But Skip Schumaker, batting second for Memphis, hit his second home run in AAA tonight in a win over the Astros’ AAA affiliate. It was a solo shot in the third after Timo Perez grounded into a double play. He also reached base on a Joe McEwing error and came around to score in what looks like a crazy fifth inning. The Redbirds’ manager and first baseman were both ejected.

And the Cubs beat the Reds handily, so the Cardinals’ ugly loss doesn’t change our division lead. It was a very nice start by Reyes. He struck out seven, including the last batter in the third, fourth, and fifth innings. He looked to be pitching consistently in the bottom of the strike zone.

I had an unexpected treat in my email this morning–the below picture taken by Mr. Shankle who lives close to Monkey’s Eyebrow, KY. Here’s the highway sign for the town:

Many thanks! And that should put to rest the notion that “We’d like to say hello to all those folks listening in Monkey’s Eyebrow, Kentucky” was a proper Shannonism. There is a place called Monkey’s Eyebrow, so there’s nothing loony about saying hello to its residents. It would have been a Shannonism if there were a city called something like Monchesiborough in Kentucky that he pronounced Monkey’s Eyebrow, but that’s not the case.

Updated: On request from Bobovski, here’s the list o’ Mike Shannon links reposted from here:

Rockin Redbirds’ The Glory that is Shannon

KHITS List

Brian Gunn’s tribute to Moon Man

Scott’s Mike Shannon Appreciation Days

Brad Voyles and Franklin Perez were both cut by the Memphis Redbirds yesterday and the team acquired a 29-year-old switch-hitting catcher by the name of Mike Rose from the Devil Rays’ AAA affiliate. Voyles had pitched impressively in Spring Training, allowing no earned runs in 6.1 IP with 4:0 K:BB, but injured himself at the end of April after putting in four effective starts. Memphis was shutout tonight and lost 7-0 to Kansas City’s AAA team. The one in Omaha–not the one in KC. Skip Schumaker singled to lead off the game and gunned down a baserunner attempting to take third base. Gall, Rose, and Hernandez each picked up a base hit. Tankersley pitched a decent six innings for Memphis. That’s all the positives to be mustered from the box score.

Update: Both games of the Memphis v. Omaha doubleheader are being streamed for free on the intarwebs.

A while back, I’d blathered a bit about the newspaper puzzle called Jumble and speculated on how to write a good algorithm for scrambling the letters of a word so that it would be unrecognizable. Last night, Bobo and I discussed a much easier problem–what would be the most efficient algorithm for unscrambling them into the correct word. The number of candidate unscramblings is the factorial of the length of the word, so there are 24 candidate unscramblings for a word with four letters, 120 for five letter words, 720 for six letter words, 5,040 for seven letter words, 40,320 for 8 letter words, 362,880… and so on. I came up with a fairly elegant solution that doesn’t require you to enumerate all the candidate unscramblings and where the time it takes to solve a jumbled word take logarithmic time on the size of a dictionary. What I did was to take a list of words used in ten years of Wall Street Journal articles and turned it into a two-column file where one column has an English word and the other column has the word with its letters sorted in alphabetical order. So the first few entries look like:

aaaablmns           alabamansaaaaccccirstu       acciaccaturasaaaaccccirtu        acciaccaturaaaaaccdeeiikllnssss lackadaisicalnesses         .                    .         .                    .         .                    .

So when I want to unscramble a word, I just order its letters alphbetically and look that word up in the table. Works like a charm. There is some noise in the dictionary, though. I took a scrambling like ‘isderol’ and the algorithm found both ‘soldier’ and ‘solider.’

Nice job by Chris Duncan going deep in his first game in the bigs this season. Pujols hitting his twenty-second and Soup’s pitching himself out of jams were treats, too.

Falkenborg blew a save in Memphis today. In his 6 1/3 innings pitched for the Cardinals, he didn’t walk a batter. Then today in his first game for Memphis he walked three, also giving up a hit and being charged with four runs. Skip’s still hitting for high average, going 3-5 this afternoon.

My softball team’s third game is tonight. Supposedly our fan section will include an organist, who’d spent the week learning to play “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” If it happens, that’ll be a gas. Unfortunately, he was our camerman so I won’t have video of my new, improved swing. Here’s a clip of me stroking a double on a first pitch up and out of the zone with the ugly old swing. Hopefully tonight’s the night we get rid of that goose-egg in the wins column.

