Baseball and Food Metaphors

The St. Louis Cardinals of today are the baseball equivalent of the leftover Thanksgiving Turkey that you find in your freezer the following March, frozen solid, covered in fuzzy frost, and inedible. It looks almost exactly like the turkey that was so delicious at Thanksgiving dinner, and it even got the job done fairly well for a few days afterwards. But only now, rummaging through your freezer for sustenance, do you realize that keeping it around this long has left you with nothing but frozen, useless bird.

Cardinals management is guilty of a sin that countless teams before them have committed: Finding a very successful and popular core, and then keeping it together after its prime at the cost of building the next team. The ’04 Cardinals were Walt Jocketty’s masterpiece, a 105 win juggernaut with solid pitching, the “MV3 core” of Edmonds, Rolen, and Pujols in their primes, and valuable complimentary performances by Larry Walker, Reggie Sanders, and Edgar Renteria. Only the smoking hot Red Sox, coming off the greatest playoff series perhaps in baseball history, could take them down. The 2005 Cardinals threw in another 100 wins for good measure.

2006 should have been the year for rebuilding. Injuries took their toll on Edmonds, Rolen, and eventually Carpenter. It’s hell getting old. Walker had retired, and Sanders and Renteria departed for greener contractual pastures. A significant number of starts were given to people like Sidney Ponson and Jeff Weaver. But somehow, the same way that that leftover turkey still worked in a sandwich two weeks after turkey day, this team got hot in the playoffs, rode head-scratching performances from Jeffs Weaver and Suppan and Adam Wainwright pitching out of position as ace closer, and won the first Cardinals World Series since 1982. I was still in Velcro shoes back then. It felt like the ’06 championship was the postscript accolade that the earlier, truly dominant teams had earned.

The one unforgiveable sin made by management was the 2005 trade of young ace in the making Dan Haren, teenage slugging catcher Daric Barton, and useful middle reliever Kiko Calero for the disintegrating corpse of Mark Mulder. It’s easy to call a trade terrible in retrospect; this was a deal that looked bad from the moment it was made, and has proceeded to get worse with every passing season. Instead of building around young talent, the Cardinals tried to keep the good times rolling with more veterans. But veterans, particularly pitchers, get old in funny ways. Funny in the way that Taxi Driver is funny. Not so much ha ha funny.

And now you see the 2007 Cardinals. The team gave Edmonds, no longer a useful every day player, an extension, then had to dump him for a bag of unicorn tears the next season. Carpenter was given a huge extension, only to go out with Tommy John surgery. A series of tragic and ridiculous and embarrassing events befell this team; LaRussa’s spring training DUI, the drunk driving death of Josh Hancock, Rick Ankiel’s triumphant return and then HGH shame, Scott Spiezio’s trip to rehab, the tragic and career-ending blinding of Juan Encarnacion when he took a foul ball to the eye in the on-deck circle, and the pouty craptacularness of post-injury Scott Rolen. This was a team that suddenly had like those 90 cent off-brand hotdogs you see on sale at the grocery store: mostly sawdust and filler.

The problem is, only Walt Jocketty seemed to recognize this. He addressed the problem by resigning after the season. After a lot of handwringing, LaRussa decided to come back. That scared off all of the GM candidates who didn’t want to see Tony giving scrappy veterans like Aaron Miles 500 at bats over their useful acquisitions, so the team gave Jocketty’s understudy the job. The big offseason acquisitions proved to be, first Cezar Izturis (OPS+ of 69) to form, along with Adam Kennedy, a middle infield that can only be described as “poop in a bag,” and second, the straw-based remainder of Matt Clement. Mozeliak managed to get rid of poutypuss Rolen and his 8 home runs for Troy Glaus and his bag of magical HGH beans – a downgrade on defense, but a legit cleanup hitter threat that Pujols has been begging for since Edmonds and Rolen dropped off.

There will be precious few things to look forward to for Cardinals fans in 2008. One interesting wild card is Rick Ankiel, phenom pitcher turned headcase turned slugging outfielder. He should get a full season in center and right field this season, and how he does is anybody’s guess. He hit 43 homers between AAA and the pros last year. Anything is possible: He could hit that many for the Cardinals, or he could get spooked by his shadow and retire from baseball. The other bit of excitement for fans is Colby Rasmus, Baseball America’s #3 prospect in the game. Only 21, he hit 29 homers with a .932 OPS in the minors last season, and he’s reported to have amazing defense in center with great speed. Rasmus is likely to start the season in AAA, however.

The encouraging news, though, is that it may be a few years late, but the Cardinals are finally starting to develop young talent and not dump it for broken pitchers. An outfield of Ankiel, Rasmus, and Chris Duncan could hit 100 homeruns (and misjudge 100 popups), and all three are under 28. That’s the upside.

The downside is that this is a rotation that will prominently feature Joel Piniero, Braden Looper, Matt Clement (if he pitches at all), and Anthony Reyes, who this season should prove whether he is what he appears to be: a failed prospect. There’s not much hope for this team to finish above .500. But it should at least struggle to the finish line in an entertaining fashion.

Ladies and gentlemen, your 2008 Cardinals. At least we’re throwing out the turkey.