And listed here.

Al Reyes replaced Steve Kline. Bo Hart, Rick Ankiel, Chris Carpenter left off. Waiting to see whether game 2 pitcher will be Morris or Marquis.

I’m sorry, but this sentence is asinine: La Russa could cast an eye toward the elements and decide to put Reggie Sanders in the DH role and use someone like So Taguchi to start in left field in place of Sanders. That’s in an article about who the Cards should use as their DH for tomorrow’s game in Fenway. C-Bot made that very suggestion tonight, but really–someone like So Taguchi? What kind of a phrase is that. The man is nothing less than one of the finest defensive outfielders playing the game of baseball, and has been for a decade. It seemed like such an obvious way to go when the Bot mentioned it. I’d been thinking too conventionally. Marlon Anderson or Roger Cedeno (who spit at an umpire earlier this season, to the great shame of us all). It makes perfect sense. Put in the stellar defender and keep the pop at the plate that you can get with Sanders in the DH. DH for DuH!

I came up with that last line on my own. Espn’s writers might possibly do as well. But they won’t be drunk. And they’ll be drawing pay.

S’More: “One other thing is sure: Neither Dan Haren nor Chris Carpenter will get a start in the World Series.” That from this article. A consideration is that Morris would start on very short rest in Game 2, facing Schilling. I say: go for it. It might energize Matty Mo, and we don’t have any better options. (Forget what I said earlier). Carpenter definitely won’t start. Also mentioned is that Steve Kline might not be available, suggesting that a certain young, extremely talented left-handed pitcher, who just happens to be traveling with the team, might be added to the roster for the World Series. We’ll find out real soon.

I’ve been rooting for Boston all season, but that has to come to an end now. There is only one baseball team I wish success for at this point, and that’s the St. Louis Cardinals. So let’s talk rotation!

STLCardinals.com has an article speculating on who the starters might be. Their rotation: Williams-Marquis-Morris-Suppan. Williams is the undeniable game 1 starter. He is our best pitcher, and a seasoned veteran who will be able to get us off to a good start, attitude-wise, in the intimidating Fenway Park. Woody pitched there in 2003, poorly, (6-2/3 IP, 10H, 5ER). But we won the game. For those of you who don’t remember, we were outscored 18-27 in that three game series, but went 2-1. Our best pitcher was Garrett Stephenson. Theirs was arguably Tim Wakefield, the Boston starter tomorrow (6IP, 6H, 1ER). Woody starts game 1.

I don’t know about Marquis starting game 2. He hasn’t pitched well this post season. Chris Carpenter is reportedly ready to throw, his freaky arm injury miraculously healed. If Dave Duncan, Tony La Russa, and Chris think he’s ready, it would be excellent if he got the start in game 2, with Danny Haren up and ready in the bullpen from the get-go in case Carpenter’s month away from the game proves to have rendered him ineffective.

Starting Morris game 3? I don’t think so. The idea here is that he’d be pitching our first game at home, he’s better at home, blah blah blah. This would also set him up as our potential Game 7 starter in Boston. I have no illusions that Boston is not one of the best two baseball teams on the planet. We might consider ourselves lucky to make it to a Game 7, and I don’t want Morris taking the ball. I want the Soup. So start Jeff Suppan in Game 3 at home, he’ll be rested and he’s earned it.

Morris pitches Game 4, and if he feels slighted by that and doesn’t look like he’s gonna pitch well because of it, send him to the bullpen to grow up. Julian Tavarez will have some advice for him. I’m a big fan of Matt Morris, and have been for years, but he hasn’t earned a game 3 start, and is untrustworthy on the road. He”ll have a lot at stake. His Game 4 performance will determine his employment for next year, entering free agency. If he does well enough, he might just be heading home to wear pinstripes. Marquis hasn’t pitched much worse. And hopefully Haren will be ready for a start, assuming that he wasn’t needed on Sunday in this hypothetical scenario.

