Somebody had to be called up. I was hoping it wouldn’t be someone making their big league debut, but it appears that Dennis Dove is the guy. Darryl Kile’s roster replacement, Travis Smith, spent April and May of 2002 with the Cardinals; he’d gotten the giddiness and the family reunions and the culmination of a life’s dream out of the way. Good luck to Dove, who’s got a very bizarre situation to work out in his head. I hope he can find a way to get through it.

I’m reminded of a story about Joe Sewell, who made his debut with Cleveland–at the time locked in a battle for the pennant with the White Sox–after Ray Chapman, their brightest star and most beloved figure, was struck and killed by an errant pitch. Sewell, twenty-one, a few months out of college, was terrified of the prospect. He’d never seen a major league game, and suddenly his gradual climb to the bigs became a steep ascent to a reeling, rudderless first division team who’d lost its heart and soul. He struggled with the thought for a while, but one night he decided that he would no longer play to replace Ray Chapman. When he put on the Cleveland uniform, from then on, he would play for Ray Chapman. He would be Ray Chapman.

This is the flip-side of the old rooting for laundry bit, long adored by people who don’t understand the connection that brings thousands of people to a stadium, dressed up and face-painted and bearing signs, eighty-one times a year. It’s why the Cardinals are the kind of organization they are, and why baseball is the kind of game it is. Whether it’s Joe Sewell thinking “I am Ray Chapman” to himself eighty-seven years ago or Jason Simontacchi standing on the mound on June 23, 2002, there’s a common thread that keeps players from suffocating under the weight of these un-baseball-like circumstances. It’s the thing that brought them to where they are in the first place. It’s baseball, and our connections to it.

Hancock was innings in blowout games, two or three scoreless frames on a box score full of crooked numbers, but he was also a person, a story, a bullpen piece that can never quite be refitted. Dennis Dove won’t be pitching to replace Josh Hancock–he can’t. Dennis Dove will be doing what Josh Hancock did from the moment he latched on last Spring Training, what thousands of players have done since teams had names like Excelsior and Niagara and treated one-another to lavish banquets after all hands were out. He’ll be pitching for the same things Josh Hancock pitched for: the success of his team; the enjoyment of the fans; and the ideal of baseball, this weird, schoolyard game that seems so perfect a metaphor for life that we ascribe to its players a Homeric, heroic stature, and grieve when they’re taken by the real world from our pleasant, low-risk epic.

I’ll root for players, mourn Hancock and cheer on Dove; I’ll root for laundry, which would explain this website; but in the end I think we’re all rooting and playing and arguing for baseball itself. Hancock was a fine representative of all baseball stands for, and he’ll be missed. Dove can’t hope to replace Hancock, but he can and must be like him–stats aside, his job in this awful situation is to carry on baseball’s tradition like Cardinals have for more than a hundred years.

Blogs are for pith and potshots, not anything like this, so I’ll be brief because that’s all I know how to do. (Here is the press release, if you’re looking for it.) Josh Hancock was always ready to do what the team needed, even if it meant pitching in some lost causes, and by all accounts he was a nice guy off the field. His fans and his teammates will miss him.

I hope that, wherever he is now, everything makes sense and he’s not surprised; I hope every day they rally from behind while he soaks up the middle innings.

Well, this continues to suck. Three items related to the weekend in general and yesterday in particular, then some minor league potpourri:

Item one: the Cardinals’ hitters are finally, for the most part, climbing into borderline respectability. Pujols has his OPS over .800, Edmonds is finally hitting the ball in the air (but still not pulling it–he looks like much the same hitter he was after he came back early to fill in at first for Pujols, last year, just trying to spray it until his shoulder feels good), and Adam Kennedy–well, we still have his first significant contributions to look forward to!

Item two: the Cardinals might just not be good enough. (I feel like I should put this in the header, or something, because I’d rather not keep including it in posts.) They’re a hitter short, and even if La Russa wises up and dumps Schuguchson for J-Rod or the Rs Ank and Lud they may still be half a hitter short, and short of grafting somebody onto David Eckstein’s back I’m not sure how they work that out. But I guess I wasn’t sure last year, either.

Item three: Please, braintrust, do not panic about Adam Wainwright.

Look, he was outstanding out of the bullpen last year, and I’m sure that gives him a leg up on the average rookie starter, but the fact remains that he’s a young starter with a spotty track record and a history of inconsistency. I still think he’ll end the year with an ERA on the good side of 4.00, but until he manages to work out his control problems those days when balls just fall in and the line drives aren’t at anybody are going to look like that. He heightened our expectations with those brilliant first starts, but he’ll probably alternate like this for a while. (And for a team like the Cardinals, which feels a need to play defensive specialists or otherwise Preston Wilsonian hitters in right, perhaps it’s for the best–if he just kept throwing quality starts the Cards might never score him the necessary four runs.)

After watching Wainwright and Reyes struggle on consecutive days I worry about mentioning another starter with great K:BB ratios coming through the system, but Jaime Garcia continued his string of solid starts yesterday, going five innings and striking out eight. His strikeout rate fell from 9.27 to 5.94 after his A+ call-up last year and I was a little worried, since Garcia’s almost never mentioned without the words “finished product” and “limited projectability” a sentence away. If he can’t strike out more than six batters in a pitcher’s park in the Florida State League, after all, what kind of finished product is he?

