Did I Miss Anything?

The great thing about baseball is that it's a daily occurrence.  You take a week off of football, you miss one game (and endless amounts of talk about that game).  Baseball, there's always something going on and taking a week off--especially a week that includes the trading deadline--makes it tough to stay plugged in.

There's always something that happens on my vacation, anyway.  A couple years back, it was the debut of Rick Ankiel the outfielder, for instance.  The Cards always seem to know when I won't be around.

So, of course, the Cardinals had to get busy on Saturday, trading off Ryan Ludwick and bringing in Jake Westbrook.  With the contract situations and how Westbrook had been going, I expected him to be in St. Louis, but in a straight swap for someone like Jon Jay or Allen Craig.  Instead, the Redbirds removed one of their big thumpers from a team that was struggling to score runs.

As I say, I've not read all the discussions and rationales for the moves, but it seems to me that it was overpaying for middling pitching.  Westbrook has turned out to be OK so far and I'm sure that Ludwick's contract would have been an issue this offseason, but you couldn't ship him for more then?  It's not a move I'm that fond of, though so far it hasn't been a major issues since Albert Pujols finally found his stroke.

I suggested on one of my brief times on Twitter while I was gone that Pujols seemed to have taken the trade personally.  I don't suggest that it altered his feelings or inclinations toward the organization, but more that he perhaps felt that, if he'd produced at the level he usually does, perhaps Ludwick isn't moved.

Whatever the reason, he's been slugging at a Pujolsian rate again and it's good to see him heating up before the Cards go into Cincinnati tonight.  Hopefully he can keep it going.

I hear also that David Freese is now out for the year as the rotating door that is third base continues to spin.  I hate to hear that Freese is out, though it's possible that fans were overestimating what his impact on the team would have been in a return anyway.  It's hard to know how much of his tailoff in June was due to his ankle and how much was due to the league figuring him out.  You'd like to think more of the former, but we'll not know until 2011 now.

Then Jason Motte winds up on the disabled list, meaning Fernando Salas rides the Memphis express back up again.  Even though Motte can blow up at times, it's still good to have his arm in the late innings and I'd like to think it won't be long before the newest version of the Mad Hungarian is back stomping around the mound.

I will catch up on Heroes and Goats sometime soon in a separate post.  It's good to be back to Cardinal baseball!