OFF DAY FOR THE GOOD GUYS

The Cardinals and the Giants are the only two teams not playing ball on this beautiful April Thursday. I've been curtailing my amount of writing because my keyboard is acting up. I hope to get that resolved soon, because I want to go around the league like I did last Thursday, maybe talk some fantasy baseball, and comment on a study of young pitchers, overuse, and arm injuries that I read over at BP, which by the way you need to fork over the cash for and become a premium member. I grouped the pitchers into categories and want to talk about the findings as well as commenting about Cardinals that appeared on the list. If I don't get to it today, I will soon. GO CARDS!!!!

MATTY MO GOES YARD!!!

Maybe I should whine every day about this team's play. The Cards got over last night's sickness in a major way with a 15-2 pounding of the Brewers. The Cards had six doubles and four homers, including one by none other than the winning pitcher Matt Morris!! Morris pitched six solid innings allowing only one unearned run. It was a great day for Scott Rolen, who doubled and had a pair of two-run dingers to take the team lead with five. But perhaps the best news of the day was that Albert Pujols showed that he is suffering no ill effects from getting hit by a pitch the other night. Albert was 3 for 4 with 2 ribbies. Kudos to Tony for going with the all-righthanded lineup against lefty Wayne Franklin. With Vina, Edmonds, O Palmeiro and Tino on the bench and Eli, Wilson Delgado, Miguel Cairo, and Eduardo Perez all in the lineup, the Cardinal bats still went nuts. Great to get a win while giving Tino and Jimmy what amounts to two days off, though Edmonds did play a couple innings in the field.

The Birdos sit at 8-6, a half game back of the first-place Cubs (hurts to say that) and may be back to better health by Friday, when they open their three-game set against the D-Backs, who are really struggling. The Cards definitely will not have to face Curt Schillling, as he pitches tomorrow, and they might not have to face Randy Johnson either. He was originally scheduled to pitch today but was scratched with knee soreness, meaning he could possibly pitch Saturday if Byung-Hyun Kim, who is also fighting a nagging injury, cannot go. The best-case scenario would be that neither of them pitch, although all Card fans know about the Cardinals history of uncanny success against the Unit. Well, this will make for a happy day off for our heroes in red tomorrow, and we may see Vina rejoin the lineup, although it will still be as a leadoff hitter and not where he belongs. Until then, time to have a few cold ones and cheer the Blues on in the playoffs!!!!

Cards Look Uninterested, Starting Pitching Stinks Again

I waver back and forth on this team. Some days, like the comeback win over Houston on Sunday, I feel that this is a team with a terrorizing amount of offense, and that Tony and Dunc will make it work in the bullpen. Then, last night, as I watch the baserunning blunders, and the terrible pitching from Garrett Stephenson, who felt like he needed to throw at Richie Sexson with two out and no one on in the first and ended up costing himself two runs, I think this is probably a .500 team at best, especially considering the staggering amount of injuries that the team seems to be cursed with. I know, I know, I'm getting way too high and way too low based on individual games. Last night was ugly though. After Stepehenson's first inning debacle, the Cards blew what would turn out to be their best scoring chance of the night when Jose Oquendo failed to send Rolen on a fly ball by Renteria that would have easily scored him, confusing Tino at second, and getting him caught off the bag for the second out. Hey Tino, maybe next time you can check the runner in front of you, though I was expecting him to score too, not realizing that Oquendo had such a fear of John Vander Wal's rocket arm (sarcasm). The Cards played with a three man bench because Vina is still not back, and Pujols was scratched from the lineup because his thumb hurt too much. I fail to understand what makes Vina so valuable that he cannot be disabled. He has now missed what, five, six games in a row? Our bench is WEAK as a result of it. I'm not feeling many positive vibes right now, except that Matty Mo is pitching today and is due for a win. Of course, Edmonds and Pujols will probably be on the bench, since TLR will want to give Jimmy that two day off rest he loves to do before an off day. It'll be Morris against Wayne Franklin, a journeyman lefty.

THE BIG O

What did I tell ya about Orlando Palmeiro? The guy is an on-base machine! OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

Okay, that's enough. The Cards somehow won one of the weirder games of the season so far last night. Brett Tomko was down 3-0 with the bases loaded and nobody out in the first inning. I was starting to break out in a cold sweat. What is with this guy and the first inning? It's Dustin Hermanson 2001 all over again. But the Cards came back to win 7-5 despite leaving 16 men on base, having a man thrown out at home, having two other guys dead ducks at home until someone on the Brew Crew made a misplay in the field, and they lost their pitcher trying to steal second just before Orlando Palmeiro hit his first homerun in a year and a half. Aaaaah, Baseball. the biggest event in the game came when Albert Pujols got drilled by a fastball on the back of his hand. He bruised his thumb, but the x-rays were negative, and Cardinal Nation returned the loaded gun back to its safe. Palmeiro was the hero. In addition to his solo shot he had a sac fly and a two out, two-run double. The bullpen did a great job, led by Russ Springer's two scoreless innings. Steve Kline came in to retire Geoff Jenkins for a one-out save, his third of the year.