Post-Game: We got our asses thoroughly kicked to the tune of 25-3 by a very good, classy team. They played a good game and complimented our players when they did well. Both teams had fun even though we were so badly whooped. I only had one plate appearance and singled on a line drive to right center. In the field, I blew one play badly by letting a linedrive roll through my legs. I had good position on it, just didn’t put the mitt to the deck and let it roll under. Another play saw me screw up by missing the cutoff man on a hard-hit linedrive that tailed away from me and went to the fence. The grass was wet and the ball slipped away–that’s my excuse. There were more screw-ups, for sure, but those are the two I remember. I did make what I consider a very strong throw from center to second, but it didn’t result in any outs–so it wasn’t all bad. Hopefully next week I get a flyball my way. And we bat around a few times so I get more than one PA.

More remarks: Ronnie Prettyman came up in conversation tonight. He’s in the Brewers Mariners organization. Jamey Wright pitches against the Cardinals tomorrow at 9:15. You better believe I’ll be enjoying that game, no matter what happens. I hope it’s a pitchers’ duel, and Bonds goes 0-5. If Aaron Miles hits a ninth inning two run homer with Encarnacion on base, I’ll be bouncing off the walls. (In my dream world, Mike Matheny would have the lone Giant RBI.)

I’ve been sitting in a conference this morning with some paper and a pen on the table in front of me. Naturally, the mind started to wander a bit, but instead of doodling squids and other crazy shite I wrote out a flowchart for a large project that I should be starting to code up on Tuesday once I finish up the large project that’s been going on for a few weeks. I have a nice design and then it occurred to me that this project is big enough and includes some useful enough tools that it should be a very good dissertation project. That pleases me.

Last night’s baseball game was a whole lotta fun to watch, by the way. I DVR’d it since I was at softball practice from 5:30 – 8:30 last night. I had a damn good practice, too, catching every flyball to my section of the outfield with relative ease and showing some significant improvement on the infield. And I hit a home run batting right-handed. So anyways, I got home from practice and started watching the game in the second or so, the first at-bat I watched was Reggie Sanders’ two-run homer to make it 5-0 Royals. From there, I watched the game fast-forwarding through commercials and in between at-bats and caught up to the live game by the eighth inning. Once again, I ♥ my DVR. And how awesome is it that it was light out at 8:30pm last night? I love the summertime. I hate the winters now, when it’s nighttime both when I get to and leave work.

If you missed it, John Sickels did a prospect retro on John Rodriguez which was surprisingly bullish. Sickels has a fantastic eye for talent. Reyes pitches tonight. No word yet as to who was sent down to open up a spot for him. After last night’s blowup by the Braves bullpen, it wouldn’t surprise me if the Cardinals clear roster space by trading Brian Falkenborg to close for Braves in return for, oh say, Will Startup, whom Sickels rates as a C+ prospect. Not that I don’t think we could survive ten days of Matt Perisho or even Carmen Cali as the second lefty out of the ‘pen, and not that I have something against Falkenborg. That Startup fella looks like he could be a fast climber in the minors.

Update: Well I’ll be damned… Falkenborg cleared waivers. I suppose the AL GM’s don’t think as much of him as I do. That’s great news for us. For the record, my prediction in this eventuality was that Reyes would go down and Skip Schumaker or John Gall would come up for the nine days between Sunday and May 30th. We’ll face only one lefthander in that time, Noah Lowry, so my money’s on Skip. [Skip went 3-4 tonight to raise his AAAverage to .368 and stole a base. Matt Perisho got the win by pitching two scoreless innings until Timo Perez jacked a two-run pinch-hit homer in the ninth.] Update on Sunday: Chris Duncan got the call-up.

Better news: I officially declare my stroke back. Tonight I took at least two hundred swings. The last sixty or so were the same fun-lovin’ swing I had last season. I came around on some advice from C-Rae, basically the same problem I’d been having throwing. I’ve been using my arms to provide the power both when I throw and when I swing. Just gotta use my legs and hips to provide the oomph and let my arm(s) follow along behind to aim the bat at the ball or the throw at the target. It feels very, very good to hit a ball that hard that easy.

