St. Louis Cardinals: No More Distractions

I hope everyone enjoyed the football game last night.  As you may know from reading this section of cyberspace, I'm not a big fan of the pigskin. 

I always go to a Super Bowl party held by church friends of ours, but that's more to socialize than to watch in the game.  I left before the fourth quarter, which sounds like it was the most interesting part of the game.

As I have said numerous times, however, the best thing about the Super Bowl is that it means two weeks until pitchers and catchers report. 

Nothing stands between us and a full slate of pictures with sunshine and bright red uniforms.

That beats the heck out of months of discussion and speculation.

The big story now is the aggressive promotion of prospects—something that has become commonplace in the minor league system.  Erik could weigh in on this with much more authority than I could, but in my mind, it seems like a solid policy.

It is, however, going to have its drawbacks, and some players may need a slower progression.  Hopefully, the front office could realize that, and not necessarily be married to player.

But for an organization that has seemingly let talent wither, it seems like this is a good change in direction.

MLB.com has a story about the one-two punch of Chris Carpenter and Adam Wainwright.  If you were to poll St. Louis fans, this could be the one thing they are most looking forward to in 2009, and at the same time, the one thing that causes them the most worry. 

To have Carpenter and Wainwright going back-to-back in the rotation is something we've not seen yet.  Wainwright was in the bullpen in 2006, of course, and as soon as he got into the rotation in 2007, Carpenter went down with his injuries, from which he's finally returning from as the new season approaches.

To see two top quality pitchers—assuming Carpenter can get back to a level close to what he was pre-injury—going on a regular basis will do wonders for the attitude of Cardinal nation.

Hopefully, it will be a trickle down effect as well, and will allow Kyle Lohse to match up with bottom-of-the-rotation starters. Thus, Todd Wellemeyer could slide down the line as well.

There are a lot of "ifs" to the pitching staff, but the potential lurking is very intriguing to Cardinal fans.  I know personally that I'm very interested in watching Carpenter every fifth day.

I'm working on a blog project to help get to know the other teams in baseball as we prepare for the next season.  I've exchanged e-mails with numerous other bloggers, but I am still waiting on some responses since I hope to include every team. 

Our new friends at Astros County asked the same of me for their own project, and you can read my responses to their Redbird questions over there today.

While I was setting this up, this paragraph from correspondence with a Rockies blogger seemed to me a little ironic, given some of the Cardinal fan base's opinions on management:

"I wish I could say I was really looking forward to watching pitchers and catchers report, but your team is getting ready to sign Manny Ramirez and my team had a rotation featuring Livan Hernandez, Jorge de la Rosa, and Valerio de los Santos last year. Have you seen downtown Denver any time recently versus downtown St. Louis? There is no way you can tell me Denver is a small market and St. Louis isn't. It's just that your owners care about winning and ours care about cashing fat revenue-sharing checks. Makes it hard to stay dedicated.
"

It's allways good to remember other teams when we start thinking that we have it so bad.