Apparently he’s been Googling himself, because he’s struck out 25 in 21 innings to start life in AA. Nice work for a guy whose “baseball age” is still 20, and a sign that maybe there’s a few more inches to come on his fastball after all.

I realize I’ve been talking about Rick Ankiel (0-5, 1 K) a lot lately, but I certainly didn’t think it would become an issue. That said, the Committee Campaigning for Converted Players (I suggested they change the acronym, but none of them reads Cyrillic) e-mailed me the other day to remind me that the Equal-time rule states I must grant some space to a converted position player, having lavished affection and Tiger Beat-ian idol worship upon a converted pitcher.

It is with that in mind that I mention Jason Motte, Not-Top Twenty bonus pick and former catcher, who continues to pitch well as Palm Beach’s closer. (He struck out one in a scoreless inning yesterday.) He’s behind the Worrell-Sillman-Dove troika, not to mention all of the Kelvin Jimenezes and Brian Falkenborgs out there, but he’s allowed just one run in a his first nine innings and I expect his high-90s fastball will allow him to move fast.

So there. That should shut up the Pitchers Reminiscing about Catching, too.

Limited time for a post today–the last Russian exam of the year demands my attention. But I thought I’d give a shout out to the Official Roy Hobbs Candidate of Get Up, Baby!, Rick Ankiel. He went 3-4 today–three singles!–to bring his average up to .264.

He’s hitting .264/.304/.597 now, and say what you will about his plate discipline but the man’s got an isolated power of .333. He’s got hits in his last five games, during which he’s hitting .444 and slugging .778, and if you just remove his 2-16 start (as we often did to justify Colby Rasmus’s promotions) he’s hitting .303 with a slugging percentage of .732. I realize this is cherry picking, and I realize he needs consistent at-bats, but he’s 27 and the Cardinals are getting an aggregate line of .189/.241/.284 from right field. Forget about Ankiel, the Cardinals could afford to have Braden Looper learn to hit major league pitching on the job at this point. Three teams in the NL are getting better hitting from their pitchers; the Cardinals might as well bring one up who can hit a little.

Finally a bit of luck for the Cardinals: the middle of the order’s flukishly bad hitting was outlasted by Braden Looper’s impression of Greg Maddux, right down to the weird action he gets on all of his pitches now.

         IP   H  ER   K  BB  HR   ERA
BOTT   26.6  26  15  14  11   2  5.06
BLOOP    33  23   7  18  10   2  1.91

Bottenfield’s fifth start was a lot like I expected Looper’s good starts to look: he pitched six and two-thirds innings, gave up nine hits, but survived with only three earned runs because of his lack of peripherals, good or bad, and his ability to keep the ball in the park. ]

Looper’s done all of that–even after Josh Hamilton made an ill-advised first pitch burn up upon reentry his home run rate is slightly lower than it was back when it was his main good relief peripheral–but his strikeout rate was a little higher than I anticipated. He’s getting lucky on balls in play at a rate he won’t be able to maintain, no matter how good the Cardinals’ defense is, but his stuff looks good enough to convince me this isn’t a flash in the pan. I’m going to stick to my Jeff Suppan lookalike prediction for his final numbers, but in the meantime I’d love for him to keep being Greg Maddux as long as possible.

Busy today, so I’ll leave this apologetic entry on a Fun with Arbitrary Endpoints note. We’re now at the point in–knock on wood–Albert Pujols’s Return to Glory where his bad month no longer looks to be without parallel in his career. There’s a similarly mediocre patch in 2002, but the most reminiscent month comes in July of Albert’s rookie year. Lables courtesy what my subconscious kept blaming the slumps in question on:

              G  AB   H  2B  3B  HR    BA   OBP  SLG
the book     24  87  21   7   0   4  .241  .333 .460
the balding  20  77  18   3   0   5  .234  .337 .468

The god-awful start to the season is still there, but now Albert’s done enough to let us obscure it completely. At the rate he’s going now, by the end of the month we will no longer have to pore over enigmatic video clips of his swing because in the splits it will be shown that this career-defining slump never really happened! Thanks, sportswriter math!

From this moment forward–we can check this after the season courtesy Baseball Musings and its Day By Day Database–Rolen and Edmonds will each have an OPS over .800. Rolen I’m not worried about; Edmonds could be done, sure, but he looked just as awful at times last season.

Worry about the offense, sure, but I’m willing to bet Molina and the Right Field Mystery Spot will remain problems one and two. It’s too soon to worry about good hitters.

That doesn’t really do much to perk up the offense, but it was good to see Edmonds make good contact for the first time in a while. But that’s not the main story, of course.

