St. Louis Cardinals

[Woy]

#Cardinals and Furcal have agreed on two-year, $14 million deal, pending physical early next week, agent confirms. #STLcards

http://www.stltoday.com/sports/baseball/professional/cardinal-beat/cards-agree-to-terms-with-shortstop-furcal/article_a9984512-236a-11e1-ae9e-001a4bcf6878.html

On the day first baseman Albert Pujols makes his departure from the Cardinals official, the team he left behind has already moved on to address other needs.

The Cardinals will finalize a two-year, $14-million deal with shortstop Rafael Furcal early next week.

The deal has been agreed upon pending a physical, the shortstop's agent Paul Kinze confirmed to The Post-Dispatch on Saturday afternoon.

Furcal, 34, returns to the team that acquired him at the July non-waiver trade deadline last season. Furcal solidified the team's defense with his play at shortstop, and he took over the leadoff role until struggling at the plate in the World Series. Furcal hit .255 with a .316 on-base percetnage and a .418 slugging percentage in 50 games with the Cardinals in 2011. He added seven homers and 29 runs scored as the team's everyday shortstop.

Pujols agreed to accept a 10-year, $254-million from the Los Angeles Angels on Thursday. Pujols is being introduced to the LA-area media this afternoon in Anaheim, Calif. Once Pujols had made his decision, the Cardinals shifted gears to address their middle infield openings and possibly add another outfielder. Furcal had been their chief target at shortstop since free agency opened; the two sides had discussed an extension in August before tabling the talks for the winter.

The Cardinals will continue to shop the free agent market for another bat and lefthanded reliever. Outfielder Carlos Beltran has been discussed as a possible fit for the team.

[Woy]

"I don't want to talk about negotations. But to tell you the truth, it wasn't about money. I'm going to die saying that, because it wasn't about the money."

http://www.stltoday.com/sports/baseball/professional/cardinal-beat/albert-appears-as-an-angel/article_b6ecbcc2-2395-11e1-aeec-0019bb30f31a.html#.TuQHZLyERJk.twitter

[strahanfan92]

Albert Pujols' wife Diedre, in an interview with a radio station with ties to the former St. Louis Cardinals slugger, said the couple was prepared to take less money to stay in St. Louis, but were greatly disappointed when the team initially offered him a five-year deal.

Thursday, Albert Pujols signed a 10-year, $254 million offer with the Los Angeles Angels that contained no deferred money, as well as a 10-year personal services contract following that deal. The Cardinals' last offer to Pujols was for 10 years and $210 million, with $30 million deferred.

"The offer that people have seen on television I want to tell you what, listeners especially, had that offer been given to us with a guarantee, we would have the (Cardinals) bird on our back," Diedre Pujols told 99.1 Joy FM, a St. Louis-area Christian station that received some of its initial funding from Albert Pujols.

Diedre Pujols, speaking with interviewer Sandi Brown, who is her friend, said the couple initially had no plans to ever leave St. Louis or the Cardinals, the only team the first baseman had ever played for.

"When it all came down, I was mad. I was mad at God because I felt like all the signs that had been being played out through the baseball field, our foundation, our restaurant, the Down Syndrome Center, my relationships, my home, my family close," Diedre Pujols told the station. "I mean, we had no reason, not one reason, to want to leave. People were deceived by the numbers."

She indicated the key moment was the Cardinals' initial offer of five years and $130 million.

"When you have somebody say 'We want you to be a Cardinal for life' and only offer you a five-year deal, it kind of confused us," Diedre Pujols said. "Well, we got over that insult and felt like Albert had given so much of himself to baseball and into the community ... we didn't want to go through this again."

Diedre Pujols told the station the negative reaction in St. Louis over her husband's decision to sign with the Angels has been striking.

"Albert has never lied. People are like 'Oh, we thought we knew who he was.' Well, we thought we knew who they were," she told the station.

