The First Annual Cardinal Blogger Awards

The votes have been cast. Now let’s see who won!

First off, a comment from Kujo at Rockin’ the Red for a new title for the group:

How about Cardinals Bloggers United, in the likeness of the soccer hooligan firms in England?

That’s not bad. Those involved, what do you think? Or perhaps United Cardinal Bloggers would be more your style? If we are going to keep doing projects, we gotta find a name. And I do hope we keep doing projects.

OK, to the awards. I’ll post some quotes from those bloggers that elaborated on their selections.

My Ballot for the Cardinal Blogger Awards

This is the first attempt at a Cardinal blogger collaborative project. I hope that the bloggers involved enjoy it enough to try doing more things together in the near future.

Those scheduled to post their selections today include Readin’ Redbird, Redbirds Fun, CardinalsGM, Rockin’ the Red, Redbird Ramblings, and CardinalsNationGlobe. Check all of them out (I’ll direct link to their post when they get them up) and then come back here next week for a consolidated ballot. (Future Redbirds has theirs up now as well.)

So, without much further ado, let’s see my selections for the CBA. My selections are noted in bold.

The Rest of the PECOTA Story

Earlier, I compared the Baseball Prospectus PECOTA numbers and the community projections by Viva El Birdos and CardsClubhouse to the actual stats of some of the Cardinals. The ones in the previous post were players that had already been shut down for the year. With the season well over now, it’s time to reflect on the others that we projected before the season began.

Jim Edmonds

Source	AB	R	H	2B	3B	HR	RBI	BB	BA	OBP	SLG
CCH	427	73	117	25	1	24	82	64	.274	.369	.506
VEB	425	79	116	21	1	25	86	69	.273	.375	.504
PECOTA		62		19	1	21	65	59	.253	.358	.482
Actual	365	39	92	15	2	12	53	41	.252	.325	.403

Edmonds, like most every player on the Cardinals, battled injuries throughout the year. The extent of his offseason surgery was probably underplayed in the minds of the Cardinal projectors, as Edmonds never quite got his groove on in 2007.

Edmonds is the only hitter that was left (surprisingly, we didn’t do Mr. Pujols, probably figuring it was too easy!), but there are three pitchers left to examine.

Seven Reasons The Losing Streak Isn’t So Bad

Really not a lot to say about yesterday.  Kip Wells danced around trouble for a while, but if you run through the raindrops long enough, you are going to get wet.  Albert (it sounded like, since I listened to the game via XM) had a number of balls hit to the wall.  A completely healthy Pujols might have had another three home run game instead of two sac flies and an out.  The team continued to battle, even if they did fall short once again.

So it’s seven in a row at the worst possible time (and they are on a nine game road skid).  But things could be worse.  Here are seven reasons this streak isn’t the end of the world.

1) This means that, odds are, the Cardinals will do well this weekend.  If they got swept, they’d be on an 11-game streak and that doesn’t happen in baseball all that often.  Granted the fact that they are fielding half of a AAA lineup and rotation may skew things a little, but in the way of baseball, long streaks are often followed up with some good wins.  I’d say that, in the flow of a baseball season, this means at least a split this weekend.

What Now?

Not much to talk about from last night’s game. Edwin Encarnacion continued his ownership of Anthony Reyes and Reyes continued not to give any reasons to keep him in the rotation. Young pitching is supposed to be inconsistent, and I wish Reyes was a little more inconsistent. That means we’d see some good starts out of him as well as bad and have a little more encouragement. My personal feeling is if Tony LaRussa comes back for 2008 (and I think he will), Reyes probably gets traded in the off-season. And he’ll possibly bloom somewhere else, but I think he may have worn out his welcome around St. Louis, especially if there are some young guys in the minors that look to be ready to make the next step up.

Pujols goes 0-4 and runs his homerless streak to 20 games. He had a 22-gamer right before the All-Star Break this year. Coming into this year, his longest had been 18 games. It’s astounding that we are talking about an off-year for El Hombre and it’s still a .318/30/89 year, with a chance to hit his 100 RBI total and, with 12 runs, 100 runs for the 7th year in a row. Hopefully he gets healed up this offseason and comes back with a vengeance in 2008.

In fact, if the schedule was different, I’d be advocating a shutdown of AP starting now. The Cards aren’t going anywhere and milestones aren’t worth risking more injury for. However, you have to respect that TLR is going to play the game the right way. With both Chicago and Milwaukee coming up, LaRussa is going to put the best team that he can out there and make those teams earn their division crown.