c'mon cards, put this one away already. if'n you haven't done so by now . . . .

Snell	Looper
4-10, 5.91	11-9, 4.07

here's an old clip of bob gibson and denny mcclain jamming (if you could call it that) on "the ed sullivan show" back in 1968. i highly recommend that you watch.

the bucs have gone 6-11 since they traded away jason bay and xavier nady, averaging just under 3 runs a game and posting a team OPS of .652. they have scored 2 runs or fewer in 9 of the 17 games. the cards very much need to sweep the pair.

tonight's pirate starter, ian snell, has already faced the cardinals 4 times this year and has yielded 4 or more runs every time; his era vs st louis is 9.00, his ops against a robust .904. looper has faced the bucs once and got a cheap win --- 5.2 inn, 11 baserunners, 3 runs. he can equal last year's win total with a victory tonight.

with his win last night, cc sabathia is 8-0 since joining the brewers in a midseason trade. he’s shaping up to be the best midseason mound acquisition since rick sutcliffe, who went 16-1 for the 1984 cubs, pitching them into the playoffs for the first time in 39 years and winning the nl cy young award. (coincidentally, sutcliffe --- like cc --- was traded away by the indians.) unless i’m mistaken, that’s the highest wins total, post-trade, for a pitcher who changed teams in midseason. the second-highest that i’m aware of is tom seaver’s 14-3, 2.34 line for the reds after he came over at the trade deadline in 1977. back then, of course, the trade deadline was june 15, so guys had more than half a season to build up their counting stats with their new clubs; sabathia was traded just a few weeks after that date, during the first week of july --- unusually early for this day and age --- so he has a chance to compile numbers rivaling those of yesteryear’s dealt pitchers.

another gaudy post-trade won-loss record belongs to doyle alexander, who twice paid great dividends to the team that acquired him midseason. everyone remembers his tremendous 9-0, 1.53 performance for detroit in 1987, both because it powered the tigers to the nl east title and because john smoltz was the player who went the other way in the trade. but alexander also went 10-5 for the yankees after being acquired in mid-1976, helped them win their first pennant since 1964, and wound up starting Game 1 of the world series vs the reds. david cone was another profitable pickup by the yankees, going 9-2 after joining them in mid-1995 and helping them make the playoffs for the first time in 14 years; it’s now 13 years later, and they haven’t missed the playoffs since. let’s not forget our own woodrow williams, who went 7-1 for the cards in august+september 2001 and powered a late-season rush that put the cards into the postseason.

those are off the top of my head; i’m sure i’m leaving some out. but i did make a thorough survey of the cards’ pages at B-R to see if any in-season acquisition by the cardinals has ever had the kind of impact that sabathia is having for the brewers this year. i went back through 1960; here are the highest win totals since then:

yr	pitcher	w-l	era
1983	neil allen	10-6	3.70
1975	ron reed	9-8	3.23
2001	woody williams	7-1	3.96
2002	chuck finley	7-4	3.80
1960	curt simmons	7-4	2.66
1981	joaquin andujar	6-1	3.74
2007	joel pineiro	6-4	3.96
1977	tom underwood	6-9	4.95
2003	sterling hitchcock	5-1	3.79
2006	jeff weaver	5-4	5.18
1995	mike morgan	5-6	3.88

andujar would probably rank at the top of this list if it hadn’t been for the strike. he was traded on june 7, and the players struck on june 11, before andujar had thrown a pitch for st louis. he wouldn’t make his first start for them until august 14, only started 8 games total. more than half the pitchers on this list were acquired by walt jocketty, which is not an accident; i think he used to construct his teams that way on purpose, living with gaps in his rotation during the early part of the year and filling them at midseason with guys from the scrap-heap. that’s the generous interpretation. another generous one is that he nearly always had his teams in contention, and therefore was usually in "buy" mode at the deadline. the ungenerous spin is that jocketty’s opening day rotation usually fell apart by midseason, requiring him to scramble for reinforcements. . . . . only one of his acquisitions listed here actually cost a worthwhile prospect --- chuck finley, who was acquired for coco crisp after darryl kile’s death in june 2002.

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here’s another little bit related to a midseason pitcher trade. the dodgers added 42-year-old greg maddux yesterday. in the cardinals’ entire history, only 4 pitchers aged 42 or older have ever started a single game for the franchise. how many can you name? (here’s a hint: 3 of the 4 are in the hall of fame.) and while we’re at it:

• who’s the oldest pitcher ever to start for the cardinals, and how old was he?
• who’s the last pitcher aged 40 or older to start for the team?
• only 7 pitchers aged 40 or more have ever made a start for the team. how many can you name?