But La Russa’s a smarter baseball man than me, and I’d be very surprised if Carpenter is ready to pitch. If not, Marquis or Haren in Game 2. So essentially, the only change I’d make to the STLCardinals.com starting rotation is swapping Morris and Suppan.

I’ve only noticed two things that I miss in the two years or so since I cut off my cable television. Spongebob Squarepants in the wee hours of the morn, and Kudlow and Kramer on CNBC. James Kramer has a radio show that’s carried in this market, and now Larry Kudlow has started an excellent blog, Kudlow’s Money Politic$.

Check it out.

I had a dream the other night that Castro died. That’s about all I remember about the dream, and I didn’t remember about it until later in the day.

I was reminded of it again when I read this post at Indepundit’s. It’s a fine idea, but I doubt Castro would go for it.

Here’s a few more details on the defected players mentioned, including Yunel Guevara’s pitching stats.

“He’s crazy, and I say that with affection,” [Big Tubby Ray] King said. “But the dude can pitch.”

Julian Tavarez redeemed himself with some outstanding pitching in extra frames last night. We should all be happy for him, and for ourselves, since this might mean we’ll hire him for next season too.

Tonight’s the biggest baseball game of the season for St. Louis and Houston. I’m fired up. This’ll be the Soup’s first start at home in the postseason. He’s been probably our best pitcher once he’s gotten locked in. I am optimistic about tonight.

Jeff was AT THE GAME. And he still hasn’t posted anything about it.

I wrote a big long post last night, but it was lost due to scheduled maintenance for Blogger. In short, I didn’t get to see the first seven innings because of work. And worst of all, I was operating a camera, so I couldn’t even listen to the game or follow online. But I saw Izzy blow another save, and when he was walking around in the dugout, he looked truly awful. Can’t blame him, he thought he’d lost the whole season for us. He looked like Tim Robbins at his worst moments in Mystic River.

The rest is history, sweet beautiful history. Julian pitched like a man two days after behaving like a brat, or maybe even a Cub. Jim Edmonds cranked a fastball up in the zone out into the bullpen to win it in the twelfth. I taped the first three hours of the game at home, hopefully my woman kept taping the extra innings too.

I watched the game at a campus bar. Right when I finished up work, I ran over there as fast as my legs would carry me. Lots of Cubs fans, rooting for the ‘Stros out of spite. Losers.

Update: Was reading this article, and saw this great line on being the Game 6 winning pitcher, “This is great,” Tavarez said afterward. “Now my dad will talk to me again. When I called home, I said, ‘Dad, I’ve two broken fingers.’ He said, ‘Good. You deserve it.’ ”

He comes from a good family.

And Izzy keeps things in perspective: “Man,” said Isringhausen, when the mob at his locker finally cleared, “does it have to be this tough? I’m sleeping two hours a night. You get so wrapped up in it, you have to look for ways to put it in perspective. So I think about those kids over there in Iraq, getting shot at every day. Then I think: ‘And I’m nervous?’ How nervous are they? That’s the only way I can keep my head straight.”

But not permanently. Just to make a point about the goofy poll results we’ve been seeing.

Much like Vodkapundit, I have the feeling that these polls aren’t going to be at all predictive of the outcome. Electoral-vote.com lost my interest a few weeks ago, especially since the writer’s gone paranoid.

Also at Vodkapundit, this item of a poll that puts 17% of the black vote towards the Bush-Cheney ticket. I’d be delighted to see it, and that would guarantee a Bush win. But I’ll be keeping a hat clean enough to eat for November 3rd. (Or whenever Kerry’s lawyers give up their lawsuits.)

I like Bill’s ongoing coverage of the ALCS. Game 6. Game 5. Game 2.

Hopefully we’ll be seeing something like this tonight.

As an aside, when googling for that page, I also came across this animated gif that was created by a fifth grader in 1997. Isn’t that adorable? He already hated the Yankees.

