I had to work until 10 last night, running a camera for a lecture by Geoffrey Garrett on the rapidly emerging Chinese economic superpower. It wasn’t a fun shoot since his slides were projected onto a screen and lit up the middle of the stage while his podium was barely lit up at all. He gave most of his talk standing right on the boundary of the projector’s light, leaning in and out of the dark. I had a lot of fun constantly adjusting the exposure, but think we got decent video. Insomnia kicked in when I got home and so I stayed up watching X-Files, cleaning my house, and thinking about baseball and, to a lesser extent, my homework until 4:40 or so.

Woke up this morning at 7:45, deloused, and voted. There was a referendum on impeaching the president, withdrawing the military from Iraq, and not sending Illinois guardsmen to Iraq. I’m not sure whether I’m looking forward to seeing how this election turns out, seeing as how silly the ballot was. After that, class and work. Not much to report there.

I laughed hard after work at My Little Transformer, a brilliant stop-motion film about the Transformers and My Little Ponies living next door. Episode 3 is sublimely funny, and Six has an excellent callback to the second episode. The spooky seventh even uses the Dectalk synthesizer to give voice to a ghost. I’m pretty sure a bunch of those sound effects are from Final Fantasy II, as well. Old school, dawg.

At VeB today, lboros broke out the handy old Roster Matrix and the hot stove roared to life. Below is my (shamelessly stolen) version of the roster matrix, although with green for salary figures because I think myself mildly amusing. Nothing uncontroversial here if you’ve read the speculations written here since the season ended. I assumed Edmonds wouldn’t agree to an extension and the Cardinals pick up his option, or else the first year of the extension is for 10 million total. Duncan stays with the Cardinals. Spiezio gets a handsome offer and leaves via free-agency and Gary Bennett moves on as well. Todd Greene signs with the Cardinals for a modest raise over his 2006 pay from the Giants. I’m sure Suppan will head elsewhere and am thinking Mulder will leave, too. In this scenario, JeffWea comes back for $7.5m—no telling whether that’ll prove to be realistic for a few weeks, at least. Perennially favored (by me, at least) fifth starter candidate Jamey Wright is signed up to bring his ground-ballin’, pitch-to-contact ways to the Lou. Sadly, Randy Flores is traded to the Angels (who don’t have a single LHRP now that they’ve declined their option on J.C. Romero) for Dallas McPherson and Eric Rodland. McPherson is penciled in to replace Spiezio as the utility corner infielder/big bat. Eric Rodland, Brendan Ryan, and Aaron Miles compete for the second base job in Spring training, with Rodland winning out. (Considering I’ve never seen him play or heard a scouting report from anyone who has, I’m excessively impressed with what an excellent season he put together in 2006.) I also guessed that Sosa would accept arbitration and get a small pay cut from his 2006 salary. If all that went down, presto: an $86,170,000 roster good for a few wins over 81. The 2006-07 FA crop doesn’t excite me much, but there are quite a few players coming available after next year who would be excellent mid-season pickups to put us over the top.

One Possible 2007 Cardinal Roster

STARTING 8	BENCH	ROTATION	PEN
Molina C(R) $600K	Rodriguez OF(L) $400K	Carpenter RHP $7.8m	Izzy RHP(DL) $8.75m
Pujols 1B(R) $15m	Schumaker OF(L) $380K	Wainwright RHP $380K	Looper RHP $4.5m
Rodland 2B(L) $380K	Taguchi OF(R) $850K	Reyes RHP $380K	Kinney RHP $380K
Rolen 3B(R) $12m	Miles IF(B) $800	Weaver RHP $7.5m	Sosa RHP $2m
Eckstein SS(R) $4.5m	McPherson IF(L) $850K	Wright RHP $800K	Rincon LHP $1.45m
Duncan LF(L) $380K	Greene C(L) $800K	— —	Johnson LHP $380K
Edmonds CF(L) $10m	— —	Narveson LHP Memphis	Hancock RHP $380k
Encarnacion RF(R) $5m	Ryan IF Memphis	Tankersley Memphis	Thompson RHP Memphis
TOTAL $47.86m	TOTAL $3.61m	TOTAL $16.86m	TOTAL $17.84m
OVERALL PAYROLL:		$86.17m

