The Cardinal Standard: Cutting Through the Noise

Welcome to The Cardinal Standard! Let’s talk some Cardinals baseball!

Let’s be clear on one thing here, I’m not a professional. I’m just a guy who reads a lot about baseball in my spare time, and then I like to talk about it with my dad and brothers. Cardinals baseball is my vice that takes me away from work, politics, and real-world drama, as I’m sure that’s the case for just about anyone reading this.

You can count on me romancing the game of baseball, but not necessarily in this article. Over the years (Webster Groves HS, Class of 2003, for those of you St. Louisans aching to know) I have amassed a good deal of knowledge and understanding of the game. I’m old enough to appreciate the how pennants were won in the 80’s, old enough to have seen the game evolve through the 90s and 2000s, but young enough to make sense of endless new statistics and metrics that are built on algorithms and hi-tech visual measuring sticks. The game has never been more complicated, and I am here to try to help the fanbase make sense of it.

I pride myself on being non-partisan. While I am a diehard Cardinals fan—born and raised—I’m not going to be the guy who storms the castle with pitchforks and torches calling for Bill DeWitt Jr’s head after a losing season. Neither am I going to defend poor personnel decisions made for questionable reasons. I don’t own a pair of Cardinal-red glasses, but I could tell you exactly what I was doing the night David Freese walked off World Series Game 6. I might strongly disagree with steroid use—before and after it was banned—but believe it would be irresponsible to overlook the impact that Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa had on the popularity of the game during their historic home run race in 1998. I might cringe watching Oliver Marmol send Miles Mikolas out to pitch every fifth day, but still believe that he is the best man in baseball to lead this team back to postseason glory (oops, might’ve just lost half my readers!).

So let’s talk Cardinals baseball! Let’s get at it from every angle. You’ll get some optimism, some pessimism, a whole bunch of realism, definitely some sarcasm, a smattering of devil’s advocate(ism), some dad humorism whether you like it or not. I hope to entertain and educate while cutting through the noise of a frustrated fanbase, the sugar-coated explanations from the team, and the clickbait media crap. At the very least, I know my dad and brothers are reading, and that’s good enough for me.