Posts Tagged ‘Cardinals’

1/2 over.

Monday, July 5th, 2010

I remember a few weeks ago thinking there was over 100 games left to the season. I couldn’t believe that there was so much left. Now that it’s past the half way point it seems like it’s time to get ready for 2011.

So how’s everything going? I’d have to say worse than I expected. Although the past week was pretty good, the Pirates were playing the Cubs and Phillies, two teams in huge declines. Then the rest of this month there are a lot of games against the Astros and Brewers, so the next few weeks shouldn’t be too terrible. After a very rough start for Pedro, he’s started to turn things around the last week. Milledge has picked things up, although he still lacks power. Tabata is doing as well as can be expected for a 21 year old and both McCutchen and Jones continue to do well. What’s really killed the team this year is the starting rotation. The team is getting killed by the 5th inning a lot and then they’re wearing down the bullpen. So clearly, pitching is a problem that needs to be addressed by the start of next season.

I think that JR actually made a good point last week. The Pirates are making a lot of mistakes due to youth and inexperience. If they can avoid that, then maybe they can have a decent second half.

Meanwhile, like I predicted before the season, the Reds and Cardinals are leading the division, although both the Brewers and Cubs aren’t doing as well as I thought they would and the Astros are doing better than I thought they would.

The big problem with the Cubs is that they’re old. Looking at their starting 8, only two are under 30 right now, Geovanny Soto and Starlin Castro. Besides Castro, they are an aging team that’s only going to get worse as they get older. And even worse, they aren’t going to be able to trade most of the guys on the team as a lot of them have huge contracts that last a long time. The Cubs went all in for 2007 and 2008 and now they’re reaping the consequences of not planning long term past 2008. Also Carlos Zambrano is being a bit of a jack ass, which doesn’t help anything. However they did get lucky with Carlos Silva, but that isn’t going to last forever either.

Overall, right now, I think the Pirates have a much brighter future than the Cubs do at this point.

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Mannywood and ugly stuff.

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

Watching the Cards-Dodgers game taking place out in LA. On the backstop, there’s an ad for the website drugfree.org/playhealthy with the official MLB logo next to it. I noticed this when Manny Ramirez, who was suspended for 50 games early in the season, was at bat. How….odd that they think this ad is appropriate when Manny is at the plate. Just saying.

Also, I found this website today. It’s very disturbing how many people in this country have trouble dressing themselves, what they think is appropriate dress in public and what they’ve done to their cars/trucks.

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Week 1 and the Pirates win!

Monday, September 14th, 2009

The Lions march on with another loss and they are now at 18 games in a row and are 1-24 since that mirage of a 6-2 start in 2007. Magic numbers, 8 more to tie the record and 9 more to get the record.

The Steelers won on Thursday. That’s very redundant. :-)

The Packers prove that the Bears really got nothing in Jay Cutler. Talk about pissing draft picks away on that guy. There’s still a lot of season left, but I have a feeling that the Bears fans won’t be raising any beers to Jay Cutler in the years to come.

The Vikings won, but the real story there wasn’t Brett Favre, it was Adrian Peterson. The Vikings are clearly the early favorite to win the NFC North, but I doubt Brett Favre will be as big of a help as the Vikings would like to think he will be. The Vikings already had a good team when Favre showed up. And the Browns lost. Brownies being Brownies.

And the big story from yesterday, the Bungles were up 7-6 against the Broncos with about 25 seconds left. The Broncos had the ball with 87 yards to get a TD, not much of a chance for the Broncos at that point. Kyle Orton, the QB the Broncos got from the Bears threw a pass that essentially hit a group of Bengals and a Bronco, bounced up in the air and looked like it’d fall incomplete when the Broncos Brandon Stockley caught it and ran untouched for the TD and the win. Bungles being Bungles. Damn shame the Ravens won.

Mr. September, Tony Romo, helped the Cowboys win. The 49er’s dropped the Super Bowl Cardinals. The Rams will go in to week 2 looking for their first points of the season. And the Astros announcers didn’t say who scored first yesterday, the Astros or Texans, as the Texans took until the 4th quarter to get their first TD.