"The city of St. Louis has absolutely been deceived and I have never seen hatred spread so fast and I understand why," she added. "Let me say that Albert and I never, not one time, ever made plans to leave this city."

Diedre Pujols also said she had no ill will toward the Cardinals or owner Bill DeWitt and that she understands the fans' frustration with her husband's decision.

"It's just like God," she said at the end of the interview, "to put us on a team called the Angels."

[Guest]

My response to the wife probably would have been along the lines of "can you guarantee me that he isn't 35?"

With the record cable deal that Moreno now has, he's paid for Pujols many times over. As a matter of fact, he could be in on just about every major free agent each year, and he still pours money into his player development system. It isn't out of the question to consider an Angels dynasty over the coming years.

As for the Cardinals, a name I thought would be intriguing for you guys is Luke Scott. He played injured last season, but as a LF/1B he fills a need on a low risk deal. The Orioles non-tendered him, so he will be looking for other teams (as well as negotiating with the Orioles.) In 2010, Scott was in the top 10 for OPS amongst outfielders, and can certainly perform well if he is healthy.

[Woy]

Everyone knows that Beltran signed here for 2 years already, so I don't have to update the thread on that. Like the signing and think he'll replace some of Pujols's production next season.

Found this on VEB the other day, just sharing it now.

Rejected songs from this year's Cardinals' Christmas song collection:

Rasmus the Red-Nosed Reindeer
I Saw Mommy Kissing Tony LaRussa
All I Want For Christmas Is A Two-Year Contract by Skip Schumaker
Do You Hear What I Hear by The Guy That Answered the Bullpen Phone in Game 5
Let It Snow LOOGys by Tony LaRussa
Rockin' Around the MVP Trophy by David Freese
Carlos Beltran is Coming to Town
The Little Skipper Boy
It's The Most Holliday Time of the Year
Angels We Have Heard Bid High by Albert & Deidre Pujols
It Came Upon the Everclear by Dan McLaughlin ft. David Freese and Tony LaRussa
Berk Gonna Berk (sung to the tune of Feliz Navidad) by Lance Berkman
We Three Homeruns (Of World Series Game 3) by Albert Pujols
Have Yourself a McClellan Little Christmas
Mother F*ckin Silent Night by Chris Carpenter
The First Gold Glove by Yadier Molina
Redneck 12 Days of Christmas by Colby Rasmus
Nuttin' for Christmas by Matt Holliday (A Reprise of the 2009 version)
Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer Which I Then Shot and Butchered by the Bullpen
O Little Town of Anaheim by Albert & Deidre Pujols

[Woy]

More random VEB stuff, focusing on some of Dave Duncan's best projects while he was here as pitching coach.

Joel Pineiro 2009: The first time someone with clubhouse access reported it and started the meme I was a little surprised that Duncan did little in the way of mechanical adjustments—that this ostensibly enormous part of every pitching turnaround was left to the rest of his staff. Sometimes I wondered if that meant that his job was just making really obvious and potentially ridiculous suggestions about pitching while cloaked in his long run of success.

Anyone who's played a baseball video game has wondered what would happen if your cannon-fodder fifth starter decided to just throw every pitch into the bottom half of the strike zone; Dave Duncan was able to actually get his cannon-fodder fifth starter to do it, because he was Dave Duncan, the Kent Bottenfield Guy.

At one point, as a result, Joel Pineiro had a strikeout rate of 3.79 and a walk rate of 0.91. Dave Duncan didn't do the mechanics stuff, I guess, because he was too busy telling non-roster invitees, "Hey, wouldn't it be neat if you could just act like you were pitching in the Dead Ball Era?" and walking away.

Honorable mention: In 2010 Duncan apparently made the same suggestion to Brad Penny, who went 5.7/1.5 in nine starts before his own grand slam broke the spell.



Braden Looper: Hey, wouldn't it be neat if you hadn't been a relief pitcher since high school?

