Cardinals chat: Hall of Fame baseball writer Rick Hummel takes your questions at 11 a.m. Monday
Bring your Cards questions and comments to a live chat with Rick Hummel at 11 a.m. Monday
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In respect to your answer regarding Mr. Dewitt's role in personnel decisions, wouldn't it be more logical for the people who are trained and paid to make baseball decisions be the ones making the decisions rather than a businessman? There are countless instances of over involved owners ruining sports franchises throughout history -
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Commish: Everyone would like to see more triples, more balls in play, and less strikeouts which most likely would lead to a faster pace of play. Other than making the ball larger or moving the mound back another 15 feet, how does one increase contact and decrease strikeouts? It's the nature of today's game. thanks !
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I hate to sound too negative, but as I lifelong, avid Cardinals fan, I am beginning to lose interest in the team. Boring, mediocre, no energy. I cannot believe how bad the offense has been for so long and that management seems content to again rely on Carpenter, Fowler, ONeill, Bader, etc. For that matter, DeJong, Golschmidt and Edmonds are not that great. Unless changes are made, that group will again be the nucleus of a really terrible offensive team. I hope they sign Wainwright to be a hitter, even if they cannot get him in the rotation. He can hit better than most of those guys. Do you think the team understands the impact of these uninspiring teams?
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No one is happy with the Cardinals' offense, whether it is the would-be paying customers or the people paying the players. There will be a tweak or two but the Cardinals' front office, hamstrung by a couple of bad contracts, isn't in the market for big-money additions, hoping in large part that every offensive player won't be below his norm again as they all were last year.For that happen two years in succession is unlikely.
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Commish,
First, an honor to engage with literally a living legend.
I’m 60 and have grown up reading you in St. Louis.
For that let me say a heart felt thank you.
My baseball life has been enriched by you and your Hall of Fame writing.
Yes St. Louis while mostly to modest to tell you; he is in the Hall of Fame.
It seems, like us all, baseball struggles with what made us awesome as a nation.
Quilt-making.
We used to weave all of us together and the aggregate was a force like history had never seen before. Some would argue or since.
But it was the ultimate team building experiment, I’d say done mostly right.
Bumps, yep.
But a sense of US was the driving force.
Seems somewhere ‘round the 80’s “us” changed to “me”.
And we have been worse since.
We gotta’ get back to quilting...
What do you see as MLB’s cultural impact in these roaring 20’s? -
Thanks for your kind words. Baseball has to appeal to the masses, as it always did before. Make the game fun to watch again. It doesn't have to be a 2 hour game. But if it goes 3 or more or 4 in the postseason, have the players give fans a reason to stay with it. Be entertainers, without necessarily hitting home runs. Be team players. Or, as you say it, be quilt makers.
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Commish,
You know the bar is high for baseball in St. Louis. You’ve covered a lot of it.
St. Louis Cardinal Baseball fans have a high appreciation of baseball.
We are not new to baseball success. We see what you see. An excellent organization that has not met it’s own stated goals.
I respect others cities and their plights, but the Cardinals have a higher high water mark than who you mentioned.
To suggest that a disappointed fan base is unappreciative may miss the mark. -
How many teams have been in the playoffs 14 times in the past 21 seasons? Nine league championship appearances and four World Series? That would be one team. And they play here.How high a bar you want to set is your business but that seems a pretty high standard to me.
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Rick,over the years, we've always heard the potential doom and gloom whenever a sport has some kind of labor strife that cancels games. Each time, the fans end up coming back in greater numbers and revenue has soared, but is MLB in a more precarious position than ever before? Here's what I mean:
1) attendance has been falling around the league prior to the pandemic. Some of that is pace of play related, some is cost of attendance related, some is TV package related (people can see all the games at home on great HDTV). Some is three true outcomes related.
2) Fans are becoming more aware of the omnipresent "chasing value" stance of FOs, which sees them prefer getting $7 million of production out of a $5 million player than $12 million of production out of a $12 million player. I believe many are becoming annoyed that teams will willingly put a lesser player on field just because that player gives better ROI. Good players are getting squeezed out of the game because they cost too much (according to FOs).
3) We now have an off-season that so far has seen the vast majority of teams do nothing (or shed talent), essentially announcing that they will put inferior products on the field. How excited will fans be to attend games (once that's allowed) when their teams aren't any good? Maybe for a stretch when the return to normalcy feels great, but will that wear off quickly?
4) While we all understand that ownership lost tons of revenue last year, the claims of losses seem calculated to position themselves for labor negotiations since the books are never opened and no one know what the profits have been over the years. Which leads to . . .
5) Impending and likely labor strife. The league could be staring at three straight years of incomplete or radically modified seasons if 2022 is interrupted for because owners and players can't agree on a deal.
It feels like a perfect storm that could do long term damage to the game. -
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Why are the Cardinals suggesting Gorman may be ML ready this year? He has not played above A ball. He looked great last spring. But, with an entire minor league season washed out last year, it seems like a big leap. With fewer minor league teams and perhaps another shortened or missed minor league season, are teams going to advance players and just see how they do at the ML level?
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Hello Commish. Considering the massive talent of this team in 2004 and considering they got steamrolled and shutout by Boston all of a sudden in that series, do you think there were some shennanigans going on by Boston? seemed odd that that team all of a sudden stopped hitting.
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The Cardinals had no days' rest after their playoff win over Houston before the had to fly to Boston and work out and they did score nine runs in the first game. But they were facing three former 20-game winners later on in Curt Schilling, Pedro Martinez and Derek Lowe. The Cardinals got three runs.
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