As for the Pirates, who were 1-14 and had lost 13 straight road games, they pulled off a nice win yesterday. McCutchen got the first run in the first inning and later on Doumit came up big time with a solo shot that put the Pirates up 2-0. Maholm had a very nice game as well. John Russell continues to go “by the book” with Matt Capps and put him in save situations. I’m not sure who else he could go with, but Capps hasn’t been that strong this year with the closing job. Sure, he’s 24 for 28, but he’s lost some big games this year. So, Capps gave up a solo shot to Lance Berkman (big surprise). A few minutes later, he had one on, one out when Hunter Pence hit a ball right at Capps who started the double play. Lucky they got that as Hunter Pence was probably safe at 1st. Umpires being umpires. Oh well, on to Mannywood and the Dodgers. If the Pirates keep it up, they’ll give the Dodgers some breathing room against the Rockies.

The Cardinals dropped a series against the Braves. Not good, their magic number is 11 at this point, which is the lowest in baseball still. Hopefully, they’ll be able to take some games from the Marlins and the Cubs won’t get anywhere with the Brewers this week.

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We toured the city and elsewhere.

Sunday, February 8th, 2009

The Baseball Players Union basically covered up A-Rod’s steroid use. Next they warned the players in 2004 when the random drug testing was happening. I guess it wasn’t random enough. Of course in 03 and 04, A-Rod did not have his best offensive years, with a rather unspectacular OPS+ of 147 and 131. Of course after that, he took off with some really good years. 

So yesterday morning I had breakfast and just sorta hung out here in the hotel room until about 11:45. Then Jennie and I left and we finished off our Texas Roadhouse meals at her apartment. Then her friend John showed up and we went from there to Busch stadium to go on the Busch Stadium Tour. There was only about a dozen people on the tour. The tour guide made a big mistake though, when he claimed that the Cardinals were only the 2nd team to open a new ballpark with a World Series title. He, of course said that both the 2006 Cardinals with the new Busch and 1923 Yankees with the old Yankee Stadium were the two. He must not know about the 1909 Pirates opening Forbes Field with a World Series win.

After that it was to the Arch where it basically took forever to get up to the top. We got there at 2:15 or 2:30 and they didn’t have tickets until the 4:10 departure. So we had to wait around a lot. Then we got in line so that at 4:10, we’d be ready to go, but the told us to go wait at the end of the line, which we did and it moved so fast we were up front and they told us to go back again, instead we wondered off and did some other things for a few minutes and when we got back we ended up not being able to go up until almost 4:30. But it was crazy, the whole premise seemed to be to wait in line in order to wait in another line and then wait for the ticket color to be called and then wait for the lift. And the first line was horribly inefficient. They should have called the time on the PA so that people knew when to get in line. At the top, it was pretty much the same as I remember it in 1990, which is kinda disappointing, but oh well. It was pretty cool seeing how some stuff changed since 1990.

After that we walked back to the car and drove over to Union Station, had some food and then went to the hockey game with Jennie’s roommate. The first period the Blues were just ok. They didn’t score, but allowed the Avs to score a goal about halfway through the period. Jennie and her roommate left to walk around for a while so John and I went back to our seats to watch the game. The Blues came back out in the second period and scored three goals right away, so of course Jennie missed that. That was very cool, suddenly everyone was really in to it. Then the third period they scored about five minutes in and then we learned that if the Blues scored 5 goals, everyone would get a free blizzard. Of course that didn’t happen. Overall, the Blues were very good tonight and just dominated the Avalanche, something I didn’t expect to happen. Now, when I come back here for opening day, need to see the Pirates dominate the Cardinals.

Overall, a great, but busy day with lots of really nice weather that just made it even better.

Then it was back to Jennie’s apartment where we turned on SNL and I just about fell asleep on the couch. Jennie decided to drive me back to the hotel then. I came up to my room, sat in the chair, turned on the TV and fell asleep on the chair until 3:30 in the morning and woke up about 40 minutes ago.

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