Archive for December, 2008

Roster Suggestions

Saturday, December 20th, 2008

John Mozeliak didn’t ask my opinion, but I feel strangely compelled to give it anyway.

The top priority for the offseason is apparently picking up type-A LHRP Brian Fuentes to close for the Cardinals in 2009. Fuentes is a very good pitcher who can get both righties and lefties out. He’s a three-time all-star. He’d also likely lose the closer role at some point during the season as he had in 2007 with Colorado. He’d prefer to pitch for the Angels, where I wouldn’t be surprised to see Scot Shields take over as closer.

The poop on the street is that Fuentes wants something in the area of 3/$33M.

I don’t want the Cardinals to sign Brian Fuentes. Too much money, too many years on the arm, too costly losing the first-round pick. I’m well aware that our bullpen last year had problems. We need another good lefthander: we’ve got Trever Miller on a very team-friendly contract. I’d like to see Dennys Reyes pitching for the Cardinals next year to solidify the left side of the ‘pen. Reyes is a type-B FA who was offered arbitration, so the Twins will get a sandwich pick when he signs, but the team signing him won’t lose anything. He wants a three-year deal, as does Fuentes, but Reyes is two years younger and is a (very good) LOOGY, not a closer, so the year-to-year cost wouldn’t be terribly high. (I’ve had an eye on Reyes since the 2006 season, when the Ricardo Rincon era ended prematurely.

There aren’t any established closers available on the FA market, unless you count Trevor Hoffman or Eric Gagne. It may sound a little hypocritical, seeing as he’s also a type-A FA who was offered arbitration, but I could see good things coming from signing Juan Cruz to a three-year contract at setup man rates, something in the neighborhood of 3/$12M, maybe more given the crappy Farnsworth signing. The downside to that is that you lose your first-round pick in the ’09 draft, of course, and also the ex-Cubs factor he brings. The upside is that he’s developed into a very good strikeout pitcher, a plague on the houses of all left-handed hitters, and is three years younger than Fuentes. In fact, he’s been one of the best relief pitchers in baseball over the past two years, striking out over 12 batters/9 over that span and putting up an ERA+ of 176 in 2009. That in spite of pitching half his games in the second most hitter-friendly stadium in the major leagues.

I suggest we sign Juan Cruz to a contract similar to the one we picked up Braden Looper on going into ’06 with incentives for IP targets. Juan Cruz starts out 2008 closing until, ideally, Perez is clearly ready for the ninth inning. Then Cruz moves into a set-up role or takes Piñiero’s spot in the rotation if Carpenter hasn’t already. (I suppose it’s a remote possibility that Jo-el could improve from last year, but I don’t see it happening.) Cruz profiles pretty similarly to Wellemeyer—hard thrower, good minor-league history as a starter, struggles at the major league level due to walks that landed him in relief. If he could put up a 3.68 FIP as a starter in 2009 and 2010, he’d almost certainly be worth the first rounder. (That’d require him to maintain the 0.87 HR/9, drop his BB/9 to 3, and keep his K/9 from going below 8.)

Another reason I’d like the Cardinals to sign Juan Cruz is that I’d very much like Ben Sheets to be a Cardinals in 2009 without giving the Brewers an absolutely knock-out draft next summer. The market looks spooked by the flexor muscle tear near the elbow that Sheets endured late last season, but I’m a believer that Sheets’ injury history is more flukiness than frailty. If the Cardinals sign both Cruz and Sheets, our first-round pick goes to Arizona and the Brewers get our second round pick for Sheets, since Cruz is ranked 16th among free agents by Elias, while Sheets comes in at 23. I’ve heard 2/$30M being bandied about for Sheets, with a lot of teams looking to cut payroll this off-season, I could see something even less. Over the next two years, Carp will be making 28.5 million, so that’s about the limit that I expect the Cardinals would be willing to offer.

Pretty much sacrifice next year’s draft (although you’ll always find some talent that’s unexpectedly dropped to the third round) and put together a great team without helping out the competition too much.

