By all accounts I shouldn’t be writing this. Even almost 16 hours later, I am still struggling to believe the comeback(s) that the 2011 Cardinals pulled off in Game 6 of the World Series.

The Texas Rangers should have woken up hung over from their post-game celebration. They had the Cardinals on the ropes multiple times . . . but couldn’t knock them out.

Joe Buck said it best last night, “They just won’t go away.”

And as a result, St. Louis is home to a sports rarity tonight. A series-ending, season-ending, winner-take-all single game to determine a Champion.

Let’s Go Cards.

But while browsing the show Facebook page, I saw this:

Good to know the end of the show is not yet within reach.

This was going to be a post about Albert Pujols and his stalled contract negotiations. I was going to give a compelling and well thought out argument that the Cardinals will be just fine without him.

But then the Cardinals suffered a massive loss with the season (plus) ending injury to the Horse of the Rotation, Adam Wainwright, so I scrapped that post and started over.

So a shorter mention on El Hombre

As good as Albert is, and he is phenomenal, he is a smaller piece to the Cardinals’ success than Mr. Wainwright.

If the Cardinals don’t meet his contract demands, that salary will be used towards the multiple pieces needed to plug that gap. But again, as good as he is, there are more value-oriented players to play first base.While he is consistently awesome, I’m not sure the Cardinals can afford to pay him for future production when that production is almost surely going to drop in 4-5 years, but his pay will be based on his 10 year track record of awesomeness. Sure they have the money, but what good is Albert when you can’t field a team around him?

If the rumors of 10 years/30 million are in the ballpark of what Albert is seeking, then let the Cubs (who seem more than eager to throw crazystupid money at Albert) or some other sucker sign him. They can be saddled with him in his 40′s at a price that will be WAY too much for a past-their-prime slugger who currently has so many aches and pains he doesn’t run out ground balls to first.

And even Albert can’t save the Chicago Cubs. They are forever doomed to the suckitude we are all accustomed to.

A Real Ball Breaker – 12. to. 18. months.

I was listening to a local morning show on Wednesday when it was announced that Adam Wainwright was returning to St. Louis for a medical evaluation. Just before the announcement came, Cardinals starter, Jake Westbrook was being interviewed and was discussing his recovery from Tommy John surgery. He was commenting that it was 2+ years before he was back to what he thought was his normal self.

The true impact of Adam Wainwright’s injury is not just limited to 2011. Adam probably won’t return to the lineup until June or July of 2012 at the earliest. Even then, he probably won’t be 100%. So Adam, notwithstanding his now tenuous contract situation, is basically out for 2 years. Suck.

20 game winners do not grow on trees. Pitchers who are still sharp after 115 picthes are rare. True staff aces that make what Wainwright made in his current contract are non-existent. Adam is the top of the rotation. While we still have a solid rotation with Carpenter, Garcia, Lohse and Westbrook, it does not look nearly as promising as it did a week ago.

A few notes on the Blues

It is still hockey season, and as with any team in the Western Conference (except the Oilers), the Blues are still in the playoff hunt. The Blues were also active last week in the trade market.

The Departed

I’m indifferent to Eric Brewer’s departure. He was always a solid defenseman who got a raw deal from the fans. It wasn’t his fault he was what we received for the Pronger salary dump during an ownership transition. Pronger was awesome. News outlets report that Brewer was a strong leader for the team, but unfortunately, his leadership did not advanced the playoff hopes of the Note.

Erik Johnson on the other hand has been disappointing as the first overall pick in the 2006 draft. Here are the names of some of the other players we could have had: Toews, Kessel, Staal. I never understood why we picked him to begin with and he hasn’t lived up to his #1 overall pick billing. He gave up the puck a lot in our zone and I’m glad he’s gone.

Jay McClement has been a stalwart of the Blues for some time. His consistent energy and penalty killing skills will be missed.

The Additions

Chris Stewart was the only player I recognized as he consistently scored A LOT against us. He seems to have gelled very well with the team and thus far has 6 goals in 5 games. He’s the big butt we’ve been lacking since Keith Tkachuk retired. I look forward to seeing his posterior parked in the goal crease for some time. The Blues definitely got the better end of this trade.

Let’s Go Blues!

In honor of that, I bring you Harry Caray, sort of.

Go Cards!

Dear St. Louis Blues:

I love you. I really do. You’ve been my hockey team for a long time. I’ve put up with a lot of mediocrity. I’ve put up with those God awful jerseys that had way too much red in them. For a time, I bought into the notion that simply making the playoffs was a successful season; that maintaining a streak of 26 consecutive playoff appearances was a great accomplishment. After the lockout, I hoped that your streak would be broken, so that the focus of a season was not getting to the playoffs, but winning them. The new ownership groups seems committed to that end.