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as long as we’re doing trivia questions, here’s another one. albert is currently batting .348; if he can lift his average another 2 points by the end of the year, he’ll become only the 5th player ever to post at least two .350 seasons for the cardinals. can you name the other 4?

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yadi molina has maintained his batting average above .300 continuously since july 3. if he finishes at or above .300, he’ll be the first cardinal catcher to do it since ted simmons, and only the 3rd in franchise history to do it an a season of more than 400 at-bats --- the other two being simmons (6 times) and walker cooper (once, in 1943). joe torre also did it in 1970, batting .325 in a full season, but he wasn’t a full-time catcher --- midway through the season he yielded the job to ted simmons and shifted to 3d base. he ended up with 88 starts behind the plate and 72 at the 3-sack. if we count him, then molina has a chance to become the 4th .300-hitting catcher in redbird annals. if we lower the threshold to 300 at-bats, molina would be the 7th catcher in franchise history to hit .300 (or 8th, if you count torre). the full list is here.

one more factoid about yadi: he currently has 47 rbi. if he can muster another 11, he’ll have the best rbi total for any stl catcher since darrell porter, who drove in 68 runs in 1984 and 66 the year before that.

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final item: kevin goldstein had some nice words about david freese in his monday ten pack yesterday: per BP’s translations, freese has a major-league-equivalent line of .269 / .318 / .479, with 20 homers; his EqA is .269 --- exactly average among big-league 3bmen this year. PECOTA liked him even before this year, deemed him a 2- to 3-win player; after this season, it's bound to like him even better. i haven’t seen him play, but i know azru wasn’t impressed when he watched memphis weekend before last. freese almost certainly is not a future star, and he may not ever be a big-league regular, but at least he’s got a plausible chance to be one --- if not for st louis, then for somebody else. and he’s got a reasonably good chance to stick somewhere as a big-league bench player. just 2 years ago travis hanson was the best 3d-base prospect in the system; today the organization has freese, craig, brett wallace, and jermaine curtis. it’s good to see that kind of progress; it’s good to have options. . . .

the indecision over wainwright continues; per this morning’s paper, his role apparently depends upon carpenter’s health. if carp can pitch, then wainwright will be a reliever; if carp can’t, wainwright will be a starter. i reiterate what i said a few days ago ---- a player like wainwright should never be treated as a utility guy. (it suddenly occurs to me ---- pujols was tlr’s designated utility guy in the ’07 all-star game. hmmmm . . . . ) and i still don’t see the marginal gain of putting wainer into the pen under any circumstances. the team hasn’t blown a save since the perez / mcclellan regime took over in the 8th and 9th innings; some close calls, sure, but you’re always going to have those. add springer to that pair, and the back end of the pen is pretty tight; how do you improve anything by displacing one of those guys to fit wainwright in? i guess the argument is that it shores up the 6th / 7th innings; you’d be able to pitch mcclellan there, with perez setting up in the 8th and wainwright throwing the 9th. springer fills in for whoever’s tired / ineffective under this scenario, and franklin / izzy sopping up the unimportant innings. . . . . but you achieve the same thing, imho, if you leave the kids at the back end of the game, use franklin / thompson in the 6th / 7th, and get bulk innings from izzy, garcia, plus whomever wainwright displaces from the rotation --- presumably pineiro.

i’d be surprised if wainwright confers a marginal gain of even 1 win at the back of the bullpen; granted, the kids are bound to blow a game or two at some point, but wainwright wouldn’t be perfect either. but in the rotation? he’s worth about 1/5 of a win per start over pineiro (as measured by PRAR and team w-l record in the pitchers’ starts); even if he only takes 7 turns down the stretch, that’s about 1.5 wins of expected gain. nearly half of the cards’ remaining games are against the league’s best rotations ---- the dbacks (webb / haren / johnson), cubs (zambrano / harden / lilly), and brewers (sheets / sabathia). if they save wainwright for the 9th, they may not have many leads for him to protect. the team needs both him and carp in the rotation to match the zeroes that opposing starters are going to post against the cardinal hitters.