So here’s how I’d like to see our roster work itself out for next year:

Rotation

  • Wagonmaker
  • Sheets
  • Wellemeyer
  • Lohse
  • Piñiero/Carpenter

Bullpen

  • Cruz RHRP (CL)
  • Perez RHRP
  • Motte RHRP
  • K-Mac RHRP
  • Franklin/Kinney/Wonderbrad RHRP
  • Reyes LHRP
  • Miller LHRP

Starting Lineup

  • C: Molina R
  • 1B: El Hombre R
  • 2B: Kennedy L
  • 3B: Glaus R
  • SS: Spicoli R
  • LF: C-Dunc L
  • CF: Ankiel L
  • RF: Ludwick R

Bench

  • C: LaRue R
  • OF: Schumaker
  • OF: Barton/Mather/RazzleDazzle
  • IF: 2 of Brian Barden/Brenden Ryan/David Freese

Going off the most recent Roster Matrix at VeB, the payroll for that team would come in at around $111 million. They’d look like contenders on paper: if everything breaks right—healthy Carp and Sheets, resurgent Kennedy and Greene, solid bullpen, they’d be an excellent baseball team. With the Cubs planning on spending around $143M, we’d be fielding a comparably talented team without shooting ourselves in the foot for the future.

Go get ‘em, Mo.

Update/Correction: This is what I get for trusting ESPN, I guess. According to USA Today’s reporting on the Elias rankings, Ben Sheets scores a 79.038 on the FA list; Juan Cruz is lower at 76.627… The rankings are the same as reported on ESPN, sort of: Sheets is 23rd among NL pitchers and Cruz is 16th among NL relievers. I have to imagine that FA’s are lumped together, though. If you sign a starter and a reliever, both type As, whichever one scores higher should be considered the bigger loss by the old team, not whichever one happens to be ranked higher within his positional category. Bummer. I was wrong. It would’ve been nice to dramatically improve our team without providing the Brewers with our first-rounder.

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Shipfaced: I & II

Saturday, December 20th, 2008

Nick Vatterott:

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A Rare Specimen: The Effective Flowchart Joke

Saturday, December 20th, 2008

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Fridge Repair

Wednesday, December 17th, 2008

I bought a new refrigerator about two months ago when mine started making some scary noises. The old fridge didn’t have good seals on the doors anyways, that had a tendency to attract mildew which I’d have to clean up every once in a while with my roommate’s an old toothbrush and some diluted bleach.

The new one’s a beast, a monstrous side-by-side model with an ice and water dispenser in the freezer door, something I’d never had in a fridge at my own house before. I got it for a good price from the used appliance store in town. The thing works great, except when I got it, the water dispenser wasn’t working because the nipple that extends the door’s plumbing wasn’t there, so pressing the lever would result in a disorganized mess of water coming out and running down the back of the dispenser housing.

I’d seen these sorts of fridges many times in the past and was always a little fascinated by them. The first one I saw many moons ago, I remember noting that the water dispenser nozzle looked a lot like the 1/4″ plastic water line that you use to connect the fridge water supply to a house line. I had a hard time figuring out exactly how the whole system comes together at the end there. I know there’s a valve in the back of the fridge that regulates flow to the ice maker and to a reservoir behind the meat drawer that maintains a supply of cold water under line pressure. From there water flows up through the hinge of the door with the dispenser then down to the valve system, then down through the dispenser outflow nozzle.

It’s the last part that I was missing. I couldn’t figure out how it could have disappeared from the unit or how it was intended to be attached to the open side of the valve. Seeing as that’s the only thing not working on the beast, I assume that’s the reason the previous owner sold it and that the repair shop just hadn’t noticed.

So the first thing I did was jam a length of 1/4″ plastic water line up there, snip it off to about the right height, and opened the valve to see how it’d dispense.

There was good flow through the replacement hose, but water leaked around the hose, draining down the back of the dispenser housing and into the spill basin in there. For a while, I left it like that, wondering exactly how the seal was meant to be made at the valve—and sopping up the basin every few days with paper towels… I’d found exploded views of the valve assembly but can’t tell how the water lines are supposed to connect to the valve, whether they’re meant to be epoxied in or if they use more conventional and do-it-yourself friendly means of making the apparatus watertight.

I tried the conventional method first: after finding some #5 o-rings at Lowe’s that have a 1/4″ internal diameter, I yanked my home-made nozzle out, slipped one of the wee o-rings on the upper end, and jammed it back up into the valve assembly. My concern was that this would cause a portion of the water flow to leak inside the freezer door or into the freezer itself, both of which would be Bad Things. It stopped the dripping inside the dispenser housing and I haven’t seen any evidence that water’s leaking anywhere—in the door, into the freezer, onto the ground, nothing…

That’s a good thing to know. It means if you have one of these fridges and your water dispenser nozzle looks grungy (being the only part of the system routinely exposed to air), you can rip that part of the line out and replace it with less than a dollar’s worth of parts. Or I suppose if you have some large water bottle that you wish you could fill up before work every morning but is too big to fit in the dispenser housing, you could replace the nozzle with a piece of 1/4″ tubing long enough to reach somewhere convenient for filling it.