I also liked that because it reminded me of the good old days. Those days of yore when even the lameness of the Ewoks could scarcely give away the rapid deterioration of George Lucas’ mental state that would eventually be made fully manifest in the character of Jar-Jar Binks and C-3PO’s having been built by Darth Vader in his childhood.

Update, Postgame: Dag, I so called that. Some gags work even when you know the fake puke is coming.

Jimmy Carter does a lot of great work with Habitat for Humanity, a fine organization that is responsible for the majority of new construction in my part of town. Unfortunately, while his participation with HfH consumes too much of his time to seriously study history, it affords him enough to spout off as though he had. Case in point.

The reason that the peace movement can’t be taken seriously is that they have no realistic conception of what peace is and how a peaceful state is achieved in the world. To them, as far as I can tell, peace is simply not fighting. (And for some living in a communist state.) But historically, peace has always been won in war, and maintained through the capability to step back onto a wartime footing when threats emerge. European politicians will have you believe that they’ve found a new way, a peaceful way to coexist with foreign powers, where diplomats are sufficient to settle disputes and infantry is a sad anachronism. But their new way was only made possible because of an ongoing occupation of Germany by the US army, the swarm of US B-52 bombers we had circling nonstop over the polar icecap… the complete subsidization of Eurpoean military capability by the United States during the Cold War. It’s one thing to get a bunch of banana republics devastated by two massive wars, depleted of conscriptable men to settle their scores at a table. It’s a totally different game when you’re talking about hostile, isolated police states with stated intentions of acquiring nukes to threaten their neighbors with. And the British Empire didn’t get to the point where they could peacefully de-colonize India and most of Africa, and allow Australia and Canada to establish themselves as Commonwealths owing fealty to the British crown on their own. It took the Revolutionary War to create that world. The peace came at a cost, and from the inception of the United States, we’ve proved willing to pay it.

Fortunately, some nations have taken notice, and we’ve got strong, dependable allies in Australia and Great Britain.

Pete Munro was picked to pitch for Houston tomorrow. He’ll be facing Matt Morris, who will not do well in free agency if he blows it tonight and costs one of the best Cardinals teams ever their shot at the world series.

Not to put undue pressure on him or anything.

I’m not at the point where I’d murder someone over it, but that Scooter thing was just a god-awful bad idea. I’d take part in a pants kicking of the bastard executive at FOX that came up with the idea.

Dear God, enough with the talking baseball.

Some more information about Scooter and the denizens of Hell’s eighth circle that spawned him. Says David Hill, CEO of FOX Sports TV, “[Scooter]‘s really cute and really terrific.”

They report, I decide.

Wrong on both counts.

Stupid hippies.

A short story.

The Yankees-Sox game having been fought out longer than any previous championship series game, I missed most of the Cards-’Stros game 5. Got to see the ninth, so I saw that heartbreaking dinger Kent hit off Izzy. I expected we’d take one of three in Houston, and thought there was a chance we’d possibly even steal game 3 or 4, alas we were swept out of Houston, and return home facing two elimination games against Roger Clemens followed by Roy Oswalt.

I’m optimistic about our chances. We fought hard against those guys in Houston and had realistic opportunities to win both games against them. Clemens will be pitching on short rest after throwing to the plate 116 times in Game 3. (Plus that one he threw at Reggie Sanders when he’d called time and stepped out of the box. Clemens didn’t see it and chucked the ball Sanders-ward for some reason. Later in the game, Pujols called time, holding a hand up first to the umpire, then to Clemens to make sure he knew what was going on. Clemens nodded, “I ain’t gonna bean ya, buddy. You the man.”) Both pitchers are beatable, both can be worked, the middle relief can be exploited, if we can get to it. And we’ll be playing on a sensibly dimensioned baseball field in front of the greatest fans in the world. Cardinals fans are uncharacteristically downbeat right now. If we win tomorrow night, we’ll have the series evened up at 3-3 and the picture will look radically different.

I think we’ll win both games and advance, but that being said, I reiterate that if the Astros win the series, I want to see the Cards come onto the field and congratulate them, shake their hands, and wish ‘em well against Boston in the World Series.

