Baseball: Those Saint Louis Cardinals

Montreal has some new spring training baseball games coming in March of next year. I like these games, I go to 'em ... to be honest I like the pre-game ceremonies better than the exhibition baseball (where 3rd stringers tend to enter the lineup at the 4th inning mark).  A lot of old favorites have cruised on in over the last few years from 70s/80s Expos stars, to 90s Expos stars, and other key figures to take part in the opening ceremonies.

I don't have that many ideas left to write about anymore, but writing is a fun exercise and a cool mental tool to exercise. There's certain times of the year, probably because they are topics I've done annually, where I get a sort of writin' bug. I wrote about the previous MTL Exhibition games over the last 4 or 5 years and it's becoming a yearly routine for me. I really liked the format of the Cincinnati Reds article I did where I focused on the Reds and my memories of 80s/90s baseball surrounding them. I tried to mix it up and go a different route with the Pittsburgh one last year ... and do modern "memories" of now-a-times stuff ... but who am I kidding? I'm a Nostalgia Man, I love the past pretty well.

I'm gonna go back to the Cincinnati-one format for this where I think it had the right mix of Comedy, Baseball History, and Montreal Baseball Return Promotion (45% Comedy, 30% Baseball History, 25% MTL Baseball Return Being-Down-Withness).

In the meat of that one, I talked about the Best Red, and My Favorite Red. So, let's do that but for those Old St. Louis Cardinals this time who are venturing to baseball-less Montreal to play some friendly old baseball games in March (these are like Monday and Tuesday I think not Friday and Saturday like the previous four times).


Cardinals!

I know the Cards got into some murky water last season or two ago with something about attaining some informations in a "by hook or by crook" format ... but that's not the Cards I know and like ... my main thoughts of that team that come to mind when I think of them are from the "Whitey Ball" era (no that's not a bad term for white people playing baseball, it's based off the stratagems of one Whitey Herzog ... who was the main tactician for the Cards for many years).

Note the Napoleaning of the hand.

Baseball now a days thinks the fans want homers or strikeouts ... and they are kind of altering the game (for what they think is better) to achieve more HR and K ... but I loved Whitey Ball, baby.

I remember in Earl Weaver's book, the man who basically was the key influence on wanting walks and home runs ... he said the reason he set up his lineup for the "3 run homer" was because he coached in Baltimore and hitting homeruns out of Memorial Stadium was particularly easy (the corners of the fences for example stood at 309 feet out which is ludicrous). Weaver says in his book that if he coached in Kaufman in Kansas City (corners there were 330 feet out) he'd load his lineup with speedsters instead of power hitters.

Basically, how you design your stratagems is dependent on the battlefield in baseball. What was Whitey Herzog dealing with at Busch in the 80s? He had 330 corners like at Kaufman (I guess Missouri likes far out corners) so he designed a strategic deployment based on vicious unrelenting speed and thus Whitey Ball was born.

Let's do a leaderboard of stolen bases for the 1985 Cards (this is ONE TEAM mind you, not the entire league leader board):

1985 Cards Stolen Base Leaders:

Vince Coleman 110
Willie McGee 56
Andy Van Slyke 34
Ozzie Smith 31
Tom Herr 31
Lonnie Smith 12

In 2017 that's not even the combined NL/AL leaderboard let alone the leaders of a single team! Whitey Ballers weren't just running .... they were RUNNING THEIR DICKS LOOSE!

When the Cards won the Trophy in '82 you know who had the most homers on the team? One George Hendrick and you know how many he had? A whole 19 of them. They didn't even have one 20 homerun hitter when they went all the way in 1982.

Look at ol' Whitey in that photo ... with his hand all Napoleoned in his pocket like that. There's only one sort of very specific person who comports themselves in that fashion ... only Dynamic Strategists comport themselves as such. When you see a dude nonchalantly looking about the place with a single hand in the pocket and one hand flappin' loose ... he may seem to be nonchalant as shit but that person has a myriad of scenarios being calculated and re-calculated in his mind. Yes, a person who comports themselves like that are always Dynamic Strategists.


The Best Cardinal

Lots of choice here with a team that was founded in 1900 ... you've got quite a lot of names to chose from but I still think the choice isn't that hard. From glossing over historical stats only briefly it's not hard to settle on this name as the Greatest Cardinal of Talent-Wise of All Entire Time....

Bob Gibson. 

He was 251- 174 for the Cards in his career with a 2.91 ERA and 3117 strikeouts. That's some amazing numbers for a pitcher. His best year is almost unreal ... in 1968 he was 22 and 9 with a 1.12 ERA over 304 innings pitched!! That's the closest thing to total Absolute Ultimate Dominance that there is for a pitcher.