True, it’s not nearly as cool as this boozerator, of course. Especially impressive is how he wired the pump into the water supply solenoid on the inlet valve. I guess I just figured that the water dispenser system was always under line pressure, that the flow from the house supply is regulated only by the valve in the door and that the inlet valve only switched the icemaker supply. I must be wrong about that. I wonder where the advantage of doing it that way is, since it clearly gives you more failure points.

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Hot News of the Day

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008

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Pardon my French

Friday, December 12th, 2008



Killed, though, for now by the UAW.

The deal-breaking concessions sounded reasonable to me.

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Oh Glorious Day

Thursday, December 11th, 2008

Every year I look forward to a MLB team doing something horror-show awful in the offseason just for this sort of post from Dan Szymborski.

Dayton Moore’s a smart guy who’d been laying a pretty sound foundation in KC—it boggles the mind that he’d pick up a heroically incompetent pitcher like Horacio Ramirez on a guaranteed $1.8M contract.

If you missed it, last year it was the Cardinals who justifiably drew Dan’s ire in this post, which is, no kidding, the first page returned when googling ‘”Dan Szymborski” brilliant hilarious’.

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Hot Stove BS

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

Joel Sherman, the writer who first broke the Khalil Greene trade, posted this morning that the Cardinals are surprised by the level of interest in Rick Ankiel out on the trade market. They shouldn’t be: Ank had some amazing defensive highlights (the Rockies game will stay with me forever) and has been cranking longballs at a sick clip for almost two seasons. Add in that he’ll be a Scott Boras FA after next season and he’s an attractive one-year option who shouldn’t cost the receiving team much in talent. Sherman suggests Ian Kennedy from the Yankees.

Ian Kennedy is a 6′-ish RHSP drafted (14th round) by the Cardinals out of La Quinta high school in California in 2003. He opted for college and put up stellar numbers at USC before entering the draft again after his Junior year, when he was picked in the first round by the Yankees. In 2007, his first full season of pro ball, he dominated three levels and received a September call-up which saw him successfully start three games.

Last year’s woes are pretty well known. He pitched poorly for the Yankees and was sent down to AAA, where he pitched great again. He’s throwing great in the Puerto Rican winter league now. (Two starts ago, he pitched a complete game 3-hitter while striking out 7 batters, for example.)

He’s a good pitcher and could be a very good one.

Since I don’t watch any SportsCenter or Baseball Tonight, I don’t follow the Yankees at all, but judging by Humberto Sanchez’ awful performance pitching in relief during the AFL, I imagine he’s looked at as a pretty big risk going into next season. He was the main piece of the three players coming back to the Yankees in the Gary Sheffield trade and underwent Tommy John surgery right away. He came back last season and got a September call-up, in which he pitched two effective innings for the Yankees. In the second outing (Top of the 8th), he was hitting 94 on his fastball pretty consistently and showed a strong curveball.

I’d be pleased with a trade that brought one of those two pitchers, plus a lesser minor-league reliever, for Ankiel. I’d expect that the secondary talent in the Humberto trade would be better given injury history and track record—and I’d judge the upside in that trade as better as well, so that’d be the preferred option if either is.

Ankiel would be great for the Yankees. As I read this their stadium is the second friendliest for LH pull-hitters in the league [ed--What new stadium?!?], after the circus ring in Houston something mimicking baseball is played in.

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Spicoli

Friday, December 5th, 2008

I’m thrilled with this trade. If you haven’t heard, my beloved Cardinals traded Mark Worrell and a PTBNL to the Padres for Khalil Greene, who looks exactly like Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. (Greene (w/ brand-spankin’ new photoshop job)| Spicoli. QEMFD.) I’m already thinking up Mr. Hand jokes to lay down all freakin’ season.

Greene has a reputation as an excellent defensive shortstop (although PMR, a defensive statistic that I find useful, didn’t like him in 2008 or 2007, to a lesser extent. I haven’t seen him play all that much, but I’ve liked him when the Cards play the Padres. He’s also got some sock in his bat—he hit 27 HR in 2007 while half his games in the league’s most HR-depressing stadium. Away from Petco, his career batting splits are .270/.318/.484, pretty damned good—although Busch III does suppress right handed batters to an extent. Last year was a very down year offensively for Greene and he still hit 10 balls out. The Cardinals haven’t had a double digit year for HR from the shortstop position since Renteria. He’s not as balanced of a hitter as Renteria was in his prime in the Lou, but he can hit the ball out like him.

