You know a player doesn’t have to reside year round in the city they play in. I know I wouldn’t.
How many of the Cardinal players make STL their off season home?
I mean I guess you could see how the high crime rate the Ferguson stuff could play into some player decisions but I just think it’s a combo of many things. It was widely known Boston would’ve paid more than we would no matter what. Heyward liked the $$$ and the younger core of talent. Plain and simple Stanton didn’t want to play here and wanted to play in a huge market. What can you do?
The idea of stockpiling talent through the draft and trading it when you need to acquire above average talent is sound. However in the instance of Ozuna it hasn’t worked out like we thought. Trading Piscotty for Schrock and Munoz has sort of worked. Leone clearly was a roster clearing move from a position of depth. The jury is out. Clearly we are better at developing pitching than the true power bat – star position players.
Then there’s the other issues. It’s one step forward and 2 staps back on the FA market. For ever Norris and Mikolas there’s Cecil, Fowler, Leake, Gregorson and the much maligned Greg Holland. You can’t sustain success in making the post season flopping as much as we’ve done recently on FA. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go after the big fish but we need to make a bigger splash than what we’ve done the last 3 seasons. For the last 3 years you’ve just felt like they done a little bit but not enough. That needs to change moving forward. I always liken it to hedging your bets rather than what we’ve done and go in feeling just ok.
We’ve got a lot of money coming off the books next year. We can get an impact FA or two. It’s really what this team needs not just cost controlled Ozuna, mid level starter $$$$ Mikolas and some junk for the pen. The Greg Holland signing really is still just odd to me how that went down.