A starting pitcher of today would not even fathom pitching 300+ innings let alone while maintaining a 1.12 ERA throughout. People think Nolan Ryan was the pitcher who came the closest to Absolute Total Ultimate Dominance on the mound but Nolan never put up anything like that in his career. Nolan did get under 2 in ERA one year but in the strike shortened 1981 season where he had a 1.69 over 149 innings pitched.

1.12 over 304 by Bob Gibson .... is just .... Dolemite-esque in Nature. It's As Bad as Can (be). He was basically a Human Tornado in 1968.

I never saw him pitch other than in archived videos but I don't need any live-scoutage under my wings of analysis to proclaim Bob Gibson as the greatest Card talent-wise ever  ... I mean great googly moo this man was a House of Utter Pitching Fire, truth be told.

Runner Up for this Award: Stan "The Man" Musial


My Favorite Cardinal of all time

Now, this section is where I let my personal bias seep into the mix and I gently toss my analytical abilities out the old window, and relate to the reading audience who my favorite Cardinal was. As an 80s kid and 90s teen ... the 1980s and 1990s are my area of most nostalgia for baseball so the player will be from that 20 year period no doubt. 1900-1980 and 2000-2017 are not my area of nostalgic expertise.

The criteria to be awarded the championship of this section of the article isn't the same as the Talent portion where deep analytic thinking helped derive Bob Gibson for that honor ... this section is more "Did I like that dude's name a lot?" .... "Did the dude do a helluva lotta sick back flips before taking his position in the field?" .... "were his baseball card photos funny and/or cool looking?"

I had a shortlist but I narrowed the shorty down to two finalists. Al Hrabosky and Ozzie Smith.

The Mad Hungarian is a slight notch or two on the chronoscale ahead of my time ... but I'm not doing a Cardinals article without getting a quote of his in here. I mean, here, check out this one ... wait it needs set up. The Cards management asked Hrabosky to shave his iconic facial hair and after doing so his performance dropped off substantially and he claimed it was due to his now lack of facial hair and explained the need to have it to compliment his "psyche":

lookin' guuud.

"To be perfectly honest with ya, I feel that, I maybe have average physical ability, but when I get my psyche and my self-hypnosis goin', then I can compete with anybody and anything..."

-The "Mad Hungarian" Alan Thomas Hrabosky








The man's whole modus operandi was being wickedly wickedly pumped. Now, I'm gonna just go out and say it .... That is COOL. I would really like to know the procedure he used to self hypnotize himself into the Zone. For some reason I have a feeling it might have involved listening to the Doobie Brothers whilst drinking semi-warm Schaefer beer ... but that's just speculation on my part at this juncture.

  
Nextly, the Wizard of OZ! Ozzie Smith .... complete with GIFS OF HIM DOIN' FLIPS EVERYWHERE!!!!!

Wut the .... OH MY GOOOODNESS!

What is gonna ... OH WOW!

SLOOOO MOOOO SHUUUUNNNNN!

Ozzie don't, don't you're gonna get .... HE DID A BACK FLIP!!!

Sorry Al Hrabosky but you lose. Ozzie Smith is one of the mainest mainest mainest men of the 80s/90s. I, over the years, have equated happiness to doing back flips and Ozzie Smith would take the field by doing back flips. It's almost too much. It's .... the greatest thing.

So the award for my Most Favorite Cardinal of all time goes to ... Ozz....


......A CHALLENGER APPEARS!

OH NO!

Oh no, Willie ... no. No, I can't. I can't. I wrote a pretty long article about Willie McGee back in the day like five or six years ago. It was one of the first articles that got a lotta hits on my blog. It was a pseudo art review of photos of Willie McGee that went on for, I dunno, like 2000 words. It had a complete fictitious backstory, copy-pasted french poems, and everything else. I'm sorry, Willie, I can't include you in this one because I've done like thousands of words on the Subject of Willie McGee already. 

I can use the remainder of this space to work in a Dane Iorg joke or something .... Who am I kidding? Let's get Willie in this article.

People might have thought back in 2012 that I was making fun of Willie McGee in that "The Highest of High Culture: The Appraisal of Photographs of Willie McGee" piece. I wasn't. As a kid in the 1980s, photos of Willie McGee when found in various packs of baseball cards genuinely confused and intrigued me. I'd open a pack and flip through the cards and I'd be like ... "Oh a rookie card, cool", "YEAH! AN EXPO! YES!" ... and then ..... "????" .... total bewilderment and confusion.

I wasn't making fun of Willie's appearance in that 2012 piece, I honestly think Willie McGee baseball cards are art. They are. I would look at them and really wonder things like "What the heck is this dude thinking about to be making a face like this whilst getting his baseball card photo taken?" ... I mean if you made me choose what is the greatest baseball card of all time I'd say with perfect aplomb and genuine honesty that the 1986 Topps Willie McGee is the greatest baseball card of all time.