By way of Bernie’s Pressbox:

[Anthony Reyes] will start Saturday’s game in KC, La Russa confirms…
Cardinals will have to send someone down to make room… La Russa isn’t saying who that will be. He said they’ll likely send Reyes back to Memphis on Sunday….they can recall someone to take his place — but it can’t be the guy they sent there to make room for Reyes for his Saturday start. Not for 10 days. It’ll have to be someone different.

Ponson is making good progress.

–B

I’d speculated a few days ago that Johnson would be optioned to Memphis to clear roster space, but that he wouldn’t leave STL and would go back on the roster when Reyes goes back down on Sunday. As Bernie points out, the rules require ten days before an optioned player can be recalled. I should have looked it up before speculatin’. Tyler Johnson has pitched very well for the Cardinals in limited work (4 IP 0H 0R 1BB 2K) and the team does need another lefty on the roster. The Redbirds recently signed lefty reliever Matt Perisho to a minor-league contract after he had a shit sandwich of a spring for the Mets, and he’s pitched great for Memphis–most impressively when he came in with the bases loaded and one out to induce a double play. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if Johnson were sent down to get more consistent work when Reyes is brought up and then Perisho were called up to be the second lefty in the ‘pen on Sunday when Reyes heads back to AAA. Of course, once Ponson comes off the DL a hard decision will have to be made about who to send down to clear roster space. To recall, we started the season with this roster:

Lineup: Eck Enc Pujols Rolen Edmonds Gooch Molina Miles
Rotation: Carp Guac Soup Marquis Ponson
Bench: Speeze Luna Rocket Bennett Schumaker
Bullpen: Flores Hancock Wainwright Thompson Looper Izzy Rincon

Rincon went on the DL on April 29th and John Gall came up. Schumaker was sent down for Falkenborg on May 2nd. John Gall was sent down when Larry Bigbie came off the DL on May 8th. Ponson went on the DL May 10th and Tyler Johnson was brought up to take Rincon’s spot in the bullpen and Ponson’s place on the roster.

Of the players currently on our roster, the only players with options are John Rodriguez, Hector Luna, Adam Wainwright, Tyler Johnson, and Brad Thompson. Four of those players are key parts of the team, and the fifth (TJ) fills an important role. I don’t expect Falkenborg or Hancock would make it through waivers, so TJ is the logical choice to send down for Reyes. When we send down Reyes, we could call-up Perisho and cross our fingers that he can perform in the role of the situational lefthander, although he hasn’t shown that he’s that kind of pitcher–he’s no more effective against lefties that righties, walking too many of both and relying on flyballs to get outs, so’s given up lots of doubles and homers. An 8-man bullpen isn’t too terrible of a problem for the Cards this early in the season, knowing that La Russa will use Marquis as an effective pinch-hitter in certain situations to give the bench a little bit of free depth and will use lots of pitchers in relief to keep the ‘pen sharp.

Of course, if Falkenborg would make it to Memphis without being claimed, I’d expect that a batter would come up for the week and a half until Ponson is activated when a fifth starter is needed for the May 30th start–either Skip or Gall. In the unlikely scenario that Falkenborg is sent down, I’d guess it would be Skip that came up for the week since he’s more versatile off the bench in terms of where he can play and his speed on the basepaths.

Much has been made of Juan Encarnacion’s struggles this season, and one thing that sticks out is how un-selective he’s been at the plate. The man’s batting .221 and has only taken three walks. I was just looking at the Tigers, who along with the White Sox are making the AL Central look like an exceptional division this season. One of my favored players, Placido Polanco, has only taken one walk this season! He’s been batting in the second spot this season while demonstrating none of the qualities you want in that position of the lineup. He grounds out too much which has led to five double plays so far; he doesn’t walk; and his isolated power sits at .037 including his first homer of the season from today.

That’s surprising.

I have the same hatred for Jose Lima as every other baseball fan, so I’m happy to see the Cards putting up some runs against him today.

Aaron Miles (who I’ve been a fan of since early Spring) hit his first extra base hit since April 19th today, which may irritate DanUp. It was a double rocketed to the wall. If he’d had an extra bowl of Ecksos or Cinnamon Toast Crunch this morning, that baby might have gotten up and over the wall. Way to go Aaron.

