Cardnilly doesn’t like the 2006 Cardinals, or so he says before leaving town in the midst of a horrific losing streak. He thinks we should cast off some deadwood after the season’s run its course without elaborating what that deadwood is.

I like the team. I like the risks the front office took in the offseason. I like that we’re not bloating our salary. I don’t want to root for a NL Yankees. The 2006 Cardinals are a good baseball team and I’m proud to support every man on the roster. (Except for perhaps John Rodriguez but I’m trying hard to get over it. And Timo Perez for the sake of irrationality.)

First, some news. The Redbirds won last night, 5-1. Lefty Chris Narveson, who had a nice profile at the Cardinals site yesterday, earned the win. How wild would it be to have him in the rotation next season? A home-grown lefty starter. Possible 2007 rotation:

Carp Mulder Reyes Narveson Suppan

Skip went 3-4 to bring his average up above .300 again. No walks, though. Since Schumacher has been (wisely) removed from the leadoff spot, he’s stopped working counts as religiously as he had been before, when he’d been taking strikes for the sake of it. Hopefully that’ll translate into more aggressive and productive at-bats and the walks will come when pitchers avoid him. If he can get a good hot streak going, I’d be mighty happy to see a roster move like:

Brad Thompson to Memphis for Josh Kinney or Brian Falkenborg
John Rodriguez to Memphis for Skip

Did anyone notice that Micklasz has settled his sights on Kinney to save the bullpen. I suggested calling him up for the Cubs series at the beginning of June in a series of roster moves that didn’t happen, obviously. I’m not thinking that Kinney is going to be our savior by any stretch, just to let him know that the organization is impressed with his work.

Oliver Perez was demoted to AAA yesterday. Hopefully Tom Gorzelanny pitches as sickeningly good for the Pirates as he did for the AAA Indians and the Pirates decide Perez is expendable. I’d like to see what he could do as a Cardinal.

Well, since Cardnilly’s off in the old lands and so not around to preview the series versus the Royals, I’ll put on his shoes and do a subpar Royals Preview:

Friday, June 30^th
Brandon Duckworth vs. Jeff Suppan

Duckworth was bought from the Pirates AAA Indians earlier this month and has made three starts, none of them lasting through the sixth inning. He’s a 30 yr-old groundball pitcher with good control and a slight reverse platoon split. The Cards are batting .355/.432/.526 against him and based on the limited exposure Cardinals batters have had against him while with the ‘Stros and Phillies in years past, we essentially don’t have enough spots in the lineup to fill with guys who’ve hit him well. For example: Molina’s 2-3 vs. Duckworth and Bennett’s 1-6 with a home run. With Soup Can pitching, I imagine we’ll start Bennett. Spiezio’s 3-4 and the Gooch is 2-3, so who knows who’ll start in left. Those are good problems to have.

The Royals lineup is .283/.337/.380 against Suppan. Only catcher John Buck has taken one yard against Jeff. He’s caught Duckworth’s last two games, had Thursday night off, and has a fairly hot bat–so ought to be in the lineup. It’ll be interesting to see how he faces for the first time his former teammates, Grudz and Sanders.

Saturday, July 1^st
Mark Redman vs. Sidney Ponson

The Cardinals are .358/.412/.587 against former A/Pirate lefty Redman. Everybody hits him well, notably Eckstein (14-28, 2b, 3b, 2 HR, 2 BB) and Molina (4-7, 2b, HR, BB). Spiezio will probably be in left.

It’s fortunate that the Cardinals can hit Redman, because the Royals have hit Ponson almost as well to the tune of a .319/.395/.522 line. He’ll need to be careful with Matt Stairs, and would have had to watch out for Mark Sweeney, were he not on a rehab assignment. It’s Ponson’s game to lose.

Sunday, July 2^nd
Mike Wood vs. Jason Marquis

With 29 ABs’ worth of exposure, the Cards have put up a .276/.371/.310 line against Mike Wood and in 46 ABs the Royals are .239/.300/.261 against Marquis. Looks like a decent small-ball pitching matchup and a fine opportunity for Jason to bring down his HR/9 rate. This will be my first game at the new stadium—I’ll be sitting in the fancy-pantsed Mark McGwire box, eating nachos and pounding ice-cold, frosty Budweisers that are included with the ticket price. I figure I can make a profit if I pace myself a bit.