Players wanted to look cool, tough, professional, or snapped doing an interesting action/play in these cards ... but not Willie McGee. He wanted to take these photos with the most confounding facial expressions possible ... and they are just that ... confounding. I still think to this day that what Willie McGee is thinking about in his 1986 Topps trading card is ..... "Gee whiz .... that's a funny lookin' dog over there."

Ozzie Smith, I apologize, you're the greatest .... but the award for my Most Favoritist Cardinal of All Time goes to...

Willie Mcgee.

Conclusion

I like this article, it's pretty good.

The Highest of High Culture: The Appraisal of Photographs of Willie McGee

In my halcyon days as a vagabond traveling scholar, I engaged in various studies. I dabbled intensely to refine my understanding of economics, history, voodoo, and many other fields of advanced thought. Yet the subject that always fascinated me most, was one I came across while studying at a small university in Montpellier, France roughly ten years ago. A professor by the monicker of Lebrante Lavoisier introduced me to a most curious and captivating subject which widened my mental horizons infinitely. 

Lebrante was an appraiser of antique artworks and handicrafts, the man was the proprietor of massive collections of vases, urns, paintings, and crafts of immense historical significance. His seminars at the university taught inquiring minds how to identify which pieces of art held within them the most historical significance.

On the eve of the last morrow prior to graduation day, Lebrante brought his class to his estate in lower Burgundy to showcase his students his vast collections of relics and dusty chachkies. I witnessed first hand, pieces of significance from as far back as 1976 and even as long ago as 1974.

Celadon urns, wood cut plaques, brocade tapestries, vinyl records, stone carvings, bodkin heads...his collection was utterly breath taking. He narrated as he showcased the pieces of his personal collection using the most refined of language whilst doing so,

L’art est une activité humaine, le produit de cette activité ou l'idée que l'on s'en fait, s'adressant délibérément aux sens, aux émotions et à l'intellect. On peut dire que l'art est le propre de l'homme, ce qui le distingue au sein de la nature, et que cette activité n'a pas de fonctions clairement définies.

-Lebrante Lavoisier

Following the exhibition the professor served mild cognac, and we began discussing art (as such). I asked him which piece in his vast collection was truly his favorite and he responded that choosing a favorite amongst his many chachkies would be like a father choosing which of his children was his favorite. Yet after he consumed more and more cognac and opened up a little more he took the liberty of hunkering down and confessing which of his pieces was his preferred favorite. Lebrante took out an old leather satchel from under his desk and slowly opened it. He said, that the artwork contained in this satchel was the most honest art he had ever appraised and considered it the most meaningful, deep, beautiful, wonderful, and historically significant art that the art world had ever produced. He unwrapped a small book from the leather satchel and held it up high in the air and stated as if to the heavens,

Ceci, mes cher amis, proche de mon coeur .....
sont des photograhs de Willie McGee

Inside this book was photographs of former St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Willie McGee. Lebrante explained that unlike every other baseball photograph where the "joueur" is depicted heroically, poised, proud, and confident...photos of Willie McGee presented a contrast so great that they themselves are within themselves the truest definition of the human condition.

Now without further ado (or even further aplomb) we shall attempt to appraise the value and significance of photographs of Willie McGee...

Upper Deck circa 1990

One can only wonder what was going through the photographer's mind as he/she directed his/her subject's pose in this photograph.

Willie was probably standing all tough, posing in a batting stance that looked pretty normal, cliche, and cool...but the photographer stopped him and said something along the lines of,

"No Willie, drop the bat, it's too cliche...I want you to try and look as bored, lackadaisical, lethargic, bemused, and all around distant as you possibly can. Ok great, yeah put your hands on your waist, stop smiling please, get a thousand-yard stare going, and curl one of your nostrils up a bit...ok there it is...beautiful...and..."

*SNAP*

 Final Appraisal

Facade: A+
Facial Expression: B+
Palette: C
Contrast: D
Saturation: C-
Placement: B 
Historical Significance: B-
Human Value: C+

Overall Median Auction Price: ~ $ 1,400,000


Cardinals Media Yearbook Circa 1989

Stopping time in its tracks to capture happiness in its entirety is every artist's raison d'etre...here the artist has stopped time in an orderly yet sophisticated fashion to truly represent happiness in its purest form. He/she has sliced off a moment in the time frame of continual life to represent one passed yet preserved moment. A moment in which its subject was brimming with human happiness. It is akin to a hunter catching an elusive alligator, or a treasure hunter coming across buried gold. An artiste slicing off a piece of happiness from the winding tapestries of human existence is the call of the minaret in the journey of an artist.

Lebrante has coined this piece..."Happy Willie" and it is his favorite amongst his collection (but not mine).