Other than that, the game was notable for Jeffrey Hammonds suffering his third injury of the year. I thought about it last night. Some people just look for ways to get hurt, I swear. Hammonds could hurt himself if he was walking around naked in a vacuum. the Cards pounded Todd Ritchie, as usual, and would have won by about ten runs if they could have gotten more hits with runners on and not waited till there were two outs before loading the bases. Additonally, runnning the bases a little smarter could be cool too. I don't know if Dave McKay was passing out some Canadian reefer every time a redbird rounded first, but Albert tried to socre on a play he had no chance to be safe on, Renteria would have been gunned at the plate on Palmeiro's sac fly if Keith Osik could've held onto the ball, and Palmeiro was going to get caught in a rundown between third and home when Eric Young suddenly had a Cub flashback and threw one into the stands. Ondelay, Ondelay, Mama, EY, EY, Uh-Oh!!

Pujols likely will not play the next couple games, maybe be available for pinch-hitting. He has a bruise, but nothing is broken and that is some of the best news we Cardinal fans have heard all season. Garrett Stephenson and Ben Sheets both make their second start of the season against this opponent tonight. The Brewers will be without Hammonds and probably have John Vander Wal in there. Jenkins return has given the Brewers an offensive boost. He hit a mammoth homer off of Tomko last night. tomko ended up allowing five earned in 5 1/3, but he did pick up his first win as a Cardinal. Still no word on Vina, and in the meantime I'm just enjoying having "The Big O" in the leadoff spot. Meanwhile, J.D. Drew could be back in as little as 10 days. He is still in Palm Beach, and is 3-8 with a dinger and 5 walks.

MINOR LEAGUE REPORT

Memphis has evened its record at 6-6. Among the early bright spots has been Catcher Alex Delgado, who is 7 for his first 16, and Dee Haynes who is showing good power early, having already hit a couple homers. Also encouraging is Haynes has drawn three walks in his first 28 at-bats. Jon Nunnally is the leading hitter for the team right now. The 31-year old minor league vet is 13 for his first 28 with three doubles, three homers and a triple. The pitching has been the real pleasant surprise. Nerio Rodriguez and Jason Ryan have both pitched well in their starts nd the bullpen has been great. Even with the temporary loss of Crudale, Matt Duff, Kevin Joseph, and Gabe Molina have done great, and last night marked the first appearance for Scotty Layfield, who pitched 1 2/3 scoreless innings.

The AA Smokies are 6-4 despite not getting much offense. Jeremy Dodson, who will be 26 in a few weeks, is leading the team in htting, batting .313. Catcher Yadi Molina has gotten off to a decent offensive start, hitting 4 doubles and drawing four walks in his first 28 AB's. The pitching has been superb. Dan Haren and Nick Stocks have both had a pair of good starts. Haren has allowed only 1 earned run in his first 12 innings, with a 12-1 K/BB ratio. Rick Ankiel threw another scoreless inning recently, and B.R. Cook has really taken to the bullpen, allowing just three hits over seven scoreless frames while striking out eight.

Palm Beach is really having trouble scoring. Shaun Boyd is the only player hitting over .300. He went 2 for 4 last night. Chris Narveson went six innings and gave up two earned runs, striking out five and getting the loss on Sunday. And Chance Caple has two of the club's four wins despite giving up 14 walks in two starts. One good note is that Tyler Johnson, who had been nursing some sort of injury, made his first start and pitched four innings, giving up an unearned run while not walking a man and striking out six.

Meanwhile, Peoria continues to be smoking hot. They are now 10-1 and just bashing the ball, while simultaneously getting some great pitching. Travis Hanson is opening up some eyes, leading the league in hitting at a .468 clip with already 19 RBI. He has eight doubles and two homers. Matt Lemanczyk isn't far behind, with a .464 average. Terry Evans is hitting over .380 and has 13 RBI. Tyler Adamczyk and Blake Hawksworth have now pitched a combined 25 innings without givng up an earned run. Hawksworth has struck out fourteen and walked two. Less heralded prospects Don Graves and Miguel Martinez are also 2-0. Martinez has allowed just four earned runs in eighteen innings while striking out fourteen and Graves is still unscored upon after 10 1/3 innings. Graves is a 22-year old righty who was drafted back in 1999.