the argument is probably moot, because from the sound of things i doubt that carpenter’s going to be able to pitch much (if at all) for the rest of the year; he’s still complaining of muscle discomfort, and he hasn’t thrown a baseball in over a week; it doesn’t make any sense to push it. assuming carp remains on the shelf, then wainwright will go into the rotation (replacing thompson) and the bullpen will stay as it is. adding both wainwright and carpenter to the rotation would give the cards their best chance; should they be lucky enough to have the opportunity, i'd hate to see tony / dave miss it. but it sounds as if they're going to . . . . .

now is probably not the time to rehash this, but there’s no comfort to be taken from tony n dave's handling of the pitching staff during last year’s stretch run. the rotation stabilized in august, you may recall, posting a 3.72 aggregate era for the month --- the best mark in the league ---- and reeling off something like 12 quality starts in a row, something that not even the 2004-05 rotations were able to do. the starting pitchers were on a roll, and therefore so was the team --- by september 4 they’d nosed above .500 for the first time all year and were only 1 game back in the standings. tony n dave chose that moment to improve the rotation by adding mark mulder and mike maroth to it, creating a 7-man cycle whose benefits were not readily apparent to most of us; mulder lasted 4 innings in his first try, maroth lasted less than 2, and the cardinals gave up 6 runs or more 5 times in the first turn through the 7-man rotation. the idea was scrapped at that point, but the damage was done --- the team had gone 1-6 and fallen 4 games off the pace, and the rotation never regained its rhythm. when something’s working, sometimes it’s best just to leave it alone. the mcclellan / perez bullpen has been working; don’t mess with the formula.

i know i sound sour this morning, but all in all i think the cards did ok for themselves this weekend; they took advantage of a 1-3 stretch by the brew crew and picked up 2 games. somehow i had it in my mind that their 2-game showdown w/ milwaukee was this week, rather than next; they’ve got 5 easy games at home between now and that big series, while the brewers face a mild challenge in the resurgent astros. if the cards win 4 of 5, they’ll likely be in position to move back into the wild-card lead when the brewers come to town. and it looks like they’ll miss sabathia; he is pitching tonight, and his next turn will fall on sunday 8/24 because of an off day, so he won’t be available vs the cards on 8/26 or 8/27. if yost wanted to, he could pitch sabathia this saturday (8/23) and then turn him around on short rest to pitch vs st louis on 8/27, but that’d be a pretty desperate thing to do in late august; not even yost is that stupid. so we can safely assume that sabathia won’t be appearing during the 2-game series here. sheets probably will pitch the opener; he’s scheduled to start tomorrow, and because of off-days on thursday and monday his next natural turn would fall on 8/26 in st louis.

items:

• i haven’t seen a whole lot written about kyle lohse’s wicked home/road split: 3.08 era at home with a .635 opponent ops, 5.40 era on the road with an .883 opponent ops. those figures don’t include yesterday’s start. . . . . that’s another factor to consider as we mull the risks / rewards of throwing lots of years + millions at lohse moving forward.
• i’m sure ankiel’s whiff with one out and the bases loaded yesterday didn’t shock anybody. it shouldn’t have: in 26 plate appearances with a man on third and less than 2 out, ankiel has struck out 11 times. he also has drawn 0 walks in those situations; teams are exploiting him mercilessly. in those 26 easy rbi opportunities, he has only 7 runs batted in --- he’s stranded the runner at 3d about three times as often as he has knocked him in.
• brendan ryan’s gone 4 for 25 since his demotion to memphis, but 2 of the hits were for extra bases --- a homer and a double.
• daryl jones has made an encouraging first impression at double A --- .281 / .477 / .469 through his first 85 or so plate appearances. that obp is not a typo; he has drawn 21 walks to go along with his 18 hits to date. this guy only turned 21 years old 7 weeks ago, and he has always had highly regarded raw tools; the organization’s outfield depth gets depthier.