Final Appraisal

Facade: C+
Facial Expression:B
Palette: B
Contrast: C
Saturation: B
Placement: B+ 
Historical Significance: A
Human Value: A

Overall Median Auction Price: ~ $ 1,750,000 


Donruss Diamond Kings Circa 1985

Ah yes, the famed oil on canvas painting of Willie McGee which once hung in the Deutsche Guggenheim Museum of Berlin.

This piece is more famous for its many thefts and counterfeit scandals than for its humanistic value. It was thought destroyed in 1996 when Bundeskanzler Helmut Kohl ordered all art which was not post-neo-nihilistic to be burned in Germany. It was counterfeited and attempted to be re-created dozens of times but each counterfeit could not compare to the lost original.

The painter of the original piece, Stanisław Szukalski, fully captured the distance of Willie's eyes as well as the curl of his upper lip in such a fashion that appraisers can almost assume Szukalski was one with his subject before even beginning to paint him. The flare in the right nostril of Willie is as close to perfection and reality as one can possibly come. A true masterpiece in every sense of the word.

Szukalski attempted to recreate the piece after it was burned, yet he never even came close to re-capturing his original creation. A pity if there ever was one...

Final Appraisal

Facade: A
Facial Expression: A+
Palette: A
Contrast: B
Saturation: B
Placement: A 
Historical Significance: A+
Human Value: D

Overall Median Auction Price: Unapplicable  (due to untimely destruction)


Topps "Charter Member" Circa 1991

Here, Wiilie on the surface is taking practice swings for the photographer...yet the photographer has managed to burrow deep beneath the surface to uncover the truth in the human condition. Willie's body may be taking practice swings yet his facial expression shows us a weary and unamused man...distantly staring at the past.

His eyes represent sturggle,
His nostrils symbolize cohesiveness
His gangly uninvolved hand represents Life.

This is the haute culture of everyone's midwest.

This picture...is.

Is.


Final Appraisal

Facade: A+
Facial Expression: B+
Palette: A
Contrast: A
Saturation: A
Placement: F 
Historical Significance: D+
Human Value: A

Overall Median Auction Price: ~ $ 1,175,000

Topps Circa 1986

Oh Willie, where art thou Willie...and what are you thinking of?

How does an aritist capture a facial expression which doesn't exist? How can you convey an emotion which doesn't belong? Why do the fish swim and the birds fly around in V formations in the sky?

Here the impossible has been done, the artist has captured an expression that has yet been defined by culture.

Willie has seen a funny looking dog and is thinking to himself,

"Geeee, that's a funny looking dog over there."

We don't need to see the dog to know it is funny looking because Willie's face explains it to us vicariously. Willie's expression is the explanation...

Final Appraisal

Facade: C
Facial Expression: A+
Palette: B
Contrast: C
Saturation: D
Placement: C- 
Historical Significance: D
Human Value: A-

Overall Median Auction Price: ~ $ 3,650,000


Cardinals Pre-Season Program Promotional Magazine Circa 1987

Bwaaaaaaaah ahahahahahahaha ahahahahahahaha hahahahahahahah ahahahahaha hahahahahahahahahah ahahahahahahahaha hahaha hahahah ahahaha hahahahahahah ahahahahah ahahahahah ahahahahah ahahahahah woooooo oooooo oooooooooooooooooooooo oh hoooo ooooooo hooooo baaaahhh hhhhhhhahahaha haahahahah!!!!

Oh come on now Willie, who takes a fucking picture like this? You know this is a promo photo, you have plenty of time to conjure up a semi-normal presentable expression. Why? Why would you make this face for? You're not even trying to be photogenic here.  You're giving ZERO effort.

Hahahaaaaaa aaaaahahahahahahahah ahahahahaha haha! 

Final Appraisal

Facade: A+
Facial Expression: A+++ (+) (+)
Palette: A+
Contrast:A+
Saturation: A+
Placement: A+
Historical Significance: A+
Human Value: A+

Overall Median Auction Price: ~ Over Nine Thousand Billon Dollars!!1!!!


Donruss Circa 1984

What the fuck are you looking at in this one? Was there really something so important going on to your peripheral right that you had to not look at the camera while they were taking your baseball card photo?

Willie, you look like you haven't slept in years.

Drink a cup of coffee before baseball card photo day next time, jeez Willie.

Maybe it was an inside joke on the Cardinals roster that whenever Willie was getting photographed someone would yell "Hey Willie!" and he'd look over and go "Wut?" or maybe there really was funny looking dogs walking around the park everytime Willie had to get his baseball card photo taken.


Final Appraisal

Facade: 88.6
Facial Expression: AAA
Palette: 44.87
Contrast: AAA
Saturation: FF
Placement: S+
Historical Significance: ***
Human Value: AAA

Overall Median Auction Price: Lotsa Monies!


...and thus concludes our appraisal of photographs of former St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Willie McGee. Thank you and good night.