Kent Bottenfield, 1999: Kent Bottenfield is proof that the thought has at least crossed the mind of the rest of baseball that Dave Duncan is an actual sorcerer. I know it was 1999, and that 18-7 is a very impressive win-loss record, and that teams were not as smart then as they are now.

But Kent Bottenfield was 30 years old, did not have particularly impressive stuff, and had, after the All-Star Break, finished the season 4-4 with an ERA of 4.25—and if there's one form of statistical analysis teams have always been willing to use, it's drawing conclusions from tiny, arbitrary sample sizes. Look, I'm willing to be convinced that the Angels didn't trade Jim Edmonds for him with the intent of creating a Dave Duncan cargo cult out of Bottenfield jerseys, mullet wigs, and coconut bullpen-phone fetish objects, but I won't be easily persuaded.

Andy Benes 2002: In 2001 Andy Benes was worth -2.9 bWAR in 107.1 innings.

Wells, Kip and Brett Tomko, et al: This one goes out to all the times we as Cardinals fans thought, "If Dave Duncan can turn Woody Williams into Woody Williams, imagine what he could do with a guy who has a real fastball!"

Woody Williams: In 2001 I was 14, just beginning to understand "advanced stats" (read OPS), and the world's biggest Ray Lankford fan, and it killed me that Woody Williams so quickly became the perfect Dave Duncan pitcher. I don't think I ever forgave Dave Duncan for it, let alone Woody Williams.

Lankford wasn't just my favorite player, he was my first chance at that intoxicating early-sabermetrics feeling of complete, undeserved superiority—he wasn't having a bad year, after all (.235/.345/.496) just an ugly one, and the Cardinals were trading him at the bottom of his value for some boring pitcher with a 4.97 ERA. Lankford went on to have a great second half in San Diego, which would have fit that narrative just perfectly.

Unfortunately, I hadn't, at 14, perused the two-year-old research on defense-independent pitching, or else I would have been less surprised by Williams's infuriating 7-1 finish to the season. He carried a 2.75 K:BB ratio into the trade, and he was almost exactly the same pitcher in St. Louis, with one important exception—not ground balls, Duncan's most immediately apparent fascination, but pitching to (even weaker) contact.

The part of me that read up on DIPS a few years later is nervous about saying this, but the Woody Williams for whom the Cardinals traded allowed a ton of fly balls, and a ton of home runs on those fly balls—as frequently as 10%, against a league average of 8%. The one the Cardinals got, the Dave Duncan model, allowed a ton of fly balls—fewer than he had before, but more than the league average—and gave up home runs on them a little more than half as frequently as he had that year in San Diego.

Williams was a weird pitcher in general—both before and after St. Louis he had a much lower BAbip than you'd expect (a career mark of .280), and his career FIP was 0.44 higher than his career ERA. While he was with St. Louis things got weirder still; his FIP fell to met his ERA, and together they hovered about half a run below his xFIP—the fielding-independent ERA you'd expect him to have with an average number of fly balls turning into home runs.

Williams confounded casual observation, and early-aughts sabermetrics, and two different brands of contemporary sabermetric thought, and that—in addition to his 45-22 record—makes him the perfect Dave Duncan pitcher. And that's what I'll miss most about Dave Duncan: As long as he was around, I was willing to believe—no matter how much I thought I knew about baseball—that he and a thirtysomething waiver claim were about to prove me terribly wrong about something.

And Beltran has announced he'll wear #3 for us.

[Woy]

http://tracking.si.com/2012/01/28/report-roy-oswalt-nearing-deal-with-cardinals/?eref=twitter_feed

Close to a deal with Oswalt. Love the move if it does go down.

[strahanfan92]

Done deal!

[Woy]

Don't know specifics yet, but I'm pretty sure it'll be a one-year deal.

Perfect low-risk, high-reward move we had the flexibility to make. If Oswalt stays healthy and pitches to his potential, our starting rotation becomes one of the league's best. If he struggles with injuries, then we still have a damn good top three. Westbrook (if he stays on), McClellan or Lynn would then replace Roy in the rotation, or we could bring up Shelby.

