As the 2016 season got underway, the Cardinals were feeling disrespected. Yes, they’d suffered a portentous NLDS loss to the Cubs the previous October, and then stumbled through a disappointing offseason, but from the top of the organization on down, they were adamant that they wouldn’t be relinquishing their NL Central crown without a fight. […]
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Heavy rains caused devastating floods across parts of Missouri, Illinois, and Arkansas last week, including in and around St. Louis, where the Meramec River crested at record levels and inundated homes and businesses in communities like Pacific, Eureka, and Fenton. Many smaller rural towns, lacking levees, manpower, and other resources, were hit even harder. At least 13 people were […]
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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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Here’s a needlessly elaborate version of a hypothetical first proposed to me by sometimes Double Birds contributor Adam Felder: On Sunday evening, just before the Cardinals open the regular season against the Cubs at Busch Stadium, an Omnipotent Time-Traveling Baseball Genie appears before you in a blinding seraphic vision. He offers you a deal: he […]
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The Cardinals are a successful and beloved baseball club, and in reading and writing about them we are always eager for new narratives and feel-good turns of phrase: the Cardinal Way, Baseball Heaven, the Best Fans in Baseball. Occasionally, these flights of lyrical enthusiasm will flirt—even if only unconsciously—with the idea that the team and its […]
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One year ago next week, St. Louis sports fans had their hearts ripped out of them by a grotesque Thomas Nast cartoon of a team owner. Stan Kroenke, a wigged weirdo who’d lucked into his fortune as a tapeworm in the intestines of the Walton family, persuaded a roomful of equally talentless and vicious old men—silver-spooned […]
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The local paper touts the team’s payroll “flexibility,” floating the possibility of a “sizable addition” in the near future. The owner concedes that the club has “not had great results pursuing the highest-profile free agents, even though we’ve been close on several occasions”; the problem, he says, is that “there’s always a team or two or […]
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Earlier this year the Cardinals debuted their in-house TV show, Cardinals Insider, which aired all season long on Fox Sports Midwest and every Sunday on Channel 5 in St. Louis. It’s billed as “a weekly news magazine television show…that provides fans with unfiltered, behind-the-scenes, insider access to the Cardinals from team journalists,” and is “[j]am-packed with exclusive […]
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