It wouldn’t bother me much if this is all the Cardinals manage to put together this offseason. I’d be very happy to see the Cardinals pry away Jonny Gomes from Tampa but would probably be uncomfortable with the talent we’d have to part with to get him. Gomes’ value is lower than it’s been in years and he’ll still be very inexpensive this season. The Rays would be wise to gamble that he successfully recovers from surgery and roll with a deep, productive outfield. I’d like to see Bigbie as a non-roster invitee and wouldn’t be shocked if he made the team over Rodriguez.

Re-signing Mark Mulder would be outstanding—if one of the non-Carpenter pitchers should struggle in the first few months of the season, knowing Mulder was a month or two away would be encouraging, to say the least. His injury-plagued 2006 season was bad enough to classify him as a Type-B free agent, so there isn’t much of a bright side should he be lost to free agency.

I expect Wes Helms and Mike DeRosa to have batted themselves into starting 3B jobs after what they did in 2006, but either one of them would be exceptional to have on the bench to replace Spiezio. Both should command more money than Troll-Tee, though. The Angels look prepared to move McPherson and he looks like he’d be a solid bench player with a dangerous bat. If he can stay healthy, of course. I’m pretty sure the Angels won’t see fit to protect Eric Rodland from the Rule 5 draft, so he could be had for nothing if he isn’t moved or picked by someone ahead of us. The Angels appeared to need LHRP and it’d be keen to have the Flores brothers pitching in the same division. I don’t know if Flores would be enough to land McPherson and Rodland, but we’ll be getting a pair of high draft picks from Suppan’s departure, probably two more from Belliard heading elsewhere, and one more from Mulder leaving. In other words, we could probably afford to sweeten the deal a bit if necessary.

Another baseball post.

There’s a hue and cry over at VeB to trade Anthony Reyes and Chris Duncan for Carl Crawford. I’d imagine that other teams could exceed that package if the Rays are willing to part with Crawford, and the Cardinals would have lost the only guaranteed starter for 2007 other than Cy Carpenter. But the Devil Rays do have an outfielder that I expect they’d be more willing to part with and one who I’ve wanted playing for St. Louis for a long time: Jonny Gomes. Gomes is a corner outfielder who absolutely destroys left-handed pitching—something the Cardinals desperately need. He suffered a shoulder injury last season, played hurt for a few months, then was DLed in late August and underwent surgery in September. The Devil Rays then promoted super-prospect Delmon Young (yes, that Delmon Young) who had an excellent season and established himself as the everyday right fielder.

Gomes, then, could very well be available. He’s trying to learn first base and would be a waste of a gifted athlete as a *spit* DH. The Devil Rays don’t have an everyday first baseman… Chris Duncan may be a nice fit at first and DH for Tampa Bay. The Devil Rays make head-scratcher trades seemingly every off-season, so a package of Duncan and one of the AA pitching prospects may be enough to pick up Gomes.

The playoff beard obviously did me right this year and has a place of honor for driving the Cardinals to their first world series championship in 24 years. Now that the playoffs are over, I had to part with the mane to rejoin polite society. I kept it for a few days longer for the Halloween costume. I dressed up as a “Total Badass” this year and carved silly facial hair out of the playoff beard to complete the look:

I liked it so much, I kept it around an extra day and a half to show off at work.

But now it’s gone—and my handsome mug is shorn clean once again.

I wrote a Firefox search plug-in for querying the University of Illinois phonebook a while ago. Firefox 2 was released last week and I was somewhat displeased to learn that the component that converts the old Sherlock-style plug-ins to the new OpenSearch plugins doesn’t work worth a damn. So I had to learn a new trick tonight.

The new plug-in is now available from this page. It turns out that Internet Explorer 7, which is deploying by Automatic Update this week to WinXP users, uses OpenSearch Plug-ins as well. I went ahead and wrote (and tested) the plug-in for IE7. That can be installed from here.