[Goober]

Done deal!

Where is this confirmed? I see reports that it is close, but no done deal.


Good signing if true, it's a weird signing though considering the Cardinals already have the pitching depth, unless there's an injury we don't know about.

[Woy]

Where is this confirmed? I see reports that it is close, but no done deal.


Good signing if true, it's a weird signing though considering the Cardinals already have the pitching depth, unless there's an injury we don't know about.

It was said by the ESPNBoston writer that he was "sure" that the deal was about to get done, but that's not the case at this point. Hopefully it'll be done within the next day or so.

And as for the whole possible injury we don't know about:

https://twitter.com/#!/JoeStrauss/status/163279852433190912

[Woy]

So awesome.

http://www.foxsportsmidwest.com/01/30/12/Cards-outfielder-calls-Rally-Squirrel-ca/landing_stlcardinals.html?blockID=656214&feedID=3794

And Skip's upset about this.

[Woy]

Grantland (lol) preview for our team.

Starting today and rolling straight through to Opening Day, Grantland will preview all 30 teams for the 2012 season. We start with the defending World Series champs.


ST LOUIS CARDINALS

Albert Pujols is gone, but the Cardinals might be better than they were last year. They landed one of the biggest steals of the free-agent market in Carlos Beltran at two years, $26 million. They'll get more at-bats out of David Freese and Allen Craig, which should help even if neither player approaches his post-season heroics. Most strikingly, the pitching could be a lot better, with Adam Wainwright returning from Tommy John surgery and a passel of talented, young relievers likely to see action from day one.

LINEUP
(Bill James projections, AVG/OBP/SLG, wOBA)
SS Rafael Furcal (.270/.338/.394, .324)
RF Carlos Beltran (.279/.369/.480, .367)
LF Matt Holliday (.307/.390/.533, .394)
1B Lance Berkman (.279/.396/.498, .380)
3B David Freese (.299/.357/.452, .353)
CF Jon Jay (.287/.340/.414, .328)
C Yadier Molina (.282/.340/.394, .320)
2B Daniel Descalso (.264/.332/.365, .300)

In 667 career regular-season plate appearances, about the equivalent of a full season, Freese hit .298/.354/.429, solidly above-average numbers for a starting big league third baseman. In 71 plate appearances, about the equivalent of a long road trip -- or, say, one of the greatest runs in playoff history -- Freese hit .397/.465/.794, putting on a stretch so dominant he made Bud Selig sad, for some reason. The pat answer is to always trust the (much) larger sample, that Freese is a capable offensive player, nothing more. On the other hand, Freese is a late bloomer, having made his major league debut at age 26. He's also never stayed healthy enough to play every day for a full season. There's no way we can watch this and this and this and not chalk up at least some of Freese's crazy playoff run to unsustainable pixie dust. But it's also not unreasonable for an above-average hitter to become something better than that as he hits his late 20s.

There's variance in play up and down the lineup, with Berkman a near-lock to pull back after 2011's hitfest, Beltran a potential beast if healthy but also a health risk, and Furcal likely to improve just by default. But Freese has a chance to become a top-five third baseman this year, which would go a long way toward picking up some of that lost Pujols slack.

ROTATION (Bill James projections, IP, FIP)
Chris Carpenter (216 IP, 3.25 FIP)
Adam Wainwright (209 IP, 3.24 FIP)
Jaime Garcia (183 IP, 3.47 FIP)
Kyle Lohse (170 IP, 4.09 FIP)
Jake Westbrook (183 IP, 4.35 FIP)

Pujols racked up 5.1 Wins Above Replacement last season; Wainwright averaged 5.9 WAR over the 2009 and 2010 seasons, before missing all of 2011 to Tommy John surgery. It's an imperfect comparison for many reasons, not the least of which are question marks over Wainwright's ability to come at full strength from day one, given the command issues that sometimes plague pitchers when they first return from TJ. (Bill James projections are notoriously optimistic, but others can come across as overly pessimistic … there's no perfect system. obviously.) But Wainwright's ability is there, and he could turn a pretty good Cards rotation into a very good one. The bigger ace in the hole is Shelby Miller, the beastly right-handed pitching prospect who ended last season with more than a strikeout an inning over 16 starts at Double-A. It's not hard to imagine Miller replacing Westbrook in the rotation by August, especially given the aggressive way the Cardinals handed jobs to their best young arms down the stretch last season.

