• Juan Gonzalez receiving the Greg Vaughn-memorial washed up slugger invite? Count me in.

  Juan Gone is perhaps the last pre-wild-ball slugger standing, inasmuch as he is able to stand. In 1992 he popped 43 home runs, beating Mark McGwire’s total by one to take the AL crown. (No one else had more than 35.) In 1993 he led the league again, with 46, but the AL as a whole hit 300 more homers than it had the year before: the Chicks Dig The Longball era was on. The people on that 1992 list with him and McGwire: Cecil Fielder, Albert Belle, Joe Carter. Ray Lankford led the Cardinals with 20 homers that year; two more players were in double figures, and the grand total for the team was 94.

  With a background like that I can’t not be rooting for Gonzalez, though on this team he hasn’t got much of a spot on the roster unless Ryan Ludwick completely falls off the face of the earth. Speaking of falling off the face of the earth, His Goneliness played 36 games with the indie Long Island of Lost All-Stars Ducks in 2006, but didn’t manage to latch on with any big league system. Since then he’s spent time in both the Puerto Rican League and the Caribbean Series, where he DH’d. Sounds like a good fit.

  (Also: I would be remiss if I didn’t link to this, perhaps the greatest post in the history of the internet, let alone the always-excellent Transaction Oracle blog.

• The Cardinals buy out Yadi’s arbitration years. I like Bryan Anderson, and I’m wary of Yadi’s ability to not be an execrable hitter, and I still like this move. The deal runs to his age-29 season, at $15.5 million it’s barely real money by MLB standards, and it comes off his best season to date. Signing four journeymen Paul LoDuca types to successive one-year contracts would probably cost more, and if that’s not the definition of replacement level, I don’t know what is.

  As good as Anderson has been to this point, we’re still dealing with a guy whose primary asset is his youth, whose .738 OPS in AA is only impressive because he was 20. He’s a few years away by the most optimistic estimation, and his development is far from assured. This deal leaves Yadi with a lot of trade value even if, in the worst case scenario for this contract, he regresses and Anderson starts slugging .450. And if, rather than returning to 2006 Einar Diaz form, he hits like he did last season, he’s a very valuable player, one who will now be very cheap.

• Oh, you shouldn’t have–really, you shouldn’t have.

How could I let the Cardinals’ acquisition of a new right-handed slugger go without a post, I ask? A former Baseball Prospectus coverboy, no less, one with a career OPS+ over 110? Josh Phelps is an odd player for the Cardinals to pick up, as odd as he was for the Pirates to release, seeing as he is a righty first baseman and now plays on the team with the best righty first baseman in baseball, but as sad as I am to see a personal favorite Ken Phelps-type lose his shot at becoming some team’s Jack Cust, or at least some team’s platoon partner for Jack Cust, if it means Pujols will feel less obligated to play every day with various body parts and tendons hanging from threads it’s a great move for the Cardinals. Where does this put the bench? Assuming the Cardinals keep twelve pitchers–and let’s be honest, they’ll keep twelve pitchers–it’ll be tough for Phelps to crack the squad unless the Cardinals are ready to go north with Scott Spiezio and Brian Barton as the outfield reserves, a situation I can’t imagine La Russa enjoying.

Phelps could start on some teams, and pick up the short half of a platoon for many others (notably the Pirates, even after he hit .351 for them in limited playing time–seriously, Pittsburgh?) The difference between having a Paul Sorrento career path and having a Josh Phelps career path is distressingly small and arbitrary, and since he was on the first Baseball Prospectus I ever bought, the one that helped set my baseball fandom aflutter, I’ll always pull for him to fall on the pension-pulling side of the line. But it’ll be an uneasy fit unless he sets the world on fire.

… wait, there was another acquisition?

Well, I can’t say this quite comes as a shock–if trading Edmonds was considered a decent proposition with a C prospect coming back the other way, there was no chance the Cardinals would just stick to their guns on Rolen–but I’m a little surprised at how well the Cardinals made out.

Not because this is a definite win–it isn’t–but because it isn’t a definite loss.

Gotta love lowered expectations, right? But this trade is much more likely to come out the Cardinals’ way than that rumored disaster with the Brewers. Not only would the Cardinals have traded their division rivals something like four wins on third base defense alone, they would have gotten back Chris Capuano, a starting pitcher with limited upside and even more than the usual share of starting pitcher question marks.

