With the advent of the Twitter age, we’re going to try to post tweets by individual games this season. Starting with spring-training games, we’re adding a “hash tag” to game-specific tweets so that fans everywhere can read and provide commentary on individual games. You can read all of the related posts using Twitter’s search or by going to another aggregator, such as hashtags.org. We’re still experimenting with the syntax, but right now the plan is to go with the following format:

• yymmdd{3-letter visiting-team abbreviation}{3-letter home-team abbreviation}

So, for instance, yesterday’s game in which the Cardinals played the Mets was #090227slnnyn. Today’s game vs. the Nationals is #090228wassln.

Please let us know if you have any other ideas on syntax or question on how this works.

Three-letter team codes used by MLB Gameday:

Listen to Nick from Pitchers Hit Eighth, Daniel from C70 at the Bat and yours truly as we discuss today’s spring opener and Nick’s rapid-fire questions.

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After reading Rick Hummel’s insightful piece on the Brewers’ fates this winter, which included signing Braden Looper to a one-year, $4.7-million deal, we pondered the decisions that Looper’s old team, the Cardinals, has made over the last three months. Hummel quotes Looper as saying that the Cardinals’ rotation “would be better with me than without me. But that’s just me.”

Perhaps, though, it’s more than just Looper. Given that the Cardinals are lining up their season with Joel “Give me the damn ball, Jose” Pineiro as their fifth starter, and that the team just paid Adam Kennedy $4 million to try out for another club, would the Cardinals simply have been better off keeping Kennedy and signing Looper?

It’s a false choice and academic, of course, since the move to cut Kennedy was probably more personal than strategic and that the two moves are basically unrelated. But let’s just see if the Cardinals might’ve gained by playing their cards a little differently this winter. With a roster now that features Pineiro as the fifth starter and someone other than Kennedy at second, the Cardinals can figure on Pineiro pitching around 130 innings with a 4.74 ERA. And if Skip Schumaker can make it through camp without embarrassing himself at second base, he stands to receive the plurality, if not majority, of plate appearances at the position. Plugging some projections into the fabulous Sky Kalkman WAR spreadsheet yields the following:

That configuration yields 1.9 Wins Above Replacement. Now let’s pretend that the Cardinals had kept Kennedy and signed Looper, pushing Pineiro to the bullpen. While it would undoubtedly create two clubhouse headaches (imagine the response if Pineiro missed out on both Puerto Rico’s and St. Louis’s starting rotations), would it also create more wins? Kennedy would probably take the lion’s share of PAs at second, while Pineiro would probably get a boost in his ERA from not being overexposed as a starter, so we’ll shave a half point from his ERA:

Grand total for the what-if configuration with Looper? 2.0 WAR. These are merely estimates and projections, of course, but the general idea is clear: Signing Looper wouldn’t have made that much difference (by the way, John Mozeliak deserves credit for not offering arbitration to Looper, after all). Similarly, keeping Kennedy wasn’t going to help much, if any. So if the Cardinals can receive roughly the same production from a better-contented bunch of players (though Pineiro bears watching), it’s probably just as well that they’re going to play their current hand. Now if only Joel Pineiro can pitch well enough to avoid have to talk.

The United Cardinal Bloggers (UCB) kicked off our revolving roundtable discussion this week, so please visit participating blogs. Today’s question came from Scott Deaner at Cardinal Nation Globe:

There has been quite a bit of talk/anxiety concerning where Albert will be after his contract is up. He has said that he would like to stay in St. Louis for his entire career. On the other hand, he has expressed the desire to consistently win and after this off-season one has to wonder if the organization is willing to put up the dough to supply this on top of giving Albert proper compensation.

We all know that Albert is a model player to build a franchise around. He provides one of the top and most consistent bats in baseball, a stellar glove at first base, and extraordinary leadership and character.

My question for you all is: Besides Albert, if you could pick one player in baseball to build the St. Louis Cardinals franchise around, who would it be and why?