Wellemeyer	Olsen
9-4, 4.01	6-7, 4.04

the weekend sets up nicely for the cardinals. while they're playing a trade-depleted last-place team, the brew crew will send the rump of their rotation against the dodgers' top pitchers (billingsley, lowe, kershaw). and milwaukee has to face jake peavy tonight. so the cards have a decent opportunity to shave the gap by a game or two before they meet the brewers head-on in st. louis. make it happen, fellahs.

time to give braden looper a little love. he had a very difficult month of may ---- 5 starts, 6.37 era, capped off by an 8-run pounding administered by the astros at busch III. that was his 11th start of the year, and it left his era at 5.05; opposing hitters were batting .304 against him on the season. we all looked forward to the day when chris carpenter, matt clement, maybe even mark mulder or anthony reyes would replace him in the rotation.

but in his 14 starts since june 1, looper has compiled a 3.35 era. that leads the staff. on the year as a whole he has allowed 3 runs or fewer in 17 of his 24 starts, or 71 percent; that’s second on the staff, behind lohse (73 percent). is this sustainable? i would tend to think not, although i can’t cite a specific reason why ---- looper’s BABIP is normal (.289, almost right at his career avg of .291), as are his batted-ball data; his strand rate (75 percent) is only a couple points higher than his career norm. it’s just hard for a vanilla pitch-to-contacter to remain ahead of the curve for very long. looper does avoid walks and keeps the ball on the ground, but he gives up too many hits (especially the extra-base kind) and doesn’t strike enough people out; sooner or later the balls start dropping in for hits. but whatever you think of him, looper has had a nice run of results stretching back almost three months; even if he regresses (as we should expect), the guy deserves some credit for keeping the cards’ season relevant. since wainwright and welley went down, he has gone at least 7 innings in 7 of 13 starts, which is the same ratio as kyle lohse; he pitched very well in both of his recent matchups against the cubs and brewers. he’s never going to pitch the cards to a championship, but he’s also not going to pitch them into the cellar. he’s a perfect fit for this year’s squad --- a hang-in-there pitcher for a hang-in-there team. he embodies all of the 2008 cardinals’ traits: ie, a broad base of competencies, a number of glaring limitations, and no real standout skill.

if that sounds like criticism, it’s not meant to be. braden looper, my hat’s off to ya.

hats off, too, to chris perez, who is clearly no fun to hit against. since his recall last week, he has faced 20 batters and given up 1 hit, a single. batters have swung and missed against him almost twice as often (14 times) as they have put the ball in play (8 times). overall this year, big-league opponents are batting .220 against him. last night he did it almost exclusively with his fastball --- threw it 27 times out of 33 pitches --- but two of the strikeouts (including the guy who reached base on the wp) came off the slider. he’s gonna walk some guys, but there is little doubt about who will be closing games the rest of the year ---- especially now that wainwright’s rehab regimen has been re-calibrated for a rotation role. that’s where it should have been all along, and that’s where it should stay --- regardless of what happens with carpenter. the suggestion is out there that wainwright might be shifted back yet again if (and it gets iffier by the day) carpenter proves able to pitch; i think it’s a mistake to treat important pitcher like wainwright as a utility piece. you might yank brad thompson around that way; you don’t do it to someone like wainwright. you figure out where wainwright helps you the most, and you fill the other pieces in around him.

a few quick items, and then i gotta wrap up the post and run off to a (zzzzzzz) breakfast meeting:

• looper’s 2 hits last night raised his batting average to .298. that’s 3d in the league among pitchers (minimum 25 at-bats), behind zambrano and brandon backe.
• in his olympic debut, brian barden went 3 for 4 w/ a double, rbi, and run in an 8-7 loss to south korea; last night (or yesterday; or tomorrow; whatever it is) he went 0 for 5 as the usa pounded the netherlands, 7-0.
• jess todd made his triple A debut last night and did very well: 4 hits, 1 run in 6.2 innings. he struck out 6 and got 10 groundball outs; the run came on a solo homer in the 7th inning.
• another intriguing pitcher, deryk hooker, debuted for quad cities and gave up a run on 5 hits in 5 innings. hooker impressed mightily last year in rookie ball and the instructional league; he got off to a slow start this spring, but in his last 33 innings at johnson city he gave up just 4 runs while striking out 44. he's big and lanky and only 19 years old; definitely a guy to keep your eye on. quad cities rallied for 5 in the 9th to win the game.
• updates on a couple draftees with local ties: aaron crow took the luke hochevar route and signed with an independent-league team, the fort-worth cats; he’d been drafted by washington. and tim melville, who dropped all the way to the 4th round because nobody thought they’d be able to sign him, looks ready to ink a deal with the royals.
• another nice outing by anthony reyes last night for cleveland --- 6 innings, 6 hits, 2 runs.

aw hell ---- c'mon blue! he was safe! damn umpires . . . .

