On July 3rd, Cassandra and I were at this game… It’s when we got our kick-ass powder blue t-shirts commemorating the 1982 World Series. For free! Here’s my weekend wrap-up post from that trip to the Lou.

It was a Mark Mulder start, and thought he was pitching well, with a few exceptions. That’s the game he gave up the three homers in three consecutive innings, if I recall. We came back to win in an outstanding game. A very memorable weekend. But Cass and I were getting some not-so-fresh air in the outer ring, and some fans were there bitching about what an awful move signing Mulder is and how we’d have been much better off with Haren. Cass and I talked about how they’d be eating their words at some point towards the end of the season.

Hopefully tonight’s one of those nights, and more towards the end of the season than simply the end of the season.

So tonight, the Cards will be back in the Lou fighing for their lives in the NLCS. Roy Oswalt and Mark Mulder meet up again, so it’s bound to be a very well pitched ballgame. I’ve been having a great time watching the game at home. Listening to Mike Shannon and Wayne Hagin call the games on the radio with the TV muted is a real treat. Beats sitting in a bar, surrounded by non-fans who haven’t got a clue what they’re missing. It’s also a lot cheaper, and the funds will need a closer eye kept on them this month as I bought that car battery (again, can’t recommend Advance Auto in Urbana highly enough) and replaced the disk in the laptop… It finally came in yesterday. I’m installing the WinXP partition now, and should have the Slack 10.2 partition on and customized before the game tonight. That means that I’ll be coding away comfortably on my couch, beer in hand, while watching my beloved Redbirds scrape and scrap their way to a game seven. And I’ll be liveblogging, so if you’re into that sort of thing, check back frequently starting at 7:30. While last season’s WS liveblogging efforts didn’t affect a more favorably outcome of the games, it was pretty fun, and drew a decent crowd for this shitty webpage.

I was happy enough last night about the game not to get pissed off about my car’s inability to start. When I turn the key, the engine isn’t turned over, and there’s a loud clicking noise instead. Enter google, where I find an article on Curing a Clicking Starter. So it’s either that my battery has gone bad (which would be OK), the cables aren’t carrying current (OK too), or the starter is failing (that would be very bad).

I’ve had a recall notice for a few months that I need to take my car into the shop for an inspection. I guess this’ll be as good a time as any to do that. The question is how to get it there… If I can get the car to start with a jump, then I’ll know it’s the battery. If that doesn’t work, it’s either the cables or the starter itself.

Too bad I didn’t learn me how to fix these expensive machines at some point.

Update: Had a new battery installed at Advance Auto Parts (free installation!) and it starts up like a dream.

Buzby in the Bernie’s Pressbox forum provides links to five different calls of Pujols’ homerun:

Mike Shannon
Astros’ Announcer Milo Hamilton
Fox’s Thom Brenneman
ESPN’s Dan Schulman
En Español by Pepe Mantilla

The Spanish one is awesome… Who knew it’s the second syllable that’s stressed?

I got all these broadcasters’ names from “64 Cards” from the same forum thread linked at the top of this post. I haven’t been able to figure out who made the Spanish language call. A bad guess would be Fransisco Ernesto Ruiz… He’s the regular play-by-play man for the ‘Stros Spanish language radio, and the same audio clip (although longer) is available from the Astros website on the Spanish side, although that’s from TV and the announcer doesn’t strike me as partisan for the Astros. (Not that the same can be said about the FOX announcers the whole series.) If anyone knows who that was, leave me a comment.

According to this article FoxSports has exclusive TV Spanish-language TV rights for the 2005 postseason, and their NL play-by-play man is Pepe Mantilla with Manny Mota doing the color commentary. Yes, that Manny Mota. If I am wrong–and I am never wrong–feel free to correct me.

Later: Here’s something else from the forums that gave me a chuckle–nay, a chortle–by Leroy Leroux:

Garner to Lidge after the game:

“That ball wouldn’t have been out of a lot of ballparks”

Lidge, “Yeah, name one”

Garner, “Yellowstone”

Pretty good joke.

I was hoping my new laptop hdd would have come in today… ordered it last Monday, they said 4-5 business days. Pisser. I should have it tomorrow at least. My plan was to get the disk partitioned up and put my windows and slack installations on there, then get to work coding and liveblogging while I watched the game.

Alas, it was not to be, so just reading and popping into my office to write down some notes in between innings.

I very much dug that AB by Molina. Think I’ll switch from my ’82 commemorative t-shirt to the Molina t-shirt jersey. (I think he was out on that swing in the dirt though.) Too bad Luna couldn’t get himself a hit.

Top 3rd: What’s up with Jason Lane sticking his knees out when he slides? He just kneed Molina in the head. After that, Molina took a foul tip off the knuckles. After those two plays, I put on the Molina shirt. He wants this game, and bad. Even with the TV sound muted and Mike n’ Wayne’s call on the radio instead, the tv announcers are still annoying me. Friggin’ Brenly showing off the WS ring he had nothing to do with earning. Them laughing while Molina’s fingers might be broken. What a bunch of putzes.