BREAKOUT PICK
Freese. Even if he keeps that wOBA around .350, 20 homers and a 4-win season are in play if he avoids the injury bug.

IF EVERYTHING BREAKS RIGHT
Wainwright, Freese, and Miller are the obvious reasons for optimism. But don't forget the multiple games the Cards frittered away early last season, when Ryan Franklin(?) and Miguel Batista(?!?!?) were anchoring down the back end of the bullpen. Full seasons in high-leverage roles for Jason Motte, Eduardo Sanchez, Fernando Salas, Lance Lynn, and Marc Rzepcynski could make a big difference, improving a pitching staff that was already solid in 2011 (8th in MLB with a 3.75 team FIP). Ninety-five wins are a real possibility. Yup, that would be five more than last year.

IF EVERYTHING GOES WRONG
Wainwright struggles to return to form, Freese doesn't break, Freese, Beltran, and Furcal can't stay healthy, Miller's not ready, and the various Daniel Descalso types that Tony La Russa always seemed to leverage into wins don't pan out this time. A .500ish season and third place in the Central if all of that comes to pass, though no LeBron-style Pujols jersey-burning from the self-proclaimed Best Fans In Baseball®. Goofy hairstyles of regret are definitely in play.

[Woy]

http://www.stltoday.com/sports/columns/bernie-miklasz/bernie-bytes-are-cardinals-hungry/article_039bf3d4-597f-11e1-8797-0019bb30f31a.html

This quote from Chris Carpenter jumped out at me: "It's a different feel, a different year, but there's a lot of excitement going on," Carpenter told the Post-Dispatch at spring training. Carpenter, the pitching ace and team leader, doesn't talk nonsense. He isn't into dishing empty platitudes. So if Carpenter says there's excitement in camp, I take his word for it.

To me, this is yet another positive sign that the Cardinals will be in sharp shape mentally as they approach the new season. And that's important. It's important because we've seen too many defending champions suffer from a so-called World Series hangover. A team becomes the champion and lets down. There are too many celebrations. Too many free meals and good times. Too many people telling the players that they're wonderful.

Complacency sets in. There's a disruption of routine. The alarm clock doesn't go off until it's too late. It happened to the 2007 Cardinals, who failed to make the playoffs after winning it all in 2006. The '07 team was a tragic mess, taken down in part by a partying culture that diminished focus and competitiveness.

I don't believe the 2012 Cardinals will be anything like that. Not even close. I wrote about this, in part, in last Sunday,'s column. But this is not a normal defending champion. Not after losing Albert Pujols. Not after the retirement of manager Tony La Russa and the unofficial retirement of pitching coach Dave Duncan. This team knows it has a lot of questions, a lot of doubters. Oh my gosh, how can the Cardinals survive without Pujols, TLR and Duncan? If you were a Cardinals' player, wouldn't you get tired of hearing that?

This team also has a lot of older, nucleus-type players that know they have to stay healthy and perform at a high level if they want to (A) remain in the elite class; and (B) ensure additional paydays in the future. This team also has a share of younger players that are striving to establish themselves in prominent big-league roles. It's a good mix.

My read could be spectacularly wrong, but I view the 2012 Cardinals as a unit that brings more hunger to the new year than many defending champs. That's why so many pitchers and position players have reported early. There's something new about this adventure. The dramatic changes, led by the hiring of new manager Mike Matheny (and several new coaches) has freshened the air. That's not a bad thing for a team coming off a championship season.

[Goober]

Done deal!

:gayrod: