Join columnist Jeff Gordon for his live St. Louis sports chat at 1 p.m. Friday
Bring your Cards, Blues, Mizzou, SLU and MLS questions and comments, and talk to columnist Jeff Gordon in his weekly live chat.
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In stead of finish building a world series contending team Is the Cardinals front office going to give us the same old every year speech.
Spring training has not started yet still time for trade. Lets see what we have. See the rookies and how injured players are playing. After spring training lets wait until the end of May to give everyone a chance.
End of May trade deadline coming up.
Trade deadline is here and other teams wanted to much in trade. Cardinals get a couple of good veteran pitchers to help the injured starting rotation. Cardinals win division and play 3 game wild card. Cardinals go home for the winter and wait for the winter meetings.
Will Mo improve the Cardinals between now and spring training? If so when? -
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Timothy Mark makes a fair point and a logical one. However, in keeping with the automotive metaphor, we can't keep putting our F150s up against other team's Ferraris. At some point you have to spend money and match fire with fire because three F150s aren't beating a Ferrari and a Porsche even if their third pitcher is a jalopy.
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Now fans are demanding that the Cardinals hurry up and trade productive young players before they fail. The team has done that a few times and came to regret when those young players excelled elsewhere.And who do you trade for? Almost every veteran has suffered a down year or serious injury of some kind. Almost every veteran comes with regression risk, as the Cardinals have also learned.
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Chat - remember when Mo said their model would be tested by all the spending being done by other teams? Those teams were getting elite talent, the Cards model is quantity over quality. The outcome has been the same three straight years. Do we all need to see a 4th Wild Card exit before we realize the model is antiquated and they also don't develop enough in-house talent to support it? We get FIXATED on guys like Burlseon and Nootbaar, but where would they slot on a true contender?
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All Baseball people talk about the starting pitchers being a number one, two, or three starter. A back end of the rotation starter. Since most starting pitchers start 30 to 35 games and pitch 130 to 170 innings a year and the best pitcher on the staff may not start until the forth game of the year.
My question is
what is the difference in all the starting pitchers that make them be labeled as a certain number?
Thank you for your help on this question. -
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Gordo - even Goold admitted that his opinion had changed on this team needing dual aces. So it is not the lunatic fringe fans who are just complaining to complain. It's the blueprint of every WS winning franchise for the last 5 seasons. Who was the last team that won a WS without two elite pitchers? Cardinals in 2011?
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Sure, you need to have strong starting pitching going into a postseason. Ideally, you develop a guy like Framber Valdez to fill that lead role, as he did for the Astros. Also, you need a really deep and really effective bullpen to win a championship. And you need your top hitters to hit.Fans love magic wand solutions. Spending $80 million on two starting pitchers would increase the chances of winning a World Championship by a few percentage points. Now, if both of those pitchers stay healthy, pitch to their level come playoff time (i.e., don't pull a Verlander) and get the proper offensive and defensive support, then that increases the chances by additional percentage points. Trouble is, other teams are doing the same things to upgrade -- and so teams that had great starting pitching on paper go home early.This is not to say that teams should not try to build championship-caliber teams because it's futile endeavor, but there needs to be more awareness that buying a Max Scherzer guarantees nothing, as Scherzer himself proved again.
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As they did last season, the Cardinals would either have to find internal solutions or add players from the outside on the fly. Fortunately they will have a surplus of young hitters pushing for work in the spring. They can't all make the team, so that will provide trade level to add pitching as needed.
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A constant them of these chats is the grumbling from Cardinal fans about DeWitt being so tight fisted. I would bet that most of the chatters urging DeWitt to throw crazy money at free agents would be taking a more conservative attitude toward spending if they were team owners spending their own money. Agree?
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The Cardinals love to sell their fans on these unscratched lottery ticket players. They show us the prize amounts (statistical projections) and say "see what we might have?!!!" Who was the last young player that came to ST with a ton of hype and actually delivered? Not moments, or a couple good weeks/months, but wire-to-wire expected production?
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I believe your assessment of the free agent relief market is optimistic. The best arms went off the board immediately. As for pitching, all that's left now are depth guys. The Cardinals could use a few guys to bring to spring training on minor league deals, just to be sure. And at some point trading for a pitcher would make sense.
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You nailed the disconnect! "Panned out" has very different meanings for segments of the fanbase and media. Donovan panned out. Gorman did not. Nootbaar did for two months. Yepez had his ups and downs but I wouldn't say he panned out. Burleson did not pan out. Liberatore - nope. What does panned out mean to you? Two doubles on a getaway start in Cincinnati? We need proven commodities in the playoffs.
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