I have a feeling Johnny Rocket is starting to come back down to earth a bit. The Royals will have lefty Mark Redman throwing tomorrow, so it’ll be the Luna/Taguchi lineup, but on Saturday against righthander Denny Bautista, we might see Bigbie start in left instead of Rodriguez with Miles at second and batting eighth. That lineup would need someone new to bat second–either B or Encarnacion, most likely. No matter what, it’ll be a fun, fun game with Reyes starting (recall the roster-move discussion here).

If you’ve never heard of the legendary Dock Ellis, this article from last year is a good place to start.

Here are the pictures of the beds I put in a week or so ago. The first one is a flower bed up front with a few perennial flowers and some (hopefully) perennial grasses. The pink ones will bloom into June, when the big green ones will pop open with yellow flowers. By the time they go, the Lamb’s Ear should be spread out and displaying silver and purple spiked flowers and the grasses should be pretty doggone spectacular. The bed gets some shade in the morning, so there’s a chance I might replace that picture with another one this afternoon when they’re glorying in the full sun that they prefer. [Update: I did replace the picture with one were they're in afternoon sun. The wet spot at the bottom right is where I planted some iris roots to match the iris at the top left corner that I slightly damaged when yanking out the day lillies that go down the side of the house.]

The vegetable garden is only half in. There’s a cherry tomato plant and four pepper plants–two habenero, one cayenne, and some new one that I’m trying that should be very hot and flavorful. Along the fence behind the peppers, the green beans have surprisingly not started coming up yet, so I’m hoping I didn’t plant them too deep. The snow peas on the right side of the bed along the fence are coming up very nicely. I’ll put in more peppers and tomatoes on that right side pretty soon.

My brother called me up the other day to let me know that he’s taken a different route to work each day last week and into the weekend to avoid flooded roads. You see, New Hampshire has been hit with a bit of rain recently. They actually had to briefly shut down the plant he works at due to the flooding conditions. At least he can listen to free music while he waits for the waters to recede.

In spite of what he’s been dealing with, I’m gonna go ahead and complain about the rain we’ve had here. It’s been cold and rainy for a week and my softball game was cancelled the other day. Today the sun was shining brightly so I figured I’d take the morning off, wait for the grass to dry up a bit, and mow the lawn. Turned out my neighbors had the same idea, sort of. Someone was over there mowing their lawn… the first time it’d been mowed this season, so it was well over a foot high. I thought they’d need to machete it down before they could get their push-mower over it. The beds I’d planted a week or so ago look to have settled in, so I’ll take some pictures of them tomorrow morning and post ‘em. It’s supposed to be sunny in the morning tomorrow, with thunderstorms rolling in right about the time softball practice should start.

C-Bot sent me a link to an mpeg layer-3 version of the NY Mets 2006 theme song.

Sheesh!

Post title comes from the third-best Val Kilmer movie.

Update: This article about Roger Clemens is high-larious.

The sabermetrician responsible for the UZR defensive metric and a consultant for the Cardinals, Mitchel Lichtman, was answering questions on a message board the other day. It’s a new experience for me to read a forum thread and find genuinely interesting comments being made. Hat tip to the good reverend.

MGL states a fine rule to follow when starting out on intellectual endeavors:

Before you invent a wheel, do plenty of research to see if it has already been invented. If it has, spend your time on improving it (and make sure your improvements have not already been invented as well), or move on to something else.

A corrolary to that: Before you embark on any project, spend lots of time learning all you can about it.

Hear, hear! The only thing I could add is to make sure you are thoroughly fascinated by the wheel you want to invent. I’m still looking for my wheel, but hope to find it sometime this summer. The one I’m looking at now hasn’t been significantly improved since the 1980s, to my knowledge–not since computing became cheap, so I’m reasonably convinced I can find a way to make it roll more smoothly.

Junior Spivey hit his first home run of the year tonight, a two-run shot in the second inning against Carlos Quentin’s Tucson Sidewinders. John Gall (playing third) and John Nelson both homered as well. Skip’s gone 0-4, grounding to second in his first three at-bats, reaching once on a fielding error, then flying out to left in his fourth at-bat. His average is still over .300 now in the seventh and he’ll get another plate appearance before the game’s over. It’s tied at six entering the eighth with Matt Perisho coming in to the game with the bases loaded and one out. He looks like a flyball pitcher, but in this situation induced a double play ball to end the inning. I smell a Redbirds rally coming on. (I should note that Matt Perisho is a veteran lefthanded relief pitcher recently signed by the Cards–insurance against Ty Johnson.)

