If you live in St. Louis, you might have noticed the “Arches on Parade” around town: 10-foot-tall replica arch statues that commemorate the upcoming All-Star Game. We created a Google map for those of you locals — and any visitors coming to town for the event — who want to know where to find them.

View 2009 St. Louis All-Star Game Arches in a larger map

[Ed. note: Since the following is a list of our personal remembrances, we're going to temporarily suspend the editorial first-person and just go with the first person singular. Hope it doesn't throw you off too much.]

1. Listening to Kool and the Gang after the 1982 Championship
The Cardinals had just beaten the Brewers for the world championship. Images of Whitey Herzog embracing Keith Hernandez, Darrell Porter drinking his diet Pepsi and President Reagan calling to congratulate them all — ah, the good-old days and innocence of my youth. My little brother and I played the Kool and the Gang Cardinals Celebration 45 until our record player broke.

2. Getting Vince Coleman’s autograph, 1985
In August of 1985, Vince Coleman was well on his way to winning rookie of the year, having stolen 72 bases. But he hadn’t yet, so he was still on the signing-autographs-car-dealerships circuit, and my mom took my brother and me to meet the new Cardinal star at a dealership in Belleville. My mother never really accepted the fact that I was a Mets fan at the time, and I certainly didn’t tell Coleman that. I still remember his black velour track suit and huge chain with #29 hanging from it. Little did I know that he would one day be charged with endangerment for throwing a lit firecracker into a crowd of fans waiting for his autograph in the Dodger Stadium parking lot. Guess I should count my blessings.

3. Getting to the Cardinals-Expos game in the eighth inning with my dad, 1988
When I was young, getting to go to a baseball game was on par with birthday parties and trips to Six Flags. Box seats were roughly the equivalent of a trip to Disney World. That’s why, when my dad landed upon a pair of first-row box seats in front of the visiting team’s bullpen, which of course in the old park was just down third-base line, we had to go, even if that meant leaving for the game in the seventh inning (either he worked late, or I had my own ballgame), with the promise of only an inning or so of baseball. The Cardinals were up 2-0 when we left, but as we drove, we heard the Expos rallying on the radio. By the time we arrived at our seats, the game was tied, and it was looking like extras. Talk about validating our decision: The game went 14 innings, and my dad and I got to see nearly a full game’s worth of action. The Cardinals lost, but we had triumphed.

4. Andy Van Slyke refereeing flag football at FCA camp, ca. 1988-89
Like a lot of boys, I grew up reading about baseball in The Sporting News, and I loved their weekly quotes column, in which Andy Van Slyke was a regular. For example, once when asked if he died and could be reincarnated whom would he come back as, Van Slyke replied, "My wife. Then I could see how wonderful I am." This guy was clearly hilarious. So when I attended a Fellowship of Christian Athletes camp in Eureka, Mo., during high school and found out that Van Slyke, along with Todd Worrell, Ricky Horton and others would be there, I was thrilled. I had no idea Van Slyke would end up refereeing our flag football game. When I attempted to spot an inbounds throw, I dutifully consulted Van Slyke as to where I should stand. "Ah, just keep going," Van Slyke motioned nonchalantly, as I suspiciously took another 20 feet toward my opponents’ goal. How cool was this guy!, I wondered. At any rate, I should’ve been more confident — what teenager was going to challenge a Gold Glover’s decision?

5. Sneaking up to meet Ernie Hays, ca. 1990-91
In high school, my friends and I sneaked and fibbed our way to any place at Busch Stadium where were weren’t allowed to be, which was usually anywhere but the upper deck. After getting kicked out of the box seats, we got the wild idea to try to meet legendary organist Ernie Hays. After the game, we sweet-talked our way to his booth, where he received us like we were old pals. We asked him about the music he played for the various players, and I asked him if he remembered what he played for Keith Hernandez. "Let’s see," he said. "Ah, yes, it was Jethro Tull — Thick as a Brick." You just can’t get that kind of info from the internet.

6. Ray Lankford sombrero encounter, 1998
While my in-laws, my wife and I were driving to and from the Missouri wineries during a weekend visit, we listened to the ballgame on the radio. It was a classic Cubs-Cards tilt, and Ray Lankford was wearing the ignominious golden sombrero — 0-for-5 with five strikeouts — after nine innings. But he atoned with a game-tying two-run homer in the 11th, then hit a walkoff infield single to win it in the 13th. That evening, we went to dinner at Bar Italia (old location), when who should take a table next to us but Lankford and a pal. I leaned in to tell my father-in-law that Ray Lankford was "sitting right over there!" Hard of hearing, my father-in-law didn’t catch the latter part of my nuanced low talk and replied full-voiced, "You mean the guy who struck out five times today?!" In unison, his wife, my wife and I hushed him and said that he was "sitting right over there!" To which he replied innocently, "Why didn’t you tell me?"

7. Sitting through a sweltering game at old Busch, 2000
You’re not really a Cardinal fan until you’ve sat through a 100-degree afternoon game at the concrete doughnut of old Busch Stadium. My wife and I — at the time Cardinal and Met fans, respectively — sweated out the vintage Darryl Kile-Mike Hampton duel back on Sept. 2, 2000, which Kile and the Cardinals won 2-1 in the bottom of the ninth. I can’t honestly say that I remember Fernando Vina’s walkoff single off the cursed Armando Benitez because I was struggling to stay alive, going to the underpressured water fountain three sections away each inning to fill up our water bottles with warm water. I appreciated what a great game we’d witnessed — about five years later. (By the way, Wolfram Alpha says that it "only" got up to 91 degrees, but the dewpoint — a.k.a. air wetness — was a sultry 75.)