I’m looking forward to seeing him gun to Pujols next year. If he can improve his walk rate a little bit, I think we’ll be greatly improved. Greene was the shortstop I thought would have fit us best: Furcal won’t be worth the contract he’ll eventually sign and Renteria’s career trajectory doesn’t look promising. I’m looking forward to seeing, at some point, a Khalil Greene-Tyler Greene double play turned next year.

(Temper that enthusiasm with a little Fungo, perhaps.)

To get Greene, we gave up Mark Worrell. Worrell’s a good pitcher with a funky delivery. He’s put up excellent peripherals throughout his minor league career. Added to the 40-man roster before the winter meetings last year, he made a few appearances for the Cardinals this year and didn’t have as much success as I expected he would—and I’m sure he expected better, too. Before last season, I thought he would have been a better pitcher for us than Ryan Franklin. That may have been a little bit of an exaggeration, but not much. He’ll do well for the Padres—they got a solid, major league-ready right-handed relief specialist. The Cardinals dealt a low chip from one of the few too-tall stacks of talent we have on the table. (The other being outfielders.) It would appear that Mark’s happy he’s part of this deal.

The PTBNL will be picked off a list of three players—two of them pitchers—some time around Spring Training. Players put on those lists are usually non-prospects—organizational filler types. Or Chris Lambert. As long as it’s not one of my favorite unheralded minor-leaguers (like Jameson Maj or Brian Broderick), I imagine this won’t be a big deal for anyone but that player and his family.

In unrelated news: there were 7,394,345 words written in game recaps by MLB.com beat writers over the past two seasons. The most common word, of course, is the, which occurred 467,078 times. Banana was written 10 times: six times in the plural, thrice in the singular, and once as banana-fueled. Pujols was written 1155 times. The most frequent personal name, aside from ambiguous terms like will, young, fielder, etc., was Ryan. The most frequent last name was Ramirez. The most common team name (aside from Sox, which refers to two teams) was the Cubs, at 4,177 uses. Going through the descending token frequency list, I had a… let’s call it a guffaw… when I noticed that wrong and hole occurred next to each other in frequency at 948 and 947 uses, respectively. Nobody ever mentioned Delino DeShields over the past two years. Stan Musial was referred to 13 times; Rogers Hornsby twice. Pickle was used ten times, versus 182 uses of rundown.

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Cool

Friday, December 5th, 2008

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I.L.L.

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

Even though the Illini eventually fell, 76-74, that was one hell of a basketball game. Mike Davis was on fire—it’s a shame a big potential breakout game like that couldn’t have ended with some celebration in front of the home crowd. He was certainly impressive, as was the much-maligned (unfairly) Chester Frazier, who’s been the best defender for the Illini the past two years, maybe even three.

McCamey’s got some things to learn before he’ll be able to truly grow into his talent, but he had a good game, too.

In limited minutes, I was surprised by how well JuCo transfer Dominique Keller played. He’s a solid rebounder and had better ball-handling skill than I’d expected. He should do well in the system once conference play starts, looking forward to seeing him get accustomed to this level of play.

Mark Tupper, the finest Illini columnist around in my humble opinion, had this to say going into tonight’s game:

It’s surely a clash of styles. Clemson likes to push the pace, press and shoot, and the Tigers are averaging more than 81 points a game. Illinois, on the other hand, clamps down defensively and is limiting its opponents to 56.2 points per game. Something’s gotta give.

We came pretty close to keeping up with them offensively. A couple turnovers fewer and it might’ve been the Illini’s game.

(Paul Klee, the N-G beat writer, liveblogged the game, including more than a few details one would miss on the boob tube.

Also, had a great time watching Wisconsin pull one out by the skin of their teeth last night (Illini had just about the exact same opportunity); watching tOSU take down Miami; and seeing Iowa take BC down to the wire—their game was two free throws by a Freshman away from being a big upset. The Big Ten is playing the ACC closely, here’s hoping the rest of the conference can finally beat them in this goofy challenge in spite of Illinois’ failure to contribute to that particular goal.

Now let’s get Georgia on Tuesday to get a nice 4-game wins streak going heading into Braggin’ Rights.

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Report from Abroad

Monday, December 1st, 2008

My old pal Nick’s been on a cruise ship for the past six months, providing comedy to the passengers with a group from Second City.

He recently talked the owner of a comedy club in Istanbul to let him get up on stage for some stand-up. The story is told brilliantly here.

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