Update: Skip led off the ninth in the tied ball game bunting for a single. Timo Perez sacrifice bunted him over to bring up Gall with one out and the go-ahead run on second. (This games on free intarweb audio, by the way. I’ll make sure to post before the workday’s over the next time they do a free game.)

Ack! Gall strikes out. Prentice Redman comes up to pinch hit with two outs and Skip on 2nd.

Drat. Redman flies out to center to end the inning. Still a tied ballgame in the middle of the ninth.

Rats. With the count full, Scott Hairston hits his ninth home run of the season to lead off the bottom of the ninth and end the game.

Anthony Reyes’ next start is scheduled to be May 18th at home against the Portland Sea Dogs. The Redbirds have Wednesday off, so Tankersley would be available that day on regular rest. To take the place for the DL’ing Ponson, Reyes is already unofficially listed as the probable pitcher for the Cardinals game against the Royals on Saturday, but we’ll know for sure on Thursday if Tankersley takes the mound. Even though the Cardinals are carrying 8 pitchers in the bullpen right now, I can’t imagine not calling up Reyes to pitch that game. Everything worked out so perfectly–the Memphis schedule, the Cardinals schedule, and a weak opponent in the Royals. I’m sure La Russa noticed all this before putting Ponson on the DL, too.

So how is room made on the roster for Reyes? Naturally, one of the relievers would be temporarily removed from the 25-man roster–definitely a younger pitcher who has options available. I’d guess it would be Tyler Johnson (although he won’t leave the team, he just won’t be available to pitch… And I think he wouldn’t be allowed to hang out in the bullpen.) The other choices would be Thompson or Wainwright, I’d think. The Royals have five left-handed batters, one of whom is Kerry Robinson. They’ve got a collective .336 slugging percentage and homer at a pace of once every 68.5 at-bats. Their left-handers just aren’t any good, and chances are with the supporting cast that there won’t be more than one high-leverage late-inning situation where a lefty reliever would need to be brought in to handle one of these beasts.

Not that I’m looking past the series the next three days against the visiting Metropolitans from Flushing. It will be a good test, especially tomorrow’s game against Glavine. If we can win that one, a sweep may be likely with Trachsel up on Wednesday and Jose Lima or worse due up on Thursday.

While looking for news on Dusty Baker’s contract extension status, I ran into this headline and couldn’t figure out what it could mean:

Woman Charged with Stealing from Former Bear

I actually had to click the link to figure that one out.

Here’s some more headlines, shamelessly stolen from Dave Barry:

Drunk Monkeys Mirror People

Grizzly-Polar Bear Cross Found in Arctic

Please Don’t Floss with Screwdrivers, Dentists Beg (UK Story) I’m evil

Not a headline, but funny.

A few notable bits from recent Post-Dispatch articles that jumped out at me…

In a Joe Strauss column in which he dishes out grades to Cardinals acquired in the offseason:

Hindered by left shoulder issues, Spivey continues to play ineffectively at Triple-A Memphis and, according to sources familiar with his situation, may require surgery to have any chance of returning to form.

But:

Miles’ chances of making the club appeared cooked when he jammed a hand in an early exhibition game, but he seized a chance afforded by Spivey’s and Hector Luna’s difficult camps upon returning. The semi-regular No. 8 hitter, Miles the switch hitter has remade himself offensively. He entered Saturday with a .383 on-base percentage and 14 walks to go with a .309 average. Miles had only eight walks and a .306 on-base percentage in 324 at-bats with Colorado last season. Miles and Luna are hitting a combined .315 and have largely negated Spivey’s absence.

Of the acquisitions, Miles is the only one to earn an A grade. Rincon and Spivey got F grades since they won’t be making any contributions this season while eating up $2,650,000 of payroll. Rincon is signed for another 1.45 megabucks next season.

Ray King has been fairly effective for the Rockies thus far, although his strikeout rate appears to continue its six-season decline. The desperation trade that Jocketty orchestrated by sending King to Colorado in the winter meetings for two players that the Rockies had no need for–Aaron Miles and Larry Bigbie–already looks like a fantastic move for the Cardinals with the centerpiece of the trade from the perspective of the Cardinals, B, only having collected two base hits so far this season after fracturing his calcaneus in Spring Training forcing him to miss the first month. My expectations for Bigbie are pretty high so by the end of the season, I bet that’s going to look like a lopsided trade in favor of the Redbirds that Walt had to make with his back against the wall, what with everyone who can read a paper knowing that he had to move an unhappy, declining King.