This season has been hard for me. I had really high hopes of you extending the progress you made last season. Given all the young talent we have, we should be poised to make a deeper run toward Lord Stanley’s Cup. But you are letting me down.

Maybe you need to steal an idea from baseball and bring in a closer in the last 10 minutes of the third period. A Mariano Rivera quality shut-down-pillow-stacker that does nothing than make sure you don’t blow a late lead.

Maybe you need to not be so complacent with a third period lead and keep attacking. You sit back and let the other team shoot. Guess what? They are more likely to score when you let them shoot.

Or maybe it is as simple as allowing Cam Janssen to go out and beat someone’s face in late in the third period. Okay, maybe not, but at least it would be more fun.

Just do something different so we can get back to winning!

Thanks,
Mark

I had an opportunity to go to a couple Blues games last week. It was a playoff atmosphere and both games ended in a victory for The Note.

What was also intriguing was the dance that a good majority of the Scottrade Center would do before a power play. Ameren UE sponsors the power play and the theme music is a 2Unlimited song.

There are a couple of YouTube clips of this dance. Here and here.

So I came home curious and started searching about how this dance started and found a couple of forum threads on the at stlblues.com here and here.

From what I can tell, one guy started doing this dance (the forums point to a guy named Brock Boner or Jago). If the guy who started this is Jago, then this YouTube Clip supposedly shows him. Brock Boner sounds fake to me, so I’ll go with Jago. A group near the Top Shelf area saw him and started mimicking him and it has caught on very quickly.

Pretty hilarious stuff.  I hope to see all 19,250 present doing this in the playoffs. GO BLUES!

I am a large fan of the radio program “The ITD Morning After” on 1380 AM in St. Louis. 1380 AM has a terribly weak frequency. To compensate, the audio content from each show is put up daily on www.insidestl.com. (Sidenote, I’m a believer that every radio program ought to be available online. This would be great for archival purposes, higher audience loyalty and to allow their audience to listen at their convenience, but I digress.)

When I first started listening, insidestl.com was running on WordPress and it had a podcast and I gave little thought to the daily task of downloading the audio files to get them on my Zune (yes, I’m one of the 5 people that has a Zune). I used an app called FeedReader was able to download all the audio files from the site’s main RSS feed. Then the site transitioned to a DotNetNuke (DNN) platform that will referred to as the ITX debacle.

The ITX debacle removed functionality and ultimately left a lot of folks (message boarders namely) wishing they could go back to the old system. I preferred the old system, but only because the new version of the site has not provided a podcast. The audio files are still uploaded each day, but it has required me to download them manually.

Post ITX Debacle, I’ve gotten around having to download the audio files individually using the  DownloadThemAll (DTA) FireFox add-on. That has worked okay; it provides a single button click to download all files and I didn’t have to put too much thought into it. But I still had to think about it and remember each day to use DTA to get the files, which was just too much.

Now short of continuing to wish that www.insidestl.com would provide a podcast, I started looking for an automatic method to download the content. A short search led me here, which subsequently led me here.

The end result? I have a fully automatic method for downloading audio from insidstl.com

Here’s how to do it:

1. Download WGET from here.
2. Extract the file you downloaded in step 1 to c:\wget on your hard drive.
3. Create a file called sites.txt file in c:\wget. Edit it to contain: http://www.insidestl.com/ITDMorningAfter/tabid/88/Default.aspx
   Or download sites.txt from here.
4. Create a file called insidestl.cmd file in c:\wget
   Edit it to contain:
   
c:
cd \wget
wget -r -l2 -H -t1 -nd -A.mp3 -erobots=off -i c:\wget\sites.txt

   Or download insidestl.txt here. (Rename it to insidestl.cmd after downloading.)
5. Create a new scheduled task that executes insidestl.cmd at the time of your liking. Audio files are usually uploaded by 11:00 am in my experience, but I scheduled mine for 3pm.

You now have a fully automatic method to download that day’s audio with no thought or action required. This will download the files to c:\wget directory. If you’d prefer the files to end up in a different directory, modify step 5 above to include a move command to your preferred directory.

For more help with WGET, click here

For those of you looking for quality sports talk in the morning, look elsewhere. If you are, however, looking for 3 hours of daily grabass, “The Morning After” might be for you.

It seems as if the period of try outs for Karen’s spot is over and that Tina Dalpiaz won the job. Though she seems to still have a probationary period to serve out, I think she’s here to stay.

Congrats Tina.

I commend him for many reasons. Right now, I commend him most for the fact that he acknowledges when an on-air personality leaves/is fired/quits/etc. Usually, silence is the only thing that follows such an event.

Hear Frank’s explanation here

Best wishes to Karen Vail.

Memo to the rest of the radio industry: We listeners notice when someone goes missing from your airwaves, don’t pretend they never existed.