I credit myself for breaking that ugly losing streak. You see, I hadn’t been able to see any of the games for the past week. Because of that, we lost all of them. But a Hooters waitress let me in on where the local satellite equipped bar is located and so I was able to see the game tonight. Naturally, the Cardinals won. More accurately, the Indians lost the game by playing even more sloppily in the ninth than the Cardinals had in the eighth. I think Eckstein might have been safe anyways on that final play and a lot of calls seemed to be going the Indians’ way. Edmonds looked awfully safe on that goofy wild pitch play early in the game.

In any case, how about those scrappy middle infielders racking up the ribbies, eh?

Other news: Bill Brasky Amaury Marti hit his second home run of the Palm Beach season on Tuesday night, although he went 0-3 with a walk and two strikeouts tonight. Skip Schumaker went 1-5 and stole a base.

Also, I added Elle at College of Cardinals to the ‘roll at the right. I’d noticed her a while back when she started knitting some Tony Reyes socks, now finished.

Finally, my face is burnt to a crisp. I look like an oompa-loompa. I aim to wake up before the crack of dawn tomorrow morning to watch the sun come up off the horizon of the Atlantic. Ideally, it won’t be as cloudy as last time so I can take a nifty picture.

Skip Schumaker broke out of his recent slump by going 3-4 with a home run last night. Gall kept pace with him, hitting his third, and Daubach jacked two out. I would complain that Skip needs to bring his walk rate up, but if you check the logs, he’s been working counts very well all season, even during the slump. I noticed that he’s been moved out of the leadoff spot during his slump in favor of Derek Wathan, who has all but replaced Junior Spivey as the starting second baseman for the Redbirds. If Spivey’s tenuous position in the organization were not enough in doubt, the Redbirds yesterday picked up scrappy fan favorite Bodhi Hart Hart (Bo Hart) after the Rockies released him.

In other news, I woke up at 5 this morning to watch dolphins swim off the shore while the sun rose. Then I went for a brisk morning swim. Good times.

Were you swimming in the ocean with dolphins twenty yards away or so this morning?

You should have been, it was a good time.

(Of course, I haven’t gotten to see a Cardinals game since Wednesday, but mlb gameday audio isn’t too shabby.)

((Then again, the way these last six games have gone…))

Wow. I didn’t get to see it, but I’m still amazed. I’m almost inclined to take back all the wisecracks about the myspace page.

Aside from that, all I’ve got to report is that this show is mind-numbing.

Also, if you live in St. Louis and don’t read the Evening Whirl, then you’re missing out on the finest publication in the city. Pure genius. (The webpage isn’t much, but the print edition knocked my socks off.)

Mark Mulder must be tipping his pitches. The Joe Crede home run to make it 9-1 in the third looked like a pretty good pitch to me. Jimmy Ballgame’s supposed to pick up on this shit before anyone else.

Time to play properly tomorrow. Can’t get any worse.

A.J. Pierzynski seems like quite the asshole, though. I wouldn’t blind-side him in the jaw, though a kick in the nuts would serve him right.

Contra

Super Mario Bros (Better acoustic)

That is all.

Today’s the day that I’m renting that chipper. It should be a real good time. C-Bot’s gonna help me run it. I figure we’ll take turn hatcheting side branches off the limbs and feeding the wood into the chipper’s throat. I’m guessing it’ll be done by noon.

The Cards face off against the White Sox today in a series I’ve been looking forward to. The White Sox are one of the Junior Circuit teams that I don’t mind watching. Quite a few friends of mine around here like the Sox, too. It should be a good series, and if we take two of three sans el Hombre it would be a major victory. We’ve got Mulder, Marquis, and Suppan (or Reyes) taking the hill against Vazquez, Buehrle, and Garcia. The White Sox are 5-1 against the NL Central so far in this interleague season.