A nice story on Larry Bigbie from this article by Tom Timmerman describes how Dave McKay retrieved the ball that he’d singled to center off Juan Cruz Friday night and offered it to Larry.

“To come to St. Louis and get that first hit and get that first ball that you can put on the mantel,” Bigbie said, “and remember that as my first hit as a Cardinal.”

A year ago, when Bigbie got his first hit with Colorado, he didn’t save the ball. “Nothing against Colorado,” he said, “it’s just, being in St. Louis is kind of a different hype.”

You couldn’t really blame Bigbie for having any beef with Colorado, although his ire would be more accurately turned on Larry Lucchino: backstory here, here, and here. Rick Hummel managed to drag a juicier quotation out of Aaron Miles in this article: “After it’s all said and done, [going six for nine in a series] is a little sweeter that it was done against [the Rockies].”

An article of Tom Timmerman’s answered a question I’ve had for a while, and that has to do with when Eckstein gets a game off. I won’t quote from the article, but the answer is no time soon. He’s playing great and feels great, we’ve got plenty of off-days, and he’s been hitting exceptionally at home. Looking ahead, I don’t see any long road stretches looming before the All-Star break where you’d want to get him out of the lineup. My interests would have more to do with who bats in his place. Luna is the backup shortstop so Miles would be in at second and most likely would bat lead-off. He was the lead-off hitter for Colorado during 2003, 2004, and half of 2005, and is off to his best season getting on base this year. I’d guess that Luna would bat second and Taguchi would bat eighth and play in left. The game when Eckstein doesn’t play would probably come on the road, against a left-handed pitcher, in the middle of a stretch of games. I’ll go out on a limb and predict that if the Cards face Mike Maroth in the interleague series against the Detroit Tigers during June 23-25 that David Eckstein will get his first day off of the season. That’s either the 73^rd, 74^th, or 75^th game of the season. There are plenty of long stretches in the second half where he’ll get some time off to make up for the heavy workload here in the first half.

Tonight I booked flights for the two major trips I’m taking this summer. First, I’ll be in Rehoboth, Delaware hanging out on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean–sippin’ juice in ray. The other trip takes me to Nevada City, California for Bobovski‘s wedding. I’ll be seeing two oceans and a mountain range, which is pretty exciting for a fella who hasn’t been in the sea for a long, long time–over ten years. And I haven’t seen mountains since 1986 when my family drove from Columbus, OH to Vancouver, BC for the World’s Fair. I’m hoping to get inspired because things have become dangerously, frustratingly monotonous.

Between these two trips and all the camping expeditions, it should be a memorable summer. Dare I say it?

As an aside, I found that City-Data.com website linked twice above for the city entries to be so useful that I added the search plugin to my Firefox browser. While a little out of date, it’s got an enormous amount of information available, including payroll breakdowns for some cities.

With this excellent 7-4 win today over the Rockies, the Cards will sit atop the NL Central at 22-13 with a half-game lead over the Reds. The Cards have a day off tomorrow while the Reds will be playing tonight and tomorrow against the Nationals. If the gNats manage to split the next two games, we’ll enter Friday tied with them at the top of the division. Tonight, the Reds send Aaron Harang, who was profiled by John Sickels on Monday, against Livan Hernandez. The gNats collective line against Harang is .310/.333/.448 with one walk and no home runs while Hernandez has held the Reds to a .250/.309/.441 line with six home runs, five of them off Ken Griffey Jr in fourteen at-bats. Looks like advantage Reds there. Tomorrow, the Reds send Bronson Arroyo (.162/.203/.189)! against Zach Day(.333/.472/.619). Eeek! That’s a decided advantage to the Reds.

All is not hopeless though… Look for late-game matchups between Jose Guillen and setup man Matt Belisle or (former Cardinal) Kent Mercker. Soriano has homered in his only at-bat against Rusty Brian Shackelford. Jose Vidro and Marlon Byrd have had success against Dave Weathers. Jose Vidro, Jose Guillen, and Damian Jackson have all hit well against (former Cardinal) Rick White. If the gNats can keep it close and go deep in counts to get the Reds’ starters’ pitch counts up early, they can beat the Reds bullpen.

