Wainwright Out for Season

The Cardinals' top pitcher, Adam Wainwright, will now miss the entire 2011 season due to the infamous Tommy John surgery.  Not only is this bad for our chances this year, but I think it also hurts the chances of Pujols staying here after this year.  This is for two reasons.  A) Wainwright being out significantly decreases the likelihood that we have a successful season, something which I think would give Pujols more reason to stick around.  B) Without Wainwright in the lineup, the Cards may feel like they have to go out and sign a big name pitcher.  This will obviously leave them without the money they will need to sign Pujols after the season.  The real hurter here, though, is losing Wainwright.  He's still a young pitcher who has had two Cy Young caliber seasons in a row and this is devastating to our playoff chances.  It's starting to look like a tough year to be a Cards fan.

Not the biggest hockey fan, but...

The Blues won 9-3 against Anaheim on Saturday.  Ridiculous.  Blues fans, much like Rams fans, haven't had much to cheer about in the last couple of years, so when there is a game like this one, my Facebook news feed fills to the brim with Blues statuses.  In all honesty I probably would never have know had it not been for Facebook (MTG 391 PLUG lol).

The first Blues game I ever went to, my Dad and I happened to get on a Metrolink train that got stuck SMACK DAB in the middle of the bridge crossing from Illinois into Missouri over the Mississippi River.  I can think of very few times in my life I have been as scared as I was as we sat on a billion year old-bridge barely wide enough to fit the train, while the guy in front of us says "Hope the bridge doesn't collapse, this baby will sink to the core of the earth."...comforting.  We wound up sitting there for about 45 minutes waiting for another train to come push us across.  Now riddle me this...How does it take 45 minutes for another train, when they are scheduled to run every 7-8 minutes?

Pujols' Self-Imposed Deadline Falls by the Wayside

So, the deadline Pujols had set for the Cardinals to get a deal done in the 2010-2011 off-season has passed.  Albert told reporters that the Cards had until this morning at 11:00CT if they wanted to lock up a deal before the 2011 season.  They will now have to wait until the regular season is over to resume negotiations with Pujols.  I have to admit, I am 100% surprised by this.  I knew the likelihood of getting a deal done was fading, but I never really thought there was a chance that they would let him hit free agency after this season.  But the more I think about it, the more I have to look at the Cards' future as a team.  The reality is that paying the kind of money that this deal will require is going to seriously jeopardize the re-signings of Adam Wainwright, Chris Carpenter, and Yadier Molina: essentially the core of the team, minus Matt Holliday.  And we haven't been able to get deep into the playoffs since the '06 World Series even with the rest of those players, so how will we be able to get there without them and with no money to go get anyone else?  Maybe I was too hopeful for a deal before this season, and now I'm just being pessimistic.  I don't really know.  But it's not totally over yet.  The Cards will still have a short window (I believe 1 week) after the season ends with exclusive negotiating rights with Pujols, meaning that other teams will have to wait that week to being negotiations.  And even past that, the Cards could still wind up the highest bidder on the market and win him back.  There are a lot of ways that this could play out, but no matter which one it is, I have to say that I can't imagine Cardinal life without El Hombre.

Super Bowl XLV Implications for the Motor City

Okay so aside from being a fan of my hometown St. Louis sports teams, I will have to admit that I am also a Detroit Lions fan...yes, yes go ahead and get the laughs out now. Last season, I was rooting for the two worst teams in the NFL.  But this year was a different story for both of those teams.  The Rams found themselves playing in what was essentially a play-in game for the playoffs against Seattle in the final game of the regular season.  The Lions, some experts said, may have finished out the season as the best sub-500 team in the league. For the first time in a while, I enjoyed watching football this year.  But what was especially exciting for me is that my team pulled off the win that some are now pointing to as the turnaround of the Packers' season.  

The Super Bowl put me in a funny spot...on one hand there were my division rival Packers, on the other, Ben Roethlisburger.  Herein lied the problem for me.  Roethlisburger, to me, represents a good part of what is wrong with professional sports.  Roethlisburger, like so many other professional athletes, shows us all that it's okay to be a reckless, irresponsible, even immoral human being, as long as you're a celebrity.  He teaches us the lesson that a certain amount of money can make any problem go away.  And he lets us know that for some reason, in the end, people like him can still be "winners" in our society:  He's already won 2 Super Bowls.

For this reason, I cannot find it in myself to EVER root for him, or that organization.  The good thing about this dilemma, however, was that the Packers represent the total opposite.  Not only do the Packers have a much more likable and wholesome image, but they are what football should be.  They are a gritty, hard-playing, well-rounded, TEAM-ORIENTED group of players set on a TEAM GOAL.  They are not a band of individuals focused on personal achievements like so many other teams are.  So, despite them being my divisional foe, and as much as all the Bears fans that surround me here at Bradley are gonna hate this:  they were the "good guys" in this one.  And I'm proud to have been the team to beat them to inspire the rest of this amazing run.

Look out for the Lions next season.  They are an up and coming team, mark my words.