Looper was just toying with Daryle Ward in that last at-bat. Three splitters, or whatever those were, in a row? When Loop tossed off breaking pitches last year, they seemed to drop mainly because of gravity, like they had run out of steam before they reached the plate. These were just ridiculous, cutting off pieces of strike zone and then ending up way outside. The increasingly lopsided Bottenfield comparison:

       IP   H  ER   K  BB  HR   ERA
BOTT   20  17  12  12   9   2  5.40
BLOOP  26  20   6  14   8   1  2.08

Bottenfield heated up later, but he didn’t do anything approaching this until 1999.

Geniusometer for April 21, 2007:

15: Guernica?

This team has certainly picked up where they left off in the regular season, hasn’t it? Carried offensively by fluke events (compare Kip Wells going off to the Gary Bennett Cubs Rampage), looking “flat” (see also: not hitting), and making bad, inexplicable mistakes on a regular basis.

It’s weird to look on all of this with the knowledge that it happened last year, and then this happened. That they did rally around a manager who had been around a long time, and hit when it mattered, and get the lucky breaks they had been on the wrong side of for the last half of the regular season.

The benefit of hindsight doesn’t much matter when I have to watch this team play, though, and much like last August I find myself without a lot to say; this is a deeply flawed team, and they’d better realize it before they immolate themselves on the altar of scrappiness and team players. This is a winnable division–an easily winnable division–but not when the back of your lineup against left-handers looks like this:

4. Spiezio
5. Wilson
6. Molina
7. Taguchi
8. Miles

So it’s kind of fitting that they were outslugged by a pitcher.

Speaking of slugging pitchers: a 2-4 night has put Rick Ankiel over the Mendoza Line. In his last ten games he’s hit .257/.315/.714, with five home runs, a double, and three singles. I… don’t know what to say about that. (I’m glad you asked: in his last ten games, Skip Schumaker has hit .176/.211/.235. I realize the horse is dead, but it’s not my fault Tony La Russa keeps putting it out in right field.)

Incidentally, habitual Colby Rasmus Slow Start watchers should start counting from yesterday, when it comes time to hash out the benefits of his eventual Memphis promotion; he went 3-5 with his first home run, climbing over the Ankiel Line and hopefully beginning one of his ridiculous month-long rampages.

Good news: Albert had three hits, including a big, message-shot homer; the Cardinals put up some runs; Isringhausen looked sick, flashing a suddenly-moving 93 mph fastball and the old Curveball of Death; Adam Kennedy showed off his outstanding glove and great positioning once again.

Bad news: still not enough. I can not get over how extravagantly stupid this team can be, sometimes. Keeping Skip and So around on a team with severe offensive issues? Seriously? A defensive specialist with no bat is a luxury on a good team with an outfielder that either needs to be rested regularly or is completely inept with the glove. Since Edmonds is being platooned, more or less, and Duncan is startlingly improved on defense, the Cardinals fit neither criterion all that precisely. But it is now April 19, and the Cardinals have two fifth outfielders without the slightest clue about hitting on the roster.

Down in Memphis, John Rodriguez, Rick “four home runs and nine hits in 47 at-bats” Ankiel, and Ryan Ludwick have all shown sparks with the bat. They can all play center field. Presumably they have passed the tests necessary to earn their “bunt unselfishly” and “hustle out those ground balls” licenses. So what are all three of them doing in Memphis? A case could be made that carrying any of the five outfielders currently on Memphis’s roster (Rodriguez, Ankiel, Ludwick, Eli Marrero, and Nick Stavinoha) would upgrade the Cardinals bench.

This sort of thing could be accepted when MV3 was performing on all cylinders and the supporting cast could hit. But this is a deeply flawed offensive club, and La Jock can’t continue to waste spots and at-bats on functionally useless players. If they do, these games–the winnable ones, where there are just a few rough spots and setbacks–will continue to fall into the loss column.

I went to watch Kyle Lohse shut down the Cubs with some friends, and nine hours of driving (from Springfield to Chicago back to Columbia) last night meant an update wasn’t in the cards. But I watched the out of town scoreboard with interest–especially after the Cubs and the Reds agreed to stop reaching base–and here’s how start #3 comes out for everybody’s favorite ROOGY:

       IP   H  ER  K  BB  HR   ERA
BOTT   13  12   7  8   7   0  4.84
BLOOP  19  15   5  9   6   1  2.37

Looper continues to move ahead of Bottenfield, who got knocked around in his third start of 1998. After his second start, on June 10, he was called back in relief of fellow swingman Mark Petkovsek, pitching four innings of a combined shutout on June 14. He threw forty pitches and was called in on three days’ rest to start a game against the Astros on June 18. He was knocked around for four runs in five innings but earned the win, thanks to back to back homers from Lankford and McGwire in the fifth.

Back in 2007, Looper has exceeded all expecations. He’s not going to keep that ERA around 2.37, obviously–his BABIP right now is .239–but he’s doing a good impression of Jeff Suppan: keep the ball in play and out of the stands as often as possible, and see what happens.

Looper’s continued excellence, not to mention Chris’s continued carrying of the offense and solid fielding, mean that Dave Duncan merits a 10: glorious, leonine mullet on the Geniusometer for another start. Not only that, but Shelly Duncan is hitting .370/.452/.963 for the Scranton-Wilkes Barre Yankees. He’s the Ryan Howard of Scranton. No, not that one.