No More Distractions

Hope everyone enjoyed the football game last night.  As you may know from reading this section of cyberspace, I'm not a big fan of the pigskin.  I always go to a Super Bowl party held by church friends of ours, but that's more to socialize than to really get involved in the game.  I left before the fourth quarter, which sounds like the most interesting part of the game.

As I have said numerous times, though, the best thing about the Super Bowl is that it means two weeks until pitchers and catchers report.  Nothing stands between us and a full slate of pictures with sunshine and bright red uniforms besides a fortnight of discussion and speculation, which beats the heck out of months of discussion and speculation.

The big story over at the PD is the aggressive promotion of prospects, something that has started to become a hallmark of the minor league system.  Erik could weigh in on this with much more authority than I could, but in my mind it seems like a fairly solid policy.  It is going to have its drawbacks and some players may need a slower progression.  Hopefully the front office could realize that and not necessarily be wedded to player A not dropping back down the ladder.  But for an organization that has seemed to let talent wither on the vine, it seems like this is a good change in direction.

MLB.com has a story about the one-two punch of Chris Carpenter and Adam Wainwright.  If you were to poll St. Louis fans, this could be the one thing they are most looking forward to in 2009 and the one thing that causes them the most worry.  To have Carpenter and Wainwright going back to back in the rotation is something we've not gotten to see yet.  Wainwright was in the 'pen in '06, of course, and as soon as he got into the rotation in 2007, Carpenter went down with his injuries, from which he's just now returning.

To be able to see two top quality pitchers (assuming Carpenter can get back to a level close to what he was pre-injury) going on a regular basis will do wonders for the attitude of Cardinal nation.  Hopefully it'll be a trickle down effect as well, letting Kyle Lohse hopefully match up with back of the rotation starters and Todd Wellemeyer slide down the line as well.

There's a lot of ifs to the pitching staff, but the potential that is there is very intriguing to Cardinal fans.  I know personally that I'm very interested in watching Carpenter every fifth day!

I'm working on a blog project to help get to know the other teams in baseball as we prepare for the next season.  I've exchanged e-mails with numerous other bloggers (and have some out waiting for response) so as to hopefully get every team covered.  Our new friends at Astros County returned the favor and you can read my responses to their Redbird questions over there today.

While I was setting this up, this paragraph from correspondence with a Rockies blogger seemed to me a little ironic, given some of the Cardinal fanbase's opinions on management:

I wish I could say I was really looking forward to watching pitchers and catchers report, but your team is getting ready to sign Manny Ramirez and my team had a rotation featuring Livan Hernandez, Jorge de la Rosa, and Valerio de los Santos last year. Have you seen downtown Denver any time recently versus downtown St. Louis? There is no way you can tell me Denver is a small market and St. Louis isn't. It's just that your owners care about winning and ours care about cashing fat revenue-sharing checks. Makes it hard to stay dedicated.

Always good to remember other teams when we start thinking we have it so bad.


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