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Not a fan of that change, you’re flushing a long-held identity. Unless that team’s advertising contract or stadium land is being sold off and the new owners can’t use “Cardinals” in their merchandising efforts, why change something that was already way good?
If you kept 9/10 of the fluid roster we currently play and go get one more good solid starter who can last 7, and two bullpen arms with a decent track record who don’t walk people or throw the ball to the backstop once every outing, we’d be winning about 8 more games a year, maybe 10. That’s playoff territory.
What would that cost? 15M?Albert, so sorry for your loss. Life throws us situations none of us want to deal with, but in this one, you can honor him often by doing something he would have liked. We’ll all be thinking of you here.
And yet another win-able game thrown in the toilet by the bullpen. As soon as O’Brien gave it up on his first pitch, I admit I almost foresaw this and was totally disgusted and switched the radio off and went on with my work. Way too many times this kind of stuff happens.
I do like that this team is able to keep making comebacks late in a game, that bodes well. If we play a normal schedule next year, I can see us finishing 5-10 games over .500. Whether that reaches play-off territory or not is not of prime importance to me, I’d like to see a winning record though. That will mean this year wasn’t some kind of fluke where we happened to win enough games to look presentable while in a rebuild.
Now–that’s all making the assumption that the bullpen will get a couple much better arms out there–either developed or hired. They have given up way too many games. Our starters appear serviceble, maybe somebody will get a little better and become that stopper every team needs. It’s good for morale.Like Ratsbuddy said, “it’s pitiful”. Fully in agreement here. Losses like that demoralize a team, that’s the worst part. And you can’t convince me that the starting pitcher Pallante who pitched well, can stand in that dugout and remain stoic without thoughts of “well, so much for my good effort today–these guys just threw it away”. It’s human nature.
A bullpen blowing late inning 6 run leads to a second tier team certainly no better than we are, is what you get when you dumpster dive and take chances on the waiver wire with relievers cut loose by other teams. They’re cut loose for a reason! Not saying that maybe our new kids will get it together next season (assuming we have one) but one thing is for sure: when you keep allowing men on base–they score. I thought the whole idea of relief pitching was to put out the fire–not add fuel to it.
How many more games would we have in the win column if we had given up one good hitter for a lights out reliever? 10?
This team desperately needs relievers who can put people away with a 2 strike count. So many times this year I’ve seen them start a batter out and make him look weak, and then the coup-degrace pitch gets blasted to the gap or worse. And the walks and HBP’s and any other means of getting a batter on base seems to happen with way too much frequency.
Now, the starters: a little of the same here as far as the two strike approach, but IMO we have 3 qualified pitchers we can work with for next year. Don’t know if we keep all of them over the winter, but two of the three are fairly solid performers so far, that would be Leahy, and then Pallante, who resurrected himself mid season. McGreevy is right on the edge of being real good, I’m willing to wait on him. The others are unproven or are sliding the wrong way, so I can cut ties with them if somebody any better can be afforded. Dustin May was a little up and down for us, but mostly pretty solid after a bad start to the season. At least your heart didn’t sink when you saw his spot come up in the rotation after the month of May. I think if we’d been able to keep him, he’d have excelled here in a pitcher’s park.Intended to watch it, wanted to watch it, looked for it on everything “normal” I could think of, and it was not to be found. This sure gets old.
I can’t think of a better way to get the least amount of possible advertising coverage for sponsors than to put a hyped-up game on a subscription only network or streaming service. Who’s brilliant decisions are these? Only one thing explains that, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out where the nice fat check for the rights to televise went to.
Oh well, at least the highlight coverage of it today on the MLB channel was extensive and good.
I readily admit I don’t go diving into stats, so my judgments need to reflect that. That being said, I watch nearly every game and this guy is such a vital part of this team. His arm alone has gotten us a ton of additional double plays that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, so I don’t know where there are stats that tell you how many runs we haven’t given up because a runner got stranded at third.
Eyesight tells me that he might not hit a lot, but when he does, they seem to count. His defense has got to be worth a ton to the team too. Didn’t we have a guy named Dal Maxville who hung around for many years? Did he hit?
I say we should keep Masyn for a while.I truly feel bad for Gorman, don’t know what happened to him, the fall from grace has been loud and painful. The other day I happened to think about him because I mentioned to the wife during a telecast that nobody ever talked about him any more, so I looked up his stats. Oh man…pure shock. What are we gonna do with that?? I’m not sure you can get anything for him at all in organized baseball with that slash line, you might have to just give up and say here’s your check for the rest of your time, and wave bye bye. It does seem to be the DeJong syndrome all over again. Personable players both, but you have to produce to stay in the show. Whiffing and walking back to the dugout doesn’t get it done.