And Brad Lidge should be MVP. That kid is freaking awesome.

Yankees and Red Sox rained out tonight.

I’m going to see the flick, Shaun of the Dead tonight. I expect it to be pretty doggone funny.

Wow. This one is just off the charts. Some POS mainstream media pretend-blog commits a heinous dowdism.

Read about it here.

That blog-post drew a retraction. Very nice.

Dignan has more on this.

Last night’s game was awesome. Our pitching was shaky, but held tough with men on base. Here’s Bernie’s column, and a snippet on the incredible bottom of the eighth when Pujols and Rolen went yard back-to-back:

And you could almost close your eyes and hear the voice of the great Jack Buck telling Cardinals fans to go crazy, folks. Go crazy. And the 52,347 fans, shivering in their rain gear, felt chills for another, wholly joyous reason. Mr. Buck would have been proud . . . because Busch went crazy.

Amen to that. I did some goofy dances in the living room and C was about as thrilled as a gal can get about baseball.

About that pitching, it looks like we’ll be needing another southpaw in the bullpen. There’s one travelling with us who can be reactivated for the next round. And how great is it to have Bo Hart travelling with the team?

It’s the Rocket v. the Soup tomorrow. It’s gonna be a tough, exciting game.

I was in a horrid mood this morning, and found a great technique for cheering yourself up. Start off with a super tasty subway sandwich, I recommend the BMT on wheat. Get lots of jalapenos on it. Then eat it. Then read some Medal of Honor citations. Check out Charles MacGillivary (no internal links, scroll down just a wee bit). That’s one tough man.

It worked for me.

I originally went there to see George “Bud” Day’s citation for the CMH. He’s the recipient participating in the Swiftvets-POWs for Truth campaign, and featured prominently in their new ads.

The title of this post is a comment Bobovski left in the next post down.

Speaking of which…

A friend at work showed me this article, a piece with Don Zimmer giving advice to the Red Sox and Curt Schilling.

Rather funny.

I can state with high confidence that this document was created on a computer using a pseudo-kerning font.

I can’t disagree a bit with the pitching rotation that Tony set up for the NLCS. I’d originally thought a Marquis-Morris-Williams-Suppan rotation would be the best idea, but La Russa is going with Williams-Morris-Suppan-Marquis. You’ve got Morris slated for 2 and 6 at home, where he is significantly better (although I worry about the cold weather projected for STL). The Williams v. Backe matchup will be in our favor for tomorrow, giving us a good chance to start off the series on a strong note. Suppan is unshakable on the road, and would be slated for a decisive game 7, and I feel at least as confident in him as with any of the other pitchers with Carpenter out. I think Marquis’ poor outing in the NLDS wasn’t characteristic of his pitching skill, but he really has pitched himself into the fourth pitcher spot, and has a great opportunity to pitch himself out of it in Houston against (probably) Roger Clemens. He had a great pitching duel with Roy Oswalt earlier in the season and has shown he can hold his own against tough odds.

So the tentative schedule will be: Williams v. Backe; Morris v. Munro; Suppan v. Oswalt; Marquis v. Clemens.

It’s gonna be a great series.

One more thing: I can’t get over how classy the Dodgers were in coming out and congratulating the Cardinals. The broadcasters had expressed their hopes that it would become a tradition. Alas, the Braves stayed in their dugout last night when Houston won their NLDS. Judging by this headline, I’m guessing the tradition will get a second shot at taking hold in the NLCS. I certainly have a whole lot of respect for the Astros after what they did in the regular season, and with great guys on their team like Biggio, Bagwell, Kent, Ausmus, Beltran, and former Cardinal Orlando Palmeiro.

As much as it would kill me if the ‘Stros beat us, it would disappoint me worse if the Cards didn’t show them the respect the Dodgers showed us. And if they didn’t agree to doing it, I’d hope they’d tip their caps at the top of the dugout steps on their way to the golf course.

But I hope it doesn’t come up.