Random Thoughts from this weekend in Cardinal baseball:

Orlando Palmeiro should be the Cardinals leadoff hitter. Until J.D. Drew is fully healthy and returns to the lineup on a full-time basis, I believe that Palmeiro should lead off, as he did in both games I attended in Houston. Unlike Vina, who missed all three games with a hand injury and is questionable for tonight, Palmeiro refuses to swing at pitches out of the strike zone. The result so far on the young season is 9-24 with 5 walks, and an OBA of .500. .500!!! With the Cardinals deep stable of hitters, a leadoff hitter that gets on base that a lot will make this offense that much better. Vina's OBA is currently .302. He has three walks and a couple of HBP in 37 AB's. That's actually pretty good numbers for Fernando, his OBA is getting dragged down because he's currently hitting .216. He needs to take a page from Palmeiro's handbook and start hitting line drives and taking walks. Until then, the Cards everyday lineup should be:

LF Palmeiro
SS Renteria
CF Edmonds
LF Pujols
3B Rolen
1B Martinez
C Matheny
2B Vina

This lineup is debatable. you could flip-flop Vina and Matheny, and it looks like Renteria is going to start batting seventh. I don't mind that move that much if Palmeiro is in the 2 hole. (I would want him leading off but I know that's not going to happen). Edgar actually says he prefers batting further down in the lineup because it gives him more chances to hit with runners on base, and he certainly looked comfortable there on Saturday and Sunday. I would say bat Edgar sixth and Tino seventh even, but batting Edgar seventh may give Tino more fastballs to hit. I still would rather see Palmeiro and Renteria as the first two. That would mean that the first five hitters in the lineup all have OBA's of over .400 presently. Bat Tino, Matheny, and Vina at the bottom, spot Drew in occasionally until he is fully healthy and use Marrero as a bench player all around the diamond, the role that seems to suit him best.

Considering that Palmeiro has been playing so well and it would be a big mistake to take him out of the lineup, I suppose the normal starting lineup when Vina returns will be the same as my lineup except that Vina will lead off, Palmeiro will bat 2nd, Renteria will bat 7th and Matheny 8th. I guess I can live with that but not if Vina continues to produce so poorly offensively.

I know that Coors and Minute Maid are two great hitters parks, but the offense is looking tough. Edmonds is hot, Rolen is hot, though he may end up walking 200 times if Tino doesn't start hitting better (a thought in favor of batting Renteria sixth and Martinez 7th). Pujols looks like his groin is doing much better now that he's out of the Colorado weather, though he's still not 100 percent. He had a good series, spraying singles all over the park and taking some walks.

The bullpen is still an unknown. The Izzy saga continues. Now it looks like he'll be out the rest of the month. He may never regain full health, which is a shame and a waste of a crapload of cash. If his problems linger on too long I would think that Walt would have to go after somebody sooner or later, though as Jeff Gordon said today in the Post-Dispatch, he may not be able to get antything until June or July when teams are falling out of it. Hopefully we have a healthy and dominant Izzy by then. Until then, unsung heroes have popped up out of the pen. Cal Eldred has made everyone forget about his first two nightmarish appearances with three straight good outings, Russ Springer looks like he'll be able to help all year, and Kline and Fassero have been fairly consistent, with a few ugly exceptions. Yesterday the real hero was Kiko Calero, who pitched two perfect innings and got the win. Dustin Hermanson I think is going to improve as the year goes on and he continues to gain mastery of the splitter. The loss of Lance Painter was a big bummer, as he looked really strong, but Kevin Ohme has been great since he came to Spring Training and hopefully that will continue as he gets set to pitch in a game with the big club, maybe some time in this upcoming series. All in all, the Cards can stay afloat with this bullpen. Probably the biggest question with the pitching staff right now is what to do with Jason Simontacchi, who doesn't look like he belongs in the big leagues. He will surely get at least one more chance, as he has pitched in Houston and Colorado in his first two starts, but he doesn't have the command that he did last year and if he doesn't have that, well, he's in deep doo-doo. The other big question with the rotation will hopefully be resolved tonight, as Brett Tomko tries to take the mound and avoid giving up a lot of runs in the first inning, as he has in his first two starts. Tomko is going to be very big for the Cards this year. If he can gain some type of consistency and learn to trust his pitches, the Cards could have a very formidable rotation, because it looks like Garrett Stephenson is fully healthy and can be a solid back-of-the-rotation starter. If Simo doesn't straighten himself out, the Cards have plenty of candidates to start in the fifth slot. The most likely candidate would be Eldred, who is now working on a string of five straight scoreless innings after his horrific start.

