St. Louis Cardinals Begin Spring Slate Today Against Florida Marlins

After a long winter full of debate, rumor, and activity, baseball returns to the sun-splashed fields in Florida and Arizona today.

It is a beautiful thing.

Below are the St. Louis Cardinals starters (in no particular order) for today's matchup with the co-tenants of Roger Dean Stadium, the Florida Marlins.

C Jason LaRue
1B Albert Pujols
2B Skip Schumaker
SS Khalil Greene
3B Joe Mather
LF Colby Rasmus
CF Rick Ankiel
RF Ryan Ludwick
DH Chris Duncan

The starting pitcher for the Cards today will be Blake Hawksworth.

This is an interesting configuration, getting five of the outfielders—six if you still consider Schumaker one—into the lineup at the same time. There's a good possibility that would be very close to the Opening Day lineup, save no DH, of course, and likely Adam Wainwright as the starter.

What will be interesting to see is when the subs start coming in and who they will be. It doesn't sound like Brett Wallace is going to play a whole lot this spring, just because he's not going to make the squad due to various factors.

I'm also interested in seeing if Hawksworth is making strides. Having another arm in the minors ready to go would be a very good thing for the Cardinals.

There are 35 games this spring, which means that the Cardinals should be pretty ready to go by the time April 6 rolls around.

There are a lot of questions to answer in those games, and those answers start forming today.

Yesterday in camp, the team had a creative coach-pitch game, which allowed Tony LaRussa to flex some authority and make the rules of baseball a little different than what we are used to.

You've never seen drama until there are four outs and a runner on second. No word on a ruling about Derrick Goold's protest.

Mather also got some good news in regards to his chances of going north with the squad.  He got to move down the number list to No. 7. Not too often do the Cards plan on a single-digit guy opening the season with Memphis.

There will be no TV or radio broadcasts for today's game. You can check out Brian Walton's schedule for those things over at his blog.  Not too many of these games will be televised by St. Louis TV this season.

It has seemed like in years past local media would broadcast the Cards' Saturday and Sunday games the last couple of weekends.

If you just want to listen to some baseball, here's the XM schedule for this week. I'm looking forward to listening to some games this afternoon at work.

And after you've done all that, heard about how the Cards did, and are winding down from the first day with "real" baseball, tune into the UCB Radio Hour tonight. Yours truly will be one of the guests, and we always encourage callers so we don't necessarily have to make it up all by ourselves.

I'm sure we'll be talking about today's results and what's coming in the next few days.