There will come a time this year when Matt Holliday won’t look quite like the player he does now. He won’t have posted a 174 wRC+ in his last 39 plate appearances. He won’t be getting rave reviews from the famously fickle New York City media. He may pick up an injury or two. There will […]
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This offseason marked five years since Albert Pujols, quite possibly the greatest Cardinal ever, turned down an incomprehensibly lucrative offer to remain a Cardinal for life in favor of a slightly more incomprehensibly lucrative offer to go elsewhere. The occasion passed without much notice, but if you’ve listened closely enough, you may have heard some doubt start to seep in at […]
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For a moment there, right after the Fowler signing, the Cardinals actually managed to convince some of us that they weren’t going to call it an offseason. The club, wrote Derrick Goold, “could become more aggressive than previously believed, turning toward free-agent sluggers Mark Trumbo and Edwin Encarnación as possible pursuits.” Maybe such a change […]
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The Cardinals were neither long nor shy in signaling one of their top priorities heading into the offseason. Days after finishing the season 17½ games back of the Cubs and one game short of a wild-card spot, John Mozeliak acknowledged—as straightforwardly as the circumlocutory bow-tie enthusiast has ever acknowledged anything—that the club would seek an upgrade in center […]
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And so it was that the 2016 season collapsed into a ruthless parody of itself, an occasionally dramatic but mostly soul-deadening 7-9 stretch against three wild-card rivals and two NL bottom-feeders, a five-act meditation on the futility of human endeavor and the impossibility of change. The Cardinals lost two straight to the Dodgers, needed a […]
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There are a number of reactions you could have to yesterday’s rollout of the Sporting News’ Cardinal-less list of the 50 best players in baseball. You could make a convincing case that Matt Carpenter belongs on it. You could make a highly dubious case, as panelist Derrick Goold apparently did, that Yadier Molina belongs on […]
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Losing the World Series doesn’t ever not suck, but if ever there were a team and fanbase set up to feel minimal disappointment over falling just short of a championship, it was Cardinal Nation circa November 2013. We’d just watched the Cards’ fourth World Series appearance in a decade and were a scant two years […]
Continue reading →When asked over the weekend by a Hall of Fame beat writer about the biggest story of the Cardinals’ offseason, Mike Matheny decided to answer, and when he answered he politely refused to concede that his club is old and bad, causing friend of the blog Patrick Redford and others to conclude that the Cards […]
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