With the Glaus deal the Cardinals are trading potential upside for a more stable base on which to build a gradually reforming nucleus of players. In the AL East, with an aging, injury-prone, and comparatively substandard core, the Blue Jays need all the help they can possibly hope for; in the NL Central, with a bunch of young and young-ish players who could propel them someplace soon but can’t quite be counted on yet, the Cardinals need someone who will a) keep Phat Albert’s bat off his shoulder and b) provide some bulk value. Glaus isn’t the most stable of foundations, dealing with both injury problems and steroid concerns, but compared to Rolen he’s the Hot Corner of Gibraltar. And at 31–it seems like he’s been around forever, doesn’t it? I thought he was 33–the odds are that much better that he’ll be a part of the next Cardinals pennant contender. And if he isn’t, they don’t have to pay him past 2008.

Most importantly, his injuries are less of the performance-sapping type than Rolen’s are. Glaus has made a much better recovery from his shoulder problems than Rolen has, to this point, and his 2007 injury wasn’t a recurring shoulder problem but a new bout of plantar fasciitis, meaning that, if nothing else, he and Albert will have something to talk about.

All in all, I have to congratulate Mozeliak on the way he handled this mess. He got a player who’s got the chance to be more valuable than Rolen in return; he didn’t mortgage the future by getting a guy near the end of the line; and he made the all-important salary dump, getting enough shaved off the contract to sign a legitimately useful player, or 9.1 Aaron Miles.

(Programming note: New Year’s Resolution: Get back to my every-other-day Platonic Ideal offseason post schedule. I’m out of the country right now, but I will have no excuse starting on the sixth.)

I’m being unfair, free agents having their own geographical preferences and all, but I kind of wish it could have been that other oft-injured Cubs ex-stud. Divorced from that, taking another shot at the Kip Wells Prize, another attempt to resurrect an almost-great pitcher who’s struggled for a few years with injuries and ineffectiveness, isn’t a terrible idea, as bad as it worked last time. Here’s the dossier on Clement:

• He’s taken the Mark Mulder career path. I remembered Clement jostling with Kerry Wood in the competition for being #2 starter behind Prior way back when, so I wasn’t particularly stunned when I noticed on his B-R page that he’d made an all-star team. I was surprised when I saw that it was as a member of the 2005 Red Sox–that being the year where he began to move from Good Young Pitcher to HazMatt, pitching enigma. One explanation is that nasty line drive to the head he took just after that all-star game, but that’s an oversimplification–he began sucking before that, and had a few good starts after. So let’s make a different oversimplification: before and after that all-star game, the after including the twelve starts he made in 2006 before finally going down for the count:

  GS     IP   K  BB  HR   ERA   K/9  BB/9  HR/9   FIP
  18    117  97  35   9  3.85  7.46  2.69  0.69  3.44
  26  139.1  92  71  17  6.14  5.94  4.59  1.10  4.99

  The good news is that Clement, even in his suckiest of sucky periods, kept his best asset somewhat intact: the ball stayed in the park. His last stand is more reminiscent of another disappointing pitcher, Good Jeff Weaver, than it is of injured Kip Wells or Mark Mulder; he wasn’t effective, but given his peripherals he should’ve been. Most encouragingly, he avoided the path of shoulder-injury compatriot Mulder by going under the knife.

• He’s a prototypical Cardinal project in spite of his ability to miss bats. Why? Go through all your Dave Duncan talking points: he walks too many people, so that’s right out; he strikes people out, so that won’t do; ah, here it is–he is, was, a groundball pitcher! (I would’ve taken “he’s over 30″ for half credit.) He’s no Brandon Webb or Derek Lowe, in that regard, but in 2000 and 2003 his G/F ratio was over two, which was enough for Jason Marquis to be anointed Groundball Deity several years ago. Striking people out and getting ground balls–it is a rare mix of talents. If he can keep one of the two, he could be a (very) poor man’s Brandon Webb. And I’d take that, asked at gunpoint.
• He was better than his surface numbers suggest. The .500-ish win-loss record doesn’t tell the tale, but since you’re reading a baseball blog I’m guessing you hold that truth to be self-evident; the ERA of 3.99 during his peak years gives a good summary of what I thought about him at the time, a great #2 or #3; but if you look beyond that you’ll see that he was even better. He struck out eight batters per nine innings from 2002 to 2005, good for eighth in baseball during that time period; he was twenty-first stingiest in terms of giving up home runs. Renowned as a guy who couldn’t keep the ball in the strike zone, his walks weren’t even that bad at the time, a reasonable 3.6 per nine.
• He’s older than you remember. Older than I remember, at least. He’ll be an old 32 next year.

Overall, a good risk, especially with the all-important 2009 team option intact. If his fastball hits 88 or 89 come Spring Training, and he doesn’t have Kip Wells Strike Zonephobia come May, the Cardinals could have something here. Glad to see Moz make a move I can recommend unequivocally.