And Victor Scott isn’t doing a whole lot better in AAA than he did up in the bigs either. There’s obviously something wrong with his swing, or pitch recognition, or his eyesight is just plain bad. Something! Don’t know what helps that that probably hasn’t been tried. If he doesn’t get it together soon, the same may have to happen with him too– if he can’t put the ball in play and run like __, we can’t use you. We gotta move on sometime. He reminds me of Adron Chambers and Billy Hamilton.The pitching situation: All in all, I’m OK with the starters right now. Not all of them are good, but they’re serviceable for now. There has been a definite improvement on a couple of them this year.
The bullpen however, is like an open sore with this team–when will it heal? We keep giving away winnable games after the 7th inning, lately at least one each series, and changes are apparently needed out there. Right now, any and all out there are available if I’m the GM and somebody calls me up looking for an arm, or I might even throw one in to get a position player deal cinched. I’ll take my chances with some new kids, the results can’t be a whole lot worse. Might as well see what we’ve got down on the farm.This year it seems every time we’re up against a first or second place team in their division, we seem to be able to hold our own. We might take the series. Early on we swept a couple. Or at least put up a good fight and maybe lose a game or two in it by 1-2 runs but at least keep it interesting.
If it’s a last place in their division team, we now seem to get our clocks cleaned. Is this a mental let-down like taking your foot off the gas pedal when you see their place in the standings? I’ll bet Cincinnati is chomping at the bit to hit town. And don’t give up hope Colorado–you’ll get your chance!Having followed this team for 60+ years, what’s going on is not something I like to see–after all, who enjoys a rebuild–but sadly there’s a few good guys on our team that must go in order to try and get some solid pitching for ’27 and ’28 or we’ll be repeating this ‘close but no De Palma’ scenario over and over again and again. If they stand pat at trade deadline and we play what we have, there better be a couple more phenoms hid in the minors that can get up here pretty quickly and try to save next year.
My impression is that there is not really any quality pitching to be had through trades at this time that BDW will deem affordable, all the front runners are going to make better offers than we will, so don’t know what to expect as far as acquisitions between now and spring. Chance are, not a whole lot. A bullpen arm or two to try out maybe.Yet another game stolen from customers who buy yearly subscriptions to Cardinals TV. Thanks a whole lot for that Mr. Manfred, your selling-out of customer loyalty is disgusting, but I’m sure you’ll get over it while you and your marketing people who cut this deal are relaxing at a Jamaican beach resort this winter off your bonuses.
I can assure you I will NEVER buy Peacock or Apple +, or anybody else I find out who has virtually stolen a paid-for game from me. I wouldn’t even take the services for free at this point just because.This time, the Cub fans are no better off then we are, they apparently don’t get to watch it on TV either. I checked the Cub’s Marquis Network on DirecTV–no go. We have a Champaign IL CBS TV station who normally carries the Cards-Cubs games because we’re right smack in the middle of team loyalties in this region. No go.
Looks like we’re back to the 1972 method again. Pocket Panasonic, here we come…
Liberatore might have saved his job tonight. Where has this guy been for the last two months?
Always happy when somebody gets themselves straightened out a little bit, let’s hope it lasts.Hot weather, playing an upper tier team, a hitter’s park, lazy sweepers and hanging curve balls = a likely loss for us. I’ll predict 6-2 Atlanta. Hope I get proven wrong.
Our people have been talking Libby up for a good 4 years since he first came over in a deal, and lord knows we need a decent lefty on the starting staff, but it’s just not happening. If he could limit the other team to 4 runs and just eat some innings and go 6 or 7 for us, I’d say stay here–but 4 innings, leaving men on base, and out of the game more often than not at that point is not going to cut it at this level. We may need to move on. We need a solid seven inning man.
Trouble with that last statement, is –with who?I agree on Roycroft. Unless things click for him in AAA, I don’t think he escapes a DFA by August.
CF64, this is spot on. Isn’t he about out of options?
And by him ‘clicking’, I’m thinking he better be solid for several outings down there before he even gets another looky-see. In fact, he better be flat -dominating- . I mean, the guy must have had something going on for him, he made it up to AAA and got ML call-ups. But something happened. And it keeps happening. If a pitcher can’t get outs at least two-thirds of the time in the majors, he has no value.