Our reply:

Alex Rodriguez has several things going for him, but several things working against him, not the least of which is his age (33). Given other other options, I’m going to go with a player who hasn’t yet reached his peak age over someone a few years past it. That list includes:

David Wright, just turned 26
Joe Mauer, 26
Hanley Ramirez, just turned 25
BJ Upton, 24
Evan Longoria, 23

Wright and Longoria (and Mauer) are great options, but the Cardinals are hopefully going to fill their 3B hole with Wallace soon, so 3B (or C or, obviously, 1B) is not as big of a need as SS or CF. That leaves Ramirez, who still has a few years left at SS, and Upton. Ramirez just signed a six-year deal at the beginning of the ‘08 seasion that goes through 2014 at a pretty reasonable number ($70m), whereas Upton is under team control but not signed long-term. My pick? Ramirez, with Upton a close second.

Be sure to check out Deaner’s post, which includes all of the bloggers’ replies.

Brian Walton wrote an interesting post over at The Cardinal Nation about Tony La Russa’s lineup combinations for the upcoming season. Walton focused on how the defensive versatility of the players in this year’s spring-training camp affords such combinations. We’d like to offer another angle: Are many different lineups correlated to success? That is, is it necessarily a good thing if TLR trots out 100+ different looks again this season?

To ascertain some idea of the correlation, let’s look at the Cardinals since La Russa took the helm in 1996. To get a truer view of the team’s success, we’ll use Pythagorean Wins instead of actual wins. And, thanks to Baseball-Reference.com, we’ll use the number of different lineups, excluding pitchers (pitchers would add some noise we don’t want). To give you some perspective, the team won 86 games in 2008 (Pythagorean and actual) and used 106 different lineups; in 2001, the team won 94 and used 87 lineups. So as the number of different lineups increases, one might expect to see the P-Wins go down:

Without getting overly technical, this (the R2 of.5159) is not a super-tight fit, but it’s a fairly close relationship (anything over 0.5, generally speaking). Of course, the correlation between using fewer players and winning makes sense, and we need to be careful not to attribute causality: A team who suffers injuries to key players, relies on many inexperienced players and is generally tinkering with its lineup probably isn’t going to win as many games as a team that can go with a consistent group of reliable players. For La Russa and the Cardinals in particular, that’s been the story for the most part since 1996: The major exceptions were the 2000 club, which trotted out 113 different lineups and still managed 91 P-Wins and the 1996 group, who garnered only 86 P-Wins despite a relatively stable lineup (80 variations). The stellar clubs of 2004-2005 also won more games (100 and 98, respectively) than one might’ve expected them to based on their number of lineups (98 and 93, respectively).

Is this a condition endemic to only the Cardinals, or does the use of fewer lineups correspond to wins for the rest of the league, too? We took data for all NL teams from 2006-2008, and here’s what it looks like:

Perhaps unexpectedly, the correlation (R2=.3117) isn’t nearly as strong for the NL over the last three years. It could be that it’s a manager effect; Bobby Cox, for instance, doesn’t play around much in anything, his lineups included, no matter where he is in the standings. It might also be self-determining, in that some bad teams don’t improve precisely because they don’t change their lineups (see the 2007 Nationals, who used only 75 different lineups and got only 70 P-Wins), whereas some good teams might get that way through constant adjustments.

So then let’s look at La Russa. Perhaps he is simply more apt to respond to (or cause) adverse conditions by changing his lineups. For his career (we’ve excluded the 1986 season, when he managed half the season each for the White Sox and A’s):

That is odd, indeed, with almost no correlation whatsoever between the number of different lineups and wins. That is largely due to La Russa’s tenure in the American League, where, if anything, the more lineups he used, the more wins he had:

With those dominant Oakland teams, La Russa won pennants by using tons of combinations: The A’s had a staggering 128 different looks in 1990 and produced 99 P-Wins (and that was on the heels of the ‘89 team, with 112 lineups and 97 P-Wins).

What does all of this mean? Honestly, we’re at a loss. It could be that managing in the senior circuit has proved more of a challenge for La Russa when dealing with unexpected personnel changes. It could be a reflection of the talent and "bad luck" that the Cardinals have had over the years. And, of course, it may be simply be too small a sample to reliably tell us anything about how lineups correlate to wins. But if recent La Russa history is any indication, we’re still hoping that, for 2009, less — as in lineups — means more — as in wins.