Of more interest to most of the people who would be reading this lately is that I also fixed the search plug-in for The Baseball Cube, which can be found and installed here for Firefox 2 users. IE7 users will just have to click through to their page.

For those of you who’ve been using IE6 as your internet browser for the past few years, you’ll be very pleased once you start using these search plug-ins. You’ll see some of what you’ve been missing.

Enjoy!

This’ll be the last baseball post for a few days at least. I gotta take a break or I’ll go nuts by the winter meetings, if I haven’t already.

But I was reading Jeff Gordon’s latest column and was struck by this paragraph:

The National League Central won?t stink again next year. The Cubs can?t help but improve, dramatically, and the Astros still have enough talent and resources to contend. In 2007, the Brewers could hang around as well.

I must have been struck by that paragraph really hard because I stopped reading at that point.

Here’s a table of the NL Central Division won-loss records, broken down in halves of the 2006 season:


Pre-All Star Break Post-All Star Break
Team W L Win.PCT W L Win.PCT
Houston 43 46 0.483 39 34 0.534
Pittsburgh 30 60 0.333 37 35 0.513
Cincinnati 45 44 0.505 35 38 0.479
St. Louis 48 39 0.551 35 39 0.472
Chicago Cubs 34 54 0.386 32 42 0.432
Milwaukee 44 46 0.488 31 41 0.430

I think the Pirates deserve a little more credit and the Brewers a little more scrutiny for their 2006 performances. The Brew Crew were 37 points worse than the 2005 Brew Crew in winning percentage, dropping from a promising 81-81 to a dismal 75-87. The Pirates, on the other hand, were the only team in the NL Central to actually improve their record from 2005. They’re not the best run organization around for sure, but they’ve got a lot of exciting talent percolating up through the system. Notably, Tom Gorzelanny this season who beat the Tigers in his 2006 debut before getting rocked in his next two starts to see his ERA climb to over nine. He was handled well, I think, and by the end of the year had put up more than respectable numbers.

I’m more excited to see what the Pirates can do next season than the Brewers or Cubs. Or Reds. Houston should be good again.

I may be the last man on Earth to’ve seen this, but:

With a tip of the hat to Llama Butchers.

I neglected to discuss candidates for the 2nd utility corner infielder opening in the roster in the massively rambling post covering the rest of the roster below. Scott Spiezio had the best year of his career in 2006 and may attract a two year deal to play third base somewhere for more than the Cards would be willing to pay a utility player. If he signs a new contract with us soon, I’ll be pleased. Everyone liked the Speeze and he had a great year, but it won’t surprise me if he heads to other pastures for more green.

Good corner utility infielders are hard to find. Aside from Spiezio, the best candidates I see in free agency are Wes Helms, Jeff Cirillo, or Rich Aurilia, any of whom would be an outstanding steal. All had good years in 2006 and may command more cash or playing time than the Cardinals can offer. Wes Helms would be my preference out of the three. He kills lefties and can play all the positions that Spiezio could. All three are right-handed batters, though. Melvin Mora, another right handed batter, will also be a free agent.

John Mabry didn’t have a great year with Chicago and could come back if the team insists on a left-handed corner infielder and Spiezio signs elsewhere.

Of course, if you the Cardinals pick up one of the players I suggested in the rule 5 draft, they’d have at least two left-handed bats available already and could go with the best available power bat for the second utility infield roster spot.

[Added 12:44 11/1: Quite an intriguing possibility would be Dallas McPherson, with whom the Angels may be willing to part. It would be interesting to see what it would take to pry him loose. I suggested in a VeB roster speculatin’ thread that Brad Thompson may be enough to have a low prospect tossed in. I’m not so sure that’s right. The Angels don’t appear to have a first baseman… I wonder what interest they’d have in Chris Duncan to man first base. McPherson and Rodland don’t seem out of the question. Possibly they’d toss in an a-ball pitcher in gratitude for Terry Evans Jr..