Mid 3rd: GRUDZ!!!!

I agree with Shannon, this umpire is doing a fine job. Sanders had an outstanding at-bat. Too bad he didn’t take that last fastball outside. Pettite’s pitching very well, but the Cards are up 2-1. I can’t wait for Sanders’ next AB.

Mid 4th: Carp put ‘em down in order. So did Pettite. I’d like to see Lane get burned playing so shallow. But then again, in this ballpark…

Bottom 7th: Berkman homered to make it 4-2… Oh, boy… We can still win this. If it bleeds, we can kill it… If it bleeds, we can kill it…

Top 9th: YOU ARE ONE UGLY MOTHERFUCKER!!!!

I didn’t find out until now, but Bellyscratcher liveblogged the game.

I hope the Cards are as pissed off as I am, and are ready to go out and win one behind their ace. A gentle chastising came from lboros this morning to the Cards for losing their composure and the Redbird bloggers getting disgusted. (I even dropped the F-bomb in writing, I was so pissed off. Stand back!) The bats have to wake up, the defense has to improve, and some weapons need to come off the bench. John Rodriguez’ finish to Edmonds at-bat last night was the sort of thing I want to see more of, coming in to an impossible situation with a hostile home plate umpire, a 3-2 count against you, and a rhomboid outfield where the center field wall is 435 feet away from home plate (and they’ve even got a jungle gym out by the wall in that section).

Tonight, we have to destroy the Astros. Carpenter has to stupify their hitters, and we need to crush their (so-far well founded) confidence in their pitching.

From Bryan Burwell’s column today:

“Can we pull off a miracle?” said Pujols, wiping a bead of sweat off his brow. “Of course we can. We just need to win one game. If we can do that, if we can just get past tomorrow, it puts all the pressure on them.”

We faced elimination twice last year, and won both games. This year we’ll face elimination three times, if we play well enough. And this year we have Chris Carpenter and Mark Mulder on the mound for two of them.

One last comment: the TV announcers are terrible. On Saturday C-Bot and Bobovski came over to watch game 3. The announcers were talking about how Roger Clemen’s mom made the deathbed prediction that the Astros and White Sox would meet up in the world series. Way to give away your f’n narrative, FOX. Fortunately, the engineers at the local Cardinals Network radio station figured out a way to delay the feed from Mike n’ Wayne, and so has it synced up perfectly with the game on TV. That may have been the deciding factor that kept me from throwing my TV out the window last night.

I Lied, More Comments: Suppan threw 93 pitches last night. Might he be available to face down Clemens in an NLCS game 7 in St. Louis against the Astros?

The Astros won a game in St. Louis and then took the next two at home. Can the Cardinals do the same? Can we take three games consecutively from Pettite, Oswalt, and Clemens? We have before.

I am fucking disgusted.

Later: And Mabry was safe.

Nonetheless: THEY MUST PAY for their premature celebration! Dominant outings by Carp and Mulder aren’t impossibilities. Especially with soon-to-be-minor-league-umpire Phil Cuzzi out from behind home plate.

(Thanks to commenter dfrancon at VeB for the link)

I’m not a big fan of Jason Lane. Time to crack open a cold budweiser.

Backe’s pitching the fifth, but here’re our stats against Wandy Rodriguez, who was warming up in the bottom of the fourth.

Houston’s starting to bother me all around. So much gimmicky BS… the train full of oranges, the bee buzzing when one of the “Killer B’s” are at the plate. It makes it that much more important to win this game, guaranteeing a return to Busch stadium.

The Cardinals look awfully frustrated at the plate. ‘Stros are bringing in Mike Gallo. Larry Walker’s 1-2 against him with an RBI.

It was quite a relief to see the Cards score a run off Brad Lidge. Too bad it wasn’t the tying run, after Luna’s throw home sailed off his pinky in the sixth to put the ‘Stros up 4-2. He made it even worse by not backing up Eckstein properly and basically just standing in the way off the third base line. Hector made up for it with a fantastic 5-3 putout of Biggio to end the inning, though.

Let’s put things in perspective a bit. Today was the first game of the five game series with the Astros having home-field advantage. We lost. Tomorrow we can expect to have superior pitching (I was tempted enough to write Supperior that I note it in this comment), and ideally our fielding will get back into form. If we win tomorrow, we’ll have evened up the series and guaranteed at least one game at Busch stadium, with the tantalizing promise of a second with Chris Carpenter closing out the three-game trip in Houston on Monday. If the pieces click into place and we win both games, then we’ve completely turned things around from that scary situation we now find ourselves in.

It comes down to Jeff Suppan, who’s delivered beautifully for us before, and under more dire circumstances.

More Perspective: It could be worse… We could be down 2-1 in the series, down 6-2 in the game, and have to trot Estaban Yan out of the bullpen.

Good news! Reggie Sanders feels good and should be ready to go tomorrow. Larry Walker on the other hand, is not doing good, and So Taguchi and his 4-8 line against Clemens is expected to play in his place.