After the Chipping: That was a lot of fun. The wood chipper was quite a powerful machine. It managed to grind up an 8″ diameter log without any trouble. While I was at the counter renting the tool, I talked to the woman working there about renting a backhoe to dig out my fenceposts like Jim had recommended. She pointed out a little one that would do the job. She also pointed out that they could rent me a jackhammer to break up the blocks. I might end up going with that route. I was watching a landscaping show on one of the cable channels and the contractor was reusing chunks of an old sidewalk and patio that he’d broken up in the back yard to build retaining walls and for borders of things in the yard. That strikes me as a very smart idea—much smarter than paying someone to haul the old concrete out to a dump somewhere. I could do the same with the fenceposts. Also, the former property owner had done a classic idiot move that needs to be corrected: they’d ordered too much concrete for the slab under the garden shed, and instead of having it hauled back, they dumped it all in the yard next to the slab. Now there’s a tree growing up between the two slabs. When I break up the formless pour of concrete, the tree may very well die—it’s not long for this earth as it is, though. So anyways, the current thinking is to rent a jackhammer to break up the pours of concrete that the metal posts are sunk in and also the formless slab and to reuse the pieces as landscaping rock and to replace the wooden border of my vegetable garden. Although I was looking forward to driving a backhoe, it may have to wait until I need to do some grading, which won’t happen on this piece of property.

I’ve been pruning the trees in my yard for the past few weeks and now I’ve got a very large stack of branches on my back patio. In exchange for caring for a friend’s dingo this weekend—yes, a dingo—she is allowing me to borrow her truck to tow a wood chipper from the local tool rental store. The plan was to spend the morning turning the pile of cypress, mulberry, hackberry, and magnolia branches into mulch and use it around the yard. It was really hot, though. Mid-nineties hot. And there was an X-Files marathon on TNT. Now the plan is to spend this afternoon making sure I’ve got all the branches taken down that need to be taken down. Then I’ll take the dingo for a walk. Monday’s going to be a fairly busy day at work, so the chipping will have to wait until Tuesday morning. Maybe Monday if I do some hatchet work today and tomorrow to have all the wood stacked in piles to make it go faster during the rental. My neighbors should be thrilled.

This is totally awesome! Even better than this!

Chapter 11 on the Transformers: The Movie DVD is called “Swear Word” because Starscream says shit at one point. Why? Dammit, why? There was a scene in the He-Man movie (starring Dolph Lundgren) in which a character says shit. I never understood why. Either they figured that they were going to be rated PG anyways, so might as well get your money’s worth or else they wanted the parents in the audience to have something to enjoy. That second explanation seems more likely and exceptionally misguided at the same time. The writers of Spongebob Squarepants have mastered the art of making children’s programming that’s amusing enough for adults to watch, in my not-so-humble opinion.

So I noticed that the Astros are creeping up in the division standings and though, “how the heck are they doing that?” They had a series against the Cubs.” As much as I appreciate the Cubs taking 3-4 from the Reds last weekend, it would be nice if they could be non-Cardinal NL Central teams with a bit more consistency. Take away their 6-3 record against the Cardinals and they’re 12-14 in the division. Not that bad, really.

It sucks that I have to wait until September 5th. It’s rather cruel of them to release that a few weeks into the Fall semester instead of during the summer when I can afford to watch seven DVDs in a row.

This is genius.

This sounds promising. Background here and here.

And catch yourself some meat? Yeesh.

Just for grins, I checked out how Aaron Miles had performed up to this point in the season last year. Through June 12th, he’d put up a .297/.310/.399 line last year. Notably, he’d only walked twice at this point, compared to twenty times this year so far. Most surprisingly, on May 8th, 2005 he went 1-3 with a grand slam off Al Leiter at the Marlins. Miles has put up a .275/.362/.327 line so far this season–dragged down by his poor hitting against right-handed batters outside of May. His R/L splits this season are not characteristic of his career batting splits—he’s historically been better from the left side—so it’s reasonable to expect improvement in that aspect of his game as the season progresses.

Pregame: I’m a little surprised by tonight’s lineup. Luna batting 8th with Taguchi up second. I’d swap those two. It’s mildly surprising that Miles isn’t in there. I suppose they might think using him exclusively against right-handers might force him to focus on batting lefty or something. Here’s hoping Perez has a lousy, lousy game and cracks 95 on the gun.

Postgame: Encarnacion has too much speed to be afraid of Craig Wilson’s arm. Rolen wasn’t skeered. Game shoulda been 3-0. Our pitching was perfect. Perez looked pretty good. I saw him clocked at 95 (although Izzy’s velocity showed up at 102 on the gun at one point!) That doesn’t help the buy-low Perez scheme.

Skip went 3-4 with a double and a stolen base at Memphis tonight. Marti went 1-3 for Palm Beach.

