St. Louis 2025 Game #93 thread – Wednesday, July 9 vs. Washington Nationals

FYI here,
The Giants walked off the Phillies with three runs in the last of the 9th at Oracle Park. All three runs scored on an inside-the-park three run homer by Bailey. It hit high up on the brick wall out in triples alley and bounced way away from the outfielders.

First time in 99 years a catcher walked off a game with an ITP homerun. Go check out the video.

r/Esteemed Rat

Agree JJ. When Herrera is healthy, you have Herrera, Contreras, Arenado, and Winn. That’s all fine. But that’s only 4 guys. Your other righties are Pages, Pozo, Saggese, and Hampson (or Walker when he’s healthy). Saggese is fine, but the rest are either poor hitters or marginal at their position. Actually, I don’t really know what Pozo is. Probably a flash in the pan, but who knows right now?

Donovan, Burleson, Gorman, and Scott are all really bad or at least significantly worse against lefties. Nootbaar is also diminished but not by quite as much.

You probably need to leave Nootbaar and Donovan in there regardless. Throw in the 4 righties above. That’s 6 out of 9. You can live with 1-2 spots of low production. But you already are getting them with Donovan and Nootbaar. Pages is going to be an additional one (unless Pozo catches, but the team obviously favors Pages and for lots of great reasons I think). That leaves CF and RF as the two to upgrade. The team lately has been doing this by putting Saggese in at 2B and moving Donovan to the outfield. That’s a good solution. Saggese struck the ball really well last night despite his lack of success. Hampson gives the team a slight upgrade against lefties over Victor Scott. But it’s probably not enough to really matter as he’s still poor (just less poor). We really need a CFer option or at least a corner outfield option that can hit lefties well but those players don’t exist right now in the current system. Josh Baez might be the closest possibility and I think he’s at minimum a year away if he ever makes it at all.

Zach Levenson and Travis Honeyman are really the only other two that could be ready in a year but both of those two would be even further longshots than Baez. So the simple answer is no one other than Baez and Walker. Those two are critical to solving this problem unless they go external.

Rat mentioned that Giant’s/Phillie’s final and I’d have say that the walk-off ITP’er from the Giant’s catcher for the 4-3 W was quite an oddity. Especially since the deciding run was the result of Bailey’s full throttle dash around the entire length of the base paths. I have to guess that at about 300 to 320 ft. he was beginning to leak a bit of oil as he approached HP in the person of the deciding run…Haha! In any case, whenever I see the often times amusing sight of a catcher burning around the basespaths I’m reminded that our own Timmy McCarver is the only catcher in the entire history of the game to lead the Big Leagues in triples. Many of you are probably aware that he did so in 1966 with 13 of the hard to come by 3 sackers.

Is Pozo enough of a find to change any of the thinking.

I don’t know what to think about Pozo. He seemed to have just appeared out of nowhere. I like what I see, He’s fun to watch. But is he for real in the long term? In the next year or so we’re going to have a glut of catchers. To the block with several nice prospects I guess. A shame.

3-1 bad guys after 1. Pallante gives up a well hit double on the first pitch of the game. Then settles in well to get 2 outs and gets Josh Bell to 2 strikes . . . And then just walks him with some wild command. Then Pallante throws a hanger and it gets hit just over the RF wall. The Cards answer with a Contreras double and Donovan RBI single through the hole between third and short.

The RBI hit was from Burleson.

On an unrelated note. Does Jim Hayes, the on field reporter, have any friends? Because certainly they would have told him how ridiculous his moustache looks. 😂

I can only speak for myself, but I grow a little weary of all the different sign language celebrations that hitters perform after they’re able to produce a simple base hit. The Cardinals have some sort of bird wing flap that they use and Bell gave some other sort of celebratory sign at 2B after reaching on the double. I don’t mean to be an old grouch, but these guys seem to do it after every hit. I mean, haven’t they ever reached on a base hit before? Pretty soon they’ll come up with some sort of a little sign language celebration when they reach on a BB.