Snakebitten

Today the Cardinals announced that they would not be exercising the team option on Mark Mulder for next year. This was a no-brainer, as the team would have owed him $11M for 2009 and he hasn't been healthy since sometime in 2005.

The trade for Mulder was nothing short of an unmitigated disaster. He never produced for St. Louis and Danny Haren, half of what they gave up for Mulder, became a bona fide top-of-the-rotation starter for Oakland and Arizona and will probably get some Cy Young votes this year. The other player involved in the trade, Daric Barton, struggled this season when given Oakland's starting job at first base, but he is still only 22 years old and has a promising future.

The coda to this story is that there has been a lot of talk on blogs and in the St. Louis paper about the Cardinals perhaps making a similar trade this offseason for the Padres Jake Peavy. The proposed trade would have top prospect Colby Rasmus going to San Diego along with two young pitching prospects. There is no saying whether such a trade would turn out to be as big of a disaster as the Mulder trade, but it seems unlikely that the Cardinals will pay the price necessary to get Peavy with the risk that it could blow up in their face. Again.

Watched: St. Louis Cardinals at Boston Red Sox - 6/20/08

[as always, click on pictures for a larger view]

The Boston Celtics won the NBA title on Tuesday June 17, 2008. I attended a Red Sox game at Fenway on Friday, June 20th. It was the first game at Fenway since the Celtics won the title and there were plenty of pre-game festivities. The truth of the matter is that my seats weren't really all that great for watching the game (we had one of the notoriously terrible Fenway sightlines from the rightfield corner), but they were perfect for watching the Celtics circle the field in duckboats.

I am not a huge NBA fan, but I have always been a fan of Kevin Garnett. I took a lot of pictures of Garnett at Fenway and there isn't a single one where he isn't beaming. The whole team was happy, but there seemed to be more with Garnett - joy, relief, validation, whatever - it was a lot of fun to watch.

As for the baseball game, it was quirky, which fits since Tim Wakefield started the game for the Red Sox. There are so few knuckleball pitchers around that it is really a unique experience to watch one pitch. Wakefield had the knuckler working for the most part - he gave up three runs on seven hits in seven innings. The funny thing about the knuckler is that Wakefield looks as awkward throwing it as the hitters do trying to make contact:

The game was marked by bad defense and power coming from unlikely sources. Julio Lugo made two throwing errors from shortstop for the Red Sox, Cesar Izturis made a fielding error at short for the Cardinals, and a blooper fell between four Cardinals, causing Brendan Ryan to flip over Rick Ankiel just prior to this picture being taken:

In the end, power from unlikely sources for the Cardinals (homers by Jason LaRue - .228/.337/.329, Skip Schumaker - .305/.363/.435, and Yadier Molina - .290/.347/.382) trumped power from unlikely sources for the Red Sox (homerun by Julio Lugo - .275/.364/.346 - first homer of the season) and the Cardinals won 5-4.

By the way, you may have noticed that both Jason LaRue and Yadier Molina were in the game for the Cardinals. Molina was the DH and LaRue started at catcher, presumably because Molina was coming off of a concussion. While the move worked to the Cardinals advantage, I really couldn't understand the thought process. The Red Sox had Wakefield, a soft-throwing righty, on the mound and the Cardinals had Brian Barton, Aaron Miles, Brendan Ryan and Molina to choose from for the DH (assuming that LaRue was starting at catcher because of Molina's concussion). But between those four guys, I'm not sure how Molina was the correct choice. If LaRue had gotten hurt, then the DH position is burned when you move Molina to catcher and I don't think that the upgrade in ability from Barton to Molina, Ryan to Molina or Miles to Molina (if there is any), is worth that risk. If any other player had gotten hurt (and Izturis actually did get hurt, bringing Ryan into the game), the other bench players could be shuffled to cover the position so as not to have to burn the DH, but not catcher.

Watched: Pittsburgh Pirates at St. Louis Cardinals - 5/13/08

I attended the Pirates/Cardinals game in St. Louis on Tuesday night and the game had all of the drama, euphoria and heartbreak that make baseball the greatest sport. Both starting pitchers threw extremely well early, with only a Nate McLouth two-run homer in the fourth inning as a blemish on the scorecard.

Phil Dumatrait was cruising until the bottom of the sixth inning, when Troy Glaus came to the plate with two outs and two runners on. Glaus has struggled so far in his tenure with St. Louis, but came through with a blast that just made it over the left-centerfield wall to give St. Louis the lead. Here is what Glaus' follow-through looked like from the seats my friends and I claimed via adverse possession:



[as always, you can click on the picture for a larger view]

The Cardinals lead did not last long, as the wheels started to wobble for Kyle Lohse in the seventh and he gave up another pair of runs. Albert Pujols did his thing in the eighth, though, and tied the game with a bomb to leftfield. The Cardinals had great opportunities to put the game away, with runners on first-and-third after the Pujols homer in the eighth and a bases loaded situation in the ninth, but the game was destined for extra innings. Late in the game I leaned over the Cardinals bullpen and took this picture:



"Ok, whoever wants to blow the game tonight, raise your right leg. Great, go out there and do your thing, Villone."

I'm not even going to go into what happened in the tenth, but suffice it to say that it was ugly. Villone was allowed to pitch the entire inning and gave up four runs on four hits and two walks.

And finally, just because it is one of my favorite things to take pictures of, here is a sequence of Kyle Lohse's pitching motion, which looks pretty clean to me.