That was no meteor! ‘Twas a spacecraft manned by evil, intelligent rabbits who boldly go where none have before.

The heartless bastards have been eating my beans for weeks. With their horrible fangs.

(A few more liters of medicine and I can hit the sheets.)

Also: The Monkey Chow Diet

Followed up by a passable poo joke.

(Most of those links are from Dave Barry.)

I ported the script implementing a good strategy for de-scrambling words in the Jumble puzzles to Windows: available here.

Right now it’s just a python script, so you’ll need to install a python interpreter before it’ll work (you should have one anyways). I plan to rewrite it in Ada tonight for practice while watching game 4 of the Stanley Cup championship round. If that works out, I’ll replace that zip file with one that has an executable file so the python interpreter won’t be necessary.

This hockey game is lookin’ crazy exciting. Good to see Chris Pronger having some success (although much like him, he’s committed two penalties already). In the Miami-Mississippi game that’s not televised here, Jon Jay is 3-3 with two stolen bases and he’s been hit by a pitch. [updated] Jon Jay’s 3-3 with three stolen bases now and he’s been hit by pitches twice. Hope this guy signs. The bastard Miami manager had Chris Perez pitch the last five innings of the game.

Speaking of recent Cardinal draftees, the 31 year old Cuban defector who we picked in the 20th round had his debut with Palm Beach tonight and went 1-3 with a home run. It should be fun watching this guy shoot through the farm system.

Lastly, Skip Schumaker drew his seventh walk of the season tonight. He’s been working counts well all season so it’s surprising he’s only walked that many times. This one was a seven pitch affair in the eighth: took two strikes, didn’t offer at three straight balls, fouled off a strike, and took the next pitch for the free base.

The University of Miami vs. Ole Miss super-regional championship game is on ESPN2 tonight at 7pm. The winner advances to take on Oregon St.. Keep an eye on Cardinal draftees CF Jon Jay and closer Chris Perez from Miami. Also, Chris Coghlan of Mississippi went 36th in the draft to the Marlins.

Blast! The powers that be chose to show the Georgia vs. South Carolina super-regional instead of the one of local interest. No Cards or Cubs drafted players on either team.

Something I noticed today: The AGM of the Colorado Rockies popped in at the Rockies fans’ equivalent of VeB to say that he appreciates their creativity and enthusiasm. He was greeted with compliments on the great job he’s been doing. Try to imagine what would happen if John Mozeliak did the same thing at Viva el Birdos… I’d expect it would take about ten minutes before a few would fill the thread with their swearing and whining. And the Rockies are 4.5 games back in the cellar of the NL West while the Cards are 1.5 up in first place. Shame on us (in those possible worlds I imagine).

I’ve been a Mark Mulder fan since he came on board and think he’s having a better season than he’s been given credit for–and will likely improve to career norms before the campaign is done–but how much fun with this sequence of trades be:

Send Mulder to Colorado for AAA 1B Ryan Shealy (2006) and 3B/OF Jeff Baker (2006).

The Cardinals promote Reyes to fill Mulder’s rotation slot, see how Baker does in Left and use Shealy at first while Pujols recovers from his torn oblique.

Once Pujols comes back, you package up Shealy and Reyes for Dontrelle Willis.

In the meantime, it’d be nice if the Cards could pick up Oliver Perez as well, like I was blathering about yesterday.

This isn’t gonna happen of course, but I don’t see anything huge in principle to keep it from happening–give or take an extra low-level prospect in one trade or the other. Baker and Shealy have no future with the Rockies, and Mulder would give them a groundball machine in the near-term, allow them to move Byung-Hyun Kim into the bullpen to replace Mike DeJean, and bring them two first round draft picks after Mulder leaves as a free agent after this season. The Marlins would get two top-notch MLB-ready young players. The Cardinals would get Dontrelle Willis, a lefty who’d thrive in the Lou, and a good young left-fielder–a better one than Victor Diaz whose name was bandied about in yesterday’s blatherings. If we could swing a deal for Perez and turn his career around, we’d have a heck of a 1-2-3 rotation heading into the playoffs, and all under control for next season.

Lotsa ifs there, but it’s fun to blather inanely sometimes. Two trades in the next two stops on this road trip.

Update: Lookie there… Perez has options remaining. I doubt the Pirates would hand him over to a division rival for the low-level prospect I have in mind but most trades that go down don’t make all that much sense to me.