Update: Wow… This is really impressive: a Minor League splits database. Once I get a few more projects done, I’ve been planning on writing up a program to automatically generate DanUp’s Coming Attraction feature for him. When I was bored one night, I looked into how difficult it would be to parse the MiLB stat pages and determined that it would be surprisingly difficult since the statistics are rendered to the page by a javascript, uh, script.

Ha, while going after that stat-page link, I found another story about the Memphis Redbirds “Red Hots” cheerleaders.

Also had a pretty good time looking at some of the teams’ lame-assed mascots. In case you’re wondering, yes, I did print them out for coloring fun.

We need a lefty…

Ty Johnson’s pitched very well his last two outings for Memphis. Kevin Ool has impressive numbers at AA (0.93 ERA, 0.93 WHIP, 0 HR, 2:9 BB:K) and might get the job done for a coupla weeks to give TJ time to get his stuff working right. Hopefully the two can combine to give the appearance of a solid left side of the bullpen beyond Randy Flores so we don’t look desperate when summer trading gets into full swing.

Update: Here’s a nice article about Kevin Ool by the Springfield Cardinals’ beat writer and blogger Kary Booher. From the article, it sounds like K.O. is still gaining his confidence against AA batters. I’d gamble that if used carefully he might be able to survive a few weeks of one-batter appearances on the big league squad and take a huge step up in his career. Less risky than sending Carmen Cali out there, at least.

‘Nother One: Athooks at Cardinals Diaspora passes on what he heard from Buster Olney on KFNS, that Walt Jocketty has shown interest in acquiring Torii Hunter or Shannon Stewart from the Twins. My first reaction was that it would be very difficult to afford either of those players. Hunter will earn 10 3/4 million clams this year and the Cardinals already have a center fielder (and ideally restructure his contract to add two more years.) Stewart makes $6.5 million this season, and I can’t see him as that big an upgrade over the Rodriguez/Taguchi platoon we’re paying a little over a million for. I did like one player on the Twins roster, though. Dennys Reyes was recently recalled from AAA and his career numbers make him look like he could be an effective left-handed specialist in the Cardinal bullpen. His ground-fly ratio was 94:23 in 2005 when lefties batted .208/.306/.264 against him without allowing a home run. Left field honestly doesn’t concern me much at this point in the season. I like the Luna-Gooch/Miles-Rodriguez platoons and think the team is looking pretty darned good lately, aside from last night’s outstanding pitching performance by the Rockies’ Jeff Francis. It should be the Miles/Rodriguez lineup tonight unless La Russa puts Bigbie in left field. I don’t expect that even though Bigbie has good historical numbers against the Rockies right-handed starters for the last two games of this series: 2-3 with a triple against Fogg tonight, and 4-7 against Byung-Hyun Kim tomorrow.

One more: Jim asked in the comments whether a Cliff Floyd for Jason Marquis trade would fly. Here’s what I think as an uninformed observer… I’ve seen speculation about that trade from Cardinal fans and would obviously like to see it happen even though I know Marquis will start pitching well soon. Cliff Floyd would do well in the Central with all the RHPs he’d face. With Tom Glavine restructuring his contract to defer salary, you have to think the Mets are looking to add salary, which wouldn’t be necessary in a Floyd for Marquis trade–they’d end up saving 1.35 megabucks–or a cool million if the Mets required John Gall or Rodriguez to close the deal. MLBtraderumors.com has a piece speculating on what the Mets should do about their rotation today and the thinking there is that the Mets would be out to pick up Greg Maddux (Glavine would be happy to defer salary to bring Maddux on board, eh?), Jason Schmidt, or Barry Zito. Barry Zito’s already said that he wants to play in New York, although he meant in the Bronx, not Flushing. I think the Giants will be good enough to stay in contention and they won’t want to deal Schmidt even if it’s obvious that he plans to test the free agent waters after the season. The Giants are such an old team that they’re probably better off taking the compensatory draft picks and keeping him in the rotation all year, assuming one of their key outfielders doesn’t get injured or indicted. I’m sure the A’s will look to move Zito, but the Mets farm system was picked too bare of almost-ready talent in the offseason for them to put together a package that would interest Beane.

Crazier trades have gone down than this one–two valuable players off to slow starts in their contract year heading to teams where their services would be more badly needed. Either one of the Doug Mirabelli trades this year qualify.