TWO OUTTA THREE AIN"T BAD

Yes, in retrospect a sweep would've been nice. But after Jeff Kent's game-winning two run shot on a Friday night that like a bad dream, the Cards were staring a possible five game deficit right in the face. If they lost on Saturday, they'd be facing smoke-throwing Roy Oswaltin the Sunday finale. But as they've done all year, the Cards didn't take it lying down. They got another superb performance from Woody Williams in his homeland and won on Friday, 3-0, and then rallied on Sunday. Down 5-1 at one point, the Cards exploded on Country Boy Roy in the seventh for six runs after a Jose Vizcaino error kept the inning going. Edgar Renteria put the punctuation mark on the offensive outburst with an opposite-field homerun, his second of the day to put the Cards up 10-6 and they would go on to an 11-8 victory.

I had a great weekend in Houston, other than navigating I-10 and it's hodgepodge of construction zones, traffic jams and lunatic drivers on the way over from New Orleans. I stayed with family and made it to the games Saturday and Sunday, to watch a pair of Cardinal victories while proudly wearing my Cardinal red. Minute Maid Park is a very nice place to watch a ballgame. Aside from the slight cartoonishness of the slope in center (which comes into play rarely) it is a very creative park with creative dimensions and design. Yes, the left field wall is too close to home plate, as evidenced by the popup that Craig Biggio hit for a homerun yesterday, but the Crawford Boxes in left field are a cool thing. I was in the first row in the right field bleachers for the first half of the game Friday night, but no balls came my way. The rest of the time I walked all around the park, sitting in the upper deck, sitting right down close to the field, standing in the archways in the outfield. The big plus in these new ballparks is that there are so many more sightlines because there are fewer seats. Unlike in Busch Stadium, where if you want to walk around the outside to the bathrooms or concessions you have to leave the open-air portion of the facility entirely, at Minute Maid nearly the entire place is open air. If you stand, you can actually still see everything. Going to Houston makes me excited for the Cards to build a new ballpark.

Friday night was about of crushing a loss as a team can be dealt. TLR was so despondent he was the first one to leave the clubhouse. He left in Matty Mo this time for the ninth. Morris had given up only one run, a Jeff Bagwell homer. All weekend long I heard Astros fans talking about Jim Edmonds as if he were a god (He hit a homer Friday night). One woman sitting next to me in right field actually was protecting herself, thinking that Edmonds was automatically going to spray a line drive homer right at her. But Jeff Bagwell demolishes Cardinal pitching just about as badly as Edmonds does it to the Astros. He narrowly missed tyin the game in the ninth with another homer. Instead Morris was one out away from a complete game victory, but gave up a bad-hop single to Lance Berkman that Tino couldn't handle and then tried to get cute with Kent, who deposited a 3-1 hanger deep into left field. I felt like turning around and going back home as I listened on my car radio. (I was picking up KMOX quite nicely while near the Louisiana-Texas border). But I didn't and the weekend got better. The Woodman was sterling on Saturday going six scoreless, and the bullpen was great too. Russ Springer pitched 1 2/3 scoreless and Jeff Fassero got Lance Berkman out before Dustin Hermanson came in and pitched a perfect ninth for his first save since his brief closing experiment in Montreal in 2000.

The Cards bullpen was at it again on Sunday, bailing Jason Simontacchi out after he suffered another very poor outing. The Cards were down 5-1 and I told myself if they got down any further, I was taking off so I could get home early. After all, it was Oswalt on the mound. But the Birds chipped away, and I stayed for every glorious pitch, including the seventh inning which saw clutch hits from Eli, Tino (Whoa!) and Mr. Clutch Colombian himself, Edgar Renteria. Kiko Calero pitched two perfect innings and got his first major league win. Cal Eldred continued to show that he is back, pitching two scoreless innings that included getting Bagwell to hit into a double play. Hermy was given another chance to finish the game with the Cards leading 11-6, but he allowed a two-run dong to Bagwell with two outs. It was Bagwell's second homer of the game, his third of the series, and his second one of the series that he hit completely out of the park. It was a bomb, I had a great view of it from about the seventh row on the third base line. Fassero then cam on to get Berkman out again and that was the game, 11-8, leaving the Cards just one game out of first as the second week of the season drew to a close. More analysis of the weekend to come.