The episode of Law and Order on right now has one of my favorite comedians, Jim Gaffigan, in a cameo as a plumber.

There’s been a great deal of reports that the Cards have been trying to work out a trade for the Pirates’ utility (C/1B/LF) player, Craig Wilson. I’m not convinced that Wilson’s significantly better than anyone on our bench right now. It also strikes me as unusual that Walt would telegraph an intended move like this. The reports say that the Pirates want Reyes or Wainwright for Wilson, which would be badly overpaying. I’m thinking that this might be a good time to buy low on Oliver Perez, who’s having his second awful season in a row with an ERA over 7 and a lousy K:BB ratio. Kip Wells will be coming off the 60-day DL in the next two or three weeks at which time the Pirates will have to remove someone from their rotation and from the 40-man roster. It would be awful nice of us to solve both those problems by trading one of our AA starters and a PTBNL for Perez. The Pirates could bring up their impressive lefty Tom Gorzelanny until Wells is done and keep the pitching pipeline going in their system while we gamble on what would either be a major bust or a left-handed power pitcher. Ideally, Perez would make it to AAA for some instructional work. If he would be unable to clear waivers, we’d have to option Johnson and put Perez in the bullpen. That’d also allow us to promote Blake Hawksworth to the AA rotation to get our own pitching pipeline back up to speed.

I’m looking forward to seeing the Cardinals chase Oliver early on Tuesday with Carpenter pitching in his second game back from the DL. If Perez still has his stuff in spite of his bad numbers, I’ll have my fingers crossed that we can steal him sometime next week. You know–to smooth over ruffled feathers over all the horrible things said between Walt Jocketty and Dave Littlefield after asking Anthony Reyes for Craig Wilson was proposed.

Update: Here‘s an interesting idea: Mark Worrell for Victor Diaz… The Diaz profile at Baseball Prospectus makes him sound like an awful outfielder, though. They compare his defensive to Manny’s. Updated later: That one was a pipe dream.

If Jesus Quintana were a baseball player instead of a fictional bowler, his approach at the plate would be exactly like Corey Koskie’s. He holds the bat out towards the pitcher while thrusting his hips out as though he’s giving the strikezone a slow hump. Very creepy. Eight-year old, dude.

While looking for a suitable JQ link, I noticed that Turturro will be acting in an upcoming Transformers movie directed by Michael Bay, who made a lot of very bad movies in the past ten years–notably Armageddon and Pearl Harbor. I spent a lot of time playing with those toys when I was wee. I remember the family driving from Ohio to New Jersey as a little kid the Christmas I got Soundwave. I played with it the whole way there. That feels like a very long time ago. Here’s a nifty animation of that dude breakdancing. Mildly amusing. The official movie webpage is here, although there’s no content there. I imagine I’ll see it when it comes out on videotape. I wonder if the soundtrack will include music from Boogie Nights, which used the song from the original Transformers movie called, The Touch.

There’s also a Dirty Harry video game in the works. Maybe I’ll rent it.

Looks like the Cubs helped us out this weekend. They’re up 9-3 right now, so unless their bullpen implodes, they should beat the Reds 3 of four games this weekend. If the Cards pitching can avoid giving up many more runs, we should finish up this weekend with a 1 1/2 game lead in the division. Next week, we’ll have an opportunity to improve our division record with three games against the Pirates.

One more note: It looks like Ty Johnson is working out pretty well as the #2 lefty out of the ‘pen. In his 10 IP so far this season, his K/9 and HR/9 rates are lower than what we should reasonably have expected from Ricardo Rincon. If he can bring his walk rate down a bit and keep up the good work he’s done so far, he’ll definitely be a very good weapon–something that was in doubt a few weeks ago.

Here’s a pretty neat Flash animation.

These short sports blooper clips are hilarious, too. The skiing one is cartoonish. Hope that dude’s all right. Unfortunately, the famous Kerry Robinson wall-climbing ground-rule-double play isn’t there… I still haven’t found that clip.

I didn’t notice it, but OF Brian Martin was promoted to AAA the other day. (Career numbers)

The Cardinals also traded a PTBNL to Texas for switch hitting utility infielder Derek Wathan. (This season’s stats) Trying out with the Reds in the spring, he went 0-6 with no walks but must have reached on a few errors. Perhaps Spivey’s about to be shut down for the rest of the season.