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Baseball Primer Newsblog — The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand Thursday, January 12, 2012Neyer: Who Will the Cardinals Miss the Most?Rally squirrel, obv.
But hey, let’s make this about the Hall of Fame, since we could never get tired of that.
The District Attorney
Posted: January 12, 2012 at 07:40 PM | 28 comment(s)
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1. Voros McCracken of Pinkus Posted: January 12, 2012 at 08:42 PM (#4035739)If I'm judging by a war value difference in the team, then the drop from Pujols/Berkman to Berkman/Craig is probably more costly than either the loss of Duncan or TLR.
And unlike with Leo Mazzone, about whom similar things were once asked, we may never find out.
Imagine if Dave Stewart had put up a 115 ERA+ over 342 innings before he turned 27. Would Dave Duncan get as much credit for him then?
As I said, I love TLR, but I think that this team will be fine without him. Partially because it's largely his coaching staff, it's his type of players, he helped shaped the organization and Matheny has a little of TLR's redass in him. I just hope Matheny doesn't coach out of fear and try to be too conservative. TLR was a great manager, because ultimately he didn't care what the writers or fans said about him so he was willing to bat people in different lineup spots(both pitcher batting eighth, and his stated desire to bat more of a power hitter second than a traditional contact hitter) he had no problems with pissing off the old guard and using three (or more) pitchers in an inning, etc.
Yeah, really. The best player in the game (yes, he had an off-year, but I need to see other one to strip him of his title) is almost certainly more valuable than the best pitching coach (if, in fact, Duncan is that - and he likely is).
In other words: Pujols.
1. Pujols
2. See above
Sure. But the fact that he didn't enjoy any success there enhances the possibility that his great run in Atlanta was as part of a Mazzone-Cox pairing, or an entire organizational thing, rather than any singular quality Leo has. It wouldn't surprise me if the same is true with the wizardly Duncan.
With Duncan, anyway, it's not just his time in St. Louis. In Oakland during the days of the Bash Brothers, he was turning sow's ears into silk purses right and left. Yeah, Dave Stewart turned his career around there. Duncan also revived the careers of Dennis Eckersley, Gene Nelson, and Rick Honeycutt - as relief pitchers, yeah, and at that relievers who didn't pitch a whole lot compared to other relievers of the era, but really, really good ones for the time they were on the mound. He also coaxed a good year out of Bob Welch, got Mike Moore to play a lot better in Oakland than he did before or after, and did well there with several other players as well.
Back to the OP... I think LaRussa left because he saw the writing on the wall as much as anything else, and Duncan in turn left in large part because LaRussa got out. I have to agree that of course Pujols is the biggest loss for that team, and it's not even close. I do think that we as statty guys like us - like me - tend to discount managers a bit because their impact on the game is mostly stuff that you can't read in the boxscores, and at that a lot of the stuff that you can read in the boxscores does not paint them in a good light. The real impact of a loss of Duncan/LaRussa isn't so much anything you'll necessarily see out of the Cards this year, it's that you won't see another guy picked up off the scrap heap and turned into an extra couple wins, for instance. It's tough to measure things like that but it doesn't mean that ability doesn't exist.
this is utterly insane comment.
TLR left because he's been trying to leave for damn near a decade. There was no writing on the wall, he just didn't like it here in St Louis, in which the hicks here are too stupid to appreciate his talent, and instead would bad mouth him as an egomaniac, while ignoring the fact that Whitey was massively a much bigger ####### ass than TLR....and that Whitey actually quit on the ####### team, and that Whitey told his team, hey you might as well quit, not one world series, but two, because whitey thinks that ready made excuses for sucking is perfectly fine, yet somehow he has managed to convince the cardinal faithful that he's actually worth a ####### ####, and these morons in St Louis fell for the whitey ####, while refusing to actually embrace a great manager like Tlr. We would rather have a quitter egomaniac, than a guy who accepts responsibilty for the team, but is from the west coast.
Duncan left for much more obvious reasons, he's been a career coach for 30+ years and his wife is dying and he has a chance to be with her in her last days. Really how more complicated than that do your really think this is?
Sure, but my point is that you can't isolate what is Duncan from what is Duncan/LaRussa, while noting that Mazzone/Cox was wildly successful in a way that Mazzone/Perlozzo was not (Leo got two full years in Balt., BTW). It's possible that Duncan's tremendous work with pitchers exists independent of TLR being in the big chair, but it's not certain.
agreed, but that isn't the case. Pujols is going to the al, is going to make a crapload of money to be a 6 war player, is going into the hof with an Angels cap, at the end of the day, he turned away from being an icon, into accepting the less popular road of being filthy rich.
more power to him. Pujols in 2011 was worth 5.4 war, Berkman was worth 5.2, craig is probably going to be worth around 3.5 war, the loss of Pujols relative to last season is around 2 war, which is being picked up by the addition of Wainwright, full season of Furcal, no Theriot etc.
His loss has been covered by replacement players. Meanwhile TLR was replaced by a person who has never managed, and the greatest pitching coach in baseball history is taking a sabbatical. I do not see how the loss of Pujols in regards to the changes that the team made, is the worse thing for the team. If we sign Pujols, we don't resign Furcal, we don't add Beltran to the roster. For the next year, the loss of Pujols is minimum if at all.
Air, water, food?
By the way, I may have missed it amidst all the politics, rape and football, but did anyone discuss TLR's comments with regard to how the Cardinals went after Pujols. I heard it on a SportsCenter update: basically, Pujols offered a significant discount and the Cards played it cool, according to TLR. He said the Cards were concerned that even if they paid Pujols' discount and he bombed they'd be hamstrung for a decade and, so, they didn't really pursue him.
I just wondered if this information might not soften St. Louis' feelings toward Pujols?
You're closer to it than I am but I sincerely doubt this. Even if the Cardinal fans didn't like/appreciate him he could have left anytime in the past decade and been out of work for about 45 seconds. I don't know what his contract was like but he could have gotten out at any point that his contract expired in the past decade. Even if he wanted he could have taken a year off, done TV, then snatched up a job if he was that eager to leave.
Oh, and put me down as "Pujols" is the answer to the question at the top. With all due respect to TLR and Duncan who are excellent at their jobs, the superstar first baseman is more important than either one of them.
That's a different question. You're saying who's got the best ROI.
They'll miss Pujols most because he generated the most total value.
He is replaceable if they want to, now they have a quarter billion to spend on other players for the next ten years. The witch king pitching coach is unobtainable. Surely the goods that has no substitute will be missed more even if the substitutable good brings more total value.
It's a bit more complicated than that. While the fans generally held him in disdain for not being Whitey Herzog, ownership loved him and gave him more latitude than any other manager in baseball. Despite the poor fit with the fanbase, STL offered LaRussa the chance to run the franchise the way he wanted, to overrule the GM when he wanted, to point to a single player as one to acquire or one to jettison. That kind of freedom counts for a lot when you're weighing jobs.
Most importantly, for all his apparent lack of self-awareness, TLR had to know that his thin-skinned act would never fly in a town with a more prominent or rancorous media, and I don't know that there's an MLB city with gentler sports coverage than St. Louis. Doubtless he wouldn't have lasted six months in Boston or New York, and I'm sure Tony knew that.
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