprints to 1st on a routine bouncer to short, forces a quick throw and error from crawford. bunt and run with a decent bunt from jaime, and then he does this crazy quick slide into 2nd and immediately floats back up to his feet and takes 3rd while they're throwing jaime out at 1st. sheesh, that was beautiful to behold.

oscar time!

YES!!!

i'm trying to lower expectations, especially because if he has 4 bad games in a row matheny will matheny him down to the un-matheny leagues. if he does well, though, i think it sets up a trade of either jon jay or matt adams. i feel bad for jay. he puts up 2-3 WAR for the last few seasons and would be a no doubt starter on almost any MLB team, but could almost be a 5th outfielder on the cards if taveras hits well. i think it makes sense to trade him to a team that will play him every day and hopefully get some good relief help and/or another minor league pitching prospect in return.

in related news "pump up the jam" has been playing on a loop in my head ever since i heard about this

http://cdn3.sbnation.com/imported_assets/1425347/2012-March-24-17-17-5_medium.jpg

(from the infamous moment in spring training 2012 when ricky horton and dan mclaughlin had no idea who taveras was, neither did the production crew, and horton said "'Joe Minor League Guy, No. 91, had a great year last year.")

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI9pllCxVNI

https://newenthusiast.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/ot-2.gif?w=388

haven't read this yet, but hey who doesn't love an oral history

http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/story/oral-history-of-st-louis-cardinals-2009-draft-class-060514

Jack Flaherty ‏@Jack9Flaherty 9h
Truly blessed to have been taken by the Cardinals!! What a day it has been! Looking forward to a bright future ahead! God is good! *emoji praying symbol*

:-/

#IAmSecond