Lohse	Volstad
13-4, 3.80	3-2, 2.67

here's a short article about the marlins' starter, chris volstad, that i saw at fangraphs this morning. he's a sinkerballer --- only 1 hr allowed this year in 123 combined AA-MLB innings, and a big-league GB ratio of 56 percent. the cards often have trouble with this type of pitcher. he doesn't have great control though, and he's bound sooner or later to leave a couple pitches up and pay the price. maybe tonight.

i'll be out of pocket all evening; i've programmed one overflow thread, which will open at 7:30 CDT.

the scorekeeper ought to have awarded three saves for last night’s game --- one to molina, one to mcclellan, and one to perez. molina gets one for his peg in the 9th to nail dan uggla (and why was he running --- did he forget the cards had added an insurance run?). the cs seemed to settle down perez, who had thrown only 3 strikes in 9 pitches up to that point; thereafter he threw 8 strikes in 10 tries. and of course mcclellan’s the guy who really did save the game. he came in with the cards leading by only 1 run --- no margin for error --- and had to face the top of the marlins’ lineup, then got put into an impossible position when his defense betrayed him, yet he still kept the lead from slipping away. perez had a significantly easier task --- a 2-run bulge to defend, the lower half of the order coming up, and a big assist from the d --- but he, not mcclellan, got credit for the "save."

what a stupid statistic.

i guess as long as some cardinal reliever gets awarded a save, it’s a good night . . . . . but does it really have to be wainwright? the team is still figuring on using him as the save guy when he returns, despite the accretion of circumstances that seem to dictate a return to the rotation. circumstance one is carpenter’s health --- the cards backed off their initial, aggressive plan to let carpenter throw today in preparation for his regular turn on friday; he left the team and will see paletta today and likely will miss his next start. i reckon thompson will fill in for him, although boggs and garcia would also be candidates.

circumstance number two is the performance of the two kids, who’ve begun to take ownership of the late innings. they pitched very well under pressure on friday at wrigley field, preserving a tie in the 8th and 9th innings, and closed out the marlins last night. it’s the best week of late-inning bullpen work we have seen in two months; why not see if they can keep it up? out of curiosity, i went to mcclellan’s play log at fangraphs to see how he’s done in high-leverage situations. including last night’s game, he has pitched to 40 batters in leverage situations of 3.00 or higher ---- very crucial situations, if you’re not familiar with leverage index. here’s how he has fared in those confrontations:

leverage	pa	h	bb	so	avg	obp	slg
5.00 or higher	5	0	1	0	.000	.200	.000
4.00 or higher	18	2	2	3	.154	.267	.154
3.00 or higher	40	4	4	9	.121	.200	.212

batters are 4 for 33 with 1 homer against mcclellan in those ultra-high-leverage situations. if we use BR’s looser definition of "high leverage" --- LI of 1.50 or higher --- kyle is still doing pretty well, an opponent line of .264 / .336 / .368, with just 5 xbh in 106 at-bats. . . . . the kid can handle it. we’re still learning how well perez responds to those situations, but there’s only one way to find out --- stick him out there and see what he does.

when i saw that wainwright was stretched out to 48 pitches last night, i was hopeful that it signaled a change in his projected role. but according to the post-dispatch, plan A remains in place --- he’s scheduled to pitch again on thursday. i had hoped to look at the video from that game, but it hasn’t been uploaded yet to the redbirds’ site ---- or hadn’t been, anyway, when i checked this morning. i did take a peek at the gameday log; in his one bad inning, the 2nd, he gave up a walk followed immediately by two first-pitch basehits. the damage could have been worse, but adam induced a double play with one out and runners at the corners. he gave up another double in the 3d inning . . . . only one swinging strike in the entire outing, which suggests to me that the curveball still isn’t working. if it were on, that thing would eat triple A hitters alive. i note also that duncan (per the post) said adam’s outing last night was lengthened "to give him a better chance to work on all of his pitches." maybe (probably) i’m reading too much into this, but could it be that he’s working on "all" his pitches because he can’t rely on his main out pitch as much as he’d like --- his finger isn’t strong enough to break off the curve with full effectiveness? or perhaps --- ever secretive --- the cards are using some misdirection here and / or keeping their options open, and still might stick wainwright in the rotation.

whatever the outcome of this season, it hasn't been a boring one.

should be interesting to see who pitches the bottom of the 9th inning . . . . . assuming there is a bottom of the 9th. if there is, i vote for the old miami hurricane, chris perez.

cards lead it 3-2 at the stretch.