Bernie makes Larry’s condition sound very bad, describing his neck as “locked up.” Hopefully it gets better and this isn’t it for him.

One of the secretaries at work sent me this. It helps to have sound working.

(As for the game last night: meh! If we play better than we did last night, we can win a five game series against Houston… even if they have home field advantage. I’m not going to make any predictions though, seeing as that kind of backfired on me last time.)

Haven’t heard anything about my new hdd arriving yet. Pisser. I’ve got some serious coding to do this weekend, and would have greatly preferred doing it on the laptop while sitting on my couch. Possibly knoppix would boot with no hdd in the machine… Think I’ll check that out real quick.

Update: Excellent! Knoppix works fine without a hdd. Now I’ve got myself a mobile terminal! Wonder if I can get the wireless working at my crib… iwconfig doesn’t recognize wlan0… When I get home, I’ll try the Mepis liveCD, I recall that working well with my wireless card. Now how come I hadn’t thought of this before?

New Cardinals blogger, Birds on Bat Girl, comments on the odd camera angles from last night, among other things. We’d noticed that too. I was having a hard time calling balls and strikes. Inside strikes looked like inside balls and outside balls looked like outside strikes. C-Bot correctly noted that FOX had moved their primary camera, the one that shoots over the pitcher’s right shoulder, so that the advertisement on the backstop towards the first base line side would be centered in frame.

I’m trying to decide whether I should go straight to the waterin’ hole, or head home first before the game tonight. I think I’ll head straight to the waterin’ hole. Hopefully we won’t end up in extra innings…

To kill time waiting for Game 2, I recommend this toy.

Be forewarned… If you toss that gal around fast enough, she’ll pass through solid objects. Possibly with game-ending effects:

Hat tips to April for the link.

An article about the Cards’ clubhouse.

Use bugmenot.com

Link via Cardnilly

(About the game: Reggie! Reggie! And holy shit that was a beautiful suicide squeeze!)

I see the same thing.

Before reading on, check out this video. I neglected to post it yesterday.

That cracks me up.

Game one of the National League Championship Series begins in three hours and ten minutes. It’s playing on the F/X cable network here, so I’ll be watching it at Bunny’s. Between now and then, I’m gonna put in an hour cleaning up around my crib, pop in to work to edit some audio, head out to Brickhouse to eat a Muffaletta (and possibly hit the cages), then roll into Bunny’s ready for an excellent baseball game.

Some beautiful weather today… I’m all fired up.

And my new laptop harddrive might come in tomorrow, which would get me back to a reasonable level of productivity after slouching through the past two weeks.

I was brushing my teeth this morning while Matt Lauer (I despise him and Katie Couric with an intensity unmatched by all the stars that have ever burned) was interviewing George and Laura Bush at (I believe) a Habitat for Humanity event in Louisiana. Apparently there’s some controversy about one of Laura Bush’s answers. I’ll claim to have foreseen that it would be twisted later on. But the prize line of the exchange came when Lauer had been throwing curveballs about the disaster response, with Bush replying that this isn’t the sort of thing that should be made into a partisan political spectacle, and Lauer asked something to the extent of (I’m not a-gonna look for a transcript now), “Isn’t it inevitable that it becomes a partisan issue?” Bush answered, “Depends on who’s asking the questions.” I was brushing my teeth at the time, and laughed some foamy bubbles out.

The title of this post is meant to reproduce a scene from a Dr. Katz episode.

C-Bot heard on ESPN * that Ray King was being left off the NLCS roster. This would have been unwise, as he is clearly the best option we’ve got for a second southpaw out of the ‘pen–and no way is TLR going into a series with only one BP lefty. [The Astros' lineup is heavily dominated from the right side though. Their left-handed batters are Lamb, Berkman, Vizcaino, and former Redbird Orlando Palmeiro. (I remember Palmeiro leaving the Cards for $800,000 dollars from the Astros and vaguely remember him describing it as a better shot at the World Series. This was going into the 2004 season, when the Cards were projected to finish third in the NL Central.)] I’m nearly certain that Tyler Johnson isn’t post season eligible, seeing as he didn’t come up until after 9/1. The options for a second leftie would be Bill Pulsipher or Gabe White, and neither represents an upgrade. We’ll go to the NLCS with the bullpen we’ve got, in other words.

I suspect that the goofballs* at ESPN might have misinterpreted his trip to Tennessee to pay his respects at his father’s funeral today.

Updated: The confusing ESPN article is here in which Phil Rogers says: “Getting leads to Isringhausen is not as simple as it once was, however, as the Cardinals are without Ray King and Al Reyes, their top set-up men.”

Prompted by the comment discussion in this post, I was poking around, looking at videos on Ebaum’s World.

What do I see, but the spectacled bear at the St. Louis Zoo!

This, this, and this are hilarious, too.

I hadn’t noticed it before since there’s rarely a point in checking the News-Gazette website, but they’re hosting some pictures taken by Cpl John Trefzger, a local marine deployed to Fallujah.

The accompanying blurb says that his enlistment is up this month.