Is it possible we can offload him for a low A Rockies prospect? Maybe a high school kid willing to quit his team and take a chance? If we DFA him we get nothing.In a little more light-hearted vein now: Every time Ollie goes out to make a pitching change, he’s always handing out new defense info cards to the players, we see it all the time and don’t think too much about it. All the managers and coaches do it during their mound visits. But at our house, we sometimes muse that depending on the gravity of the situation, one of those cards might be a bus ticket to Memphis.
Roycroft not doing anything at all to make a case for keeping him around. I’d guess his is the next name to disappear from the 26 man.
1TD, you and I are in complete agreement on those statements, I’ve been thinking this since the start of the season. He can disappear completely and go elsewhere. And he can take Fernandez with him as far as I’m concerned, the roster spots are better off used seeing somebody else at this point so we can assess what we have coming up the pipeline. We should move on at this point. It’s nothing personal, it’s just business. Our record and what might be at stake about late August demands it.
The talking heads keep telling us these guys have great stuff and are “close” to figuring it out, but I sure haven’t seen a whole lot of overall results other than giving up runs and muddying up an already bad situation when they come in with runners on. And way too many walks.
Bruill is here because he’s left-handed, and he’ll probably stay till about the end of the trade deadline where he’ll get DFA’d–unless–Romero gets traded. Every Cardinal pen for the last 30 years has had some left-hander who is so-so or painfully average, but fills a need to keep somebody a little better out there from having to come in too early in the games. (like Romero)Seems like year after year, there’s very little good starting pitching to go out and get at the trade deadlines or in the off-season, so that’s probably not going to change. Even the mediocre pitchers on losing teams who would have been readily available in years gone by, are now busy filling in for the injured stars.
At the point we’re at, major league experienced decent pitchers who are sound and might be available are usually beyond sensible contract reach, so sounds like we better keep trying to draft well and develop from within. I wish it could be improved in a quicker way, but I don’t see it.Mark me down as flat-out surprised we have the W-L record we do with one-fourth of the season gone. I would never have put money down that we’d be above .500 at nearly any point after the season began, much less 8 games above. That’s probably why I don’t bet on things unless I’m sure I’m right. When Donovan got his transfer papers, that took what was left of my confidence in a decent showing for this team away for this year.
So mark me down as Mr. Wrong-O. Wetherholt has played so well, it is almost like Donny never left.If we are 4-5 games above .500 by mid July, I say we gotta go for it, if for nothing else to bolster the “we’re back!” mentality for the city of St. Louis.
I say if this turns out to be the case we can be a buyer at that point, not a seller. You can always sell over the winter. I’d be hard pressed to let anybody go at the trade deadline that has improved themselves substantially over the previous year and has truly helped the team, but if the proper man became available that filled a long term need here (I’m thinking pitching or a bona fide power hitting outfielder that hits both lefties and righties), I’d be OK with getting him using other means. It appears we have plenty of goods in the pipeline on the way up, save maybe starting pitching, that we could vend.Yes, more alarming than the belief starting pitchers can’t throw more than 5 innings is the belief that relief pitchers can’t throw more than one inning.
I certainly agree, and if this continues, baseball might evolve into using two ‘starters’ per day, we’ll call them pitchers who can go 5 innings comfortably, and rotate them through every fourth day. There would be no true need for a 5th starter in a rotation. You’d only need about five or six pitchers who you’d call relievers out in your bullpen, and their use would mainly be for games that are statistically beyond hope, ones that go into extra innings, or to get things back on track because of rainouts/scheduling issues. Same amount of pitchers on the 26 man roster as now, just different roles.
It -is- a pretty cool item. My wife was a K-Mart employee back when this came out, so the flip side has meaning for her.
“Welcome back, my friends
To the show that never ends
We’re so glad you could attend
Come inside! Come inside”Nice call Blingboy. (My favorite band ever. I still marvel at the keyboard playing of Emerson.)
I guess our young roster looks good enough to start out with considering what we’re driving to accomplish. Pretty leery of Walker being on there opening day though, that spot had been truly earned by a couple others who had excelled this spring.
As we all know, in professional sports it’s kind of a tough world–put up some numbers, make yourself valuable to the team in some way, or you’re gone. I guess we’ll see what gets put up.Blingboy, this scenario sounds very familiar!
Fresh batteries installed, the 1972 Panasonic pocket transistor radio I inherited from my avid Cardinal fan father-in-law who used it for nearly 40 years, is ready to go again.
Game tested it on the first day of 2026 spring training, passed with flying colors. Wife tested the other ear, it also passed.Exactly. And if there’s no butts in the seats to fund more payroll to keep a real good player around when it comes time, those players will soon be gone too. But getting butts in the seats means you have to put a good product on the field.
Vicious circle. By next year, a lot of answers we want will be obvious with this organization.