8. "Father’s Day" Game, 2002
I didn’t meet my wife at a baseball game, but we’ve had many formative experiences watching baseball. Like when we were at a Mets-Cards game in 2002: She excused herself and returned with a bag containing a gift for me. I opened it and pulled out a kid-sized Cardinal hat. I blockheadedly wondered why she bought me the wrong size, before I realized that it had a positive pregancy test attached to it, and that it was for our bambino-to-be. A better way to find out that I was a father I cannot imagine.

9. Game 5 of the 2006 Series and becoming a Cardinal fan again.
Baseball doesn’t get any better than being there when your team wins a championship, the important modifier being "your." For me, who had suffered under the yoke of Mets’ fanship for the 23 year prior, the Cardinals became my team again, breaking the Curse of Keith Hernandez, and I saw it in person with my wife and dear friends. I still remember the upper deck shaking as the Cardinals won, and later walking down Washington Ave. high-fiving strangers in cars.

10. Touching Keith Hernandez’s blazer, 2007
The Mets were in town for the 2007 home opener, which meant that my boyhood idol, Keith Hernandez, one of the Mets’ broadcasters, was somewhere in the ballpark. I was giddy with the mere knowledge that I could theoretically meet him. But I wasn’t prepared for what was to happen, when I, starting my job for MLB.com, rode the press elevator down to the ground floor to grab a pregame meal in the cafeteria. As the doors opened, an assembly of Cardinal legends stood in a u-shape, waiting for the elevator (waiting for me, it seemed!). Lou Brock, Bruce Sutter, Ozzie Smith, Bob Gibson — and Keith Hernandez: Baseball heaven, indeed! I forced myself off the elevator toward them — here was the moment I’d been waiting for all my life, to meet Hernandez and get his autograph, and not wanting to appear unprofessional (not to mention like a big dork), I simply couldn’t. But knowing that I needed something, some tangible memento from this encounter, I made my way into the crowd, targeted an opening next to Hernandez and bumped into him, patting the fabric of his royal-blue blazer shoulder while adding a suave, "Excuse me" and never looked back. You may ask what can be gained feeling a person’s material. A lot, let me tell you.

Do I want to be in St. Louis forever? Of course. Because that city has opened the door to me and my family like no other city is ever going to do … People from other teams want to play in St. Louis and they’re jealous that we’re in St. Louis because the fans are unbelievable … It’s not about the money. I already got my money. It’s about winning and that’s it. It’s about accomplishing my goal and my goal is to try to win. If this organization shifts the other way then I have to go the other way … It’s about being in a place to win and being in a position to win. If the Cardinals are willing to do that and put a team every year like they have, I’m going to try to work everything out to stay in this town. But if they’re not on the same page of bringing championship caliber to play every year, then it’s time for me to go somewhere else. Where? Somewhere else that I can win.

– Albert Pujols, Feb. 2009

It’s as though every few months, Cardinal fans and writers re-realize that Albert Pujols is signed only through 2011 (assuming the team picks up the option on his age-31 season), and they become a flock of chicken littles. Most recently, the venerable Bernie Miklasz posted a strong argument for keeping Pujols in the fold. Then Brian Burwell wrote from Pujols’s standpoint, taking a decidedly Yankeeish ("What have you done for me lately — as in yesterday?") view and demanding to “see some legitimate signs” that the team doesn’t suddenly repudiate the very idea of winning. But is the sky really falling?

As is often the case in the fever swamps of hype and fear, objectivity and data are the last to the discussion. The question of whether the Cardinals should re-sign/extend Pujols’s contract notwithstanding (we don’t think it’s as clear a decision as many do), are the Cardinals "in a place to win"? Ultimately, of course, that’s a question for Pujols to decide. But it may be possible to come to a conclusion more or less rationally.

To try to quantify competitiveness, we came up with four team-health metrics: Annual league ranking of its farm system, payroll, win-loss percentage and attendance. Obviously, the strength of a farm system impacts future possibility of success. Payroll can indicate how dedicated a team’s ownership is to winning, though, as several teams have shown (both high-payroll losers and low-payroll winners), a strong correlation is questionable. Certainly, win-loss percentage demonstrates a team’s actual success and can indicate near-term future success insofar as their improvement is gradual ("When a team improves sharply one season they will almost always decline in the next"). And attendance, while correlating with winning, shows the support of a team’s fan base — something Pujols himself points up as important.

Sources: Baseball America (via Derrick Goold), USA Today, Baseball-Reference.com

For the entirety of Pujols’s Cardinal career, the team has consistently ranked in the top half of MLB in payroll and win-loss percentage and in the top eight in attendance per game — this despite ranking 24th in market size (based on JC Bradbury’s 2004 research).

The major complaint regarding the team’s dedication to competitiveness that we’ve read and heard is the payroll. Granted, 2009 is the lowest that it has been in 10 years. But the 2009 season needs to be weighed in light of recent seasons, after the team returned from its unsustainably high #6 rank in 2005 to closer to its 10-year average of 11th the past two previous seasons. Again, it’s hard to complain about a team in the lower third of market sizes keeping its payroll in the upper third. Boston and New York are about the only places where payroll is consistently greener, and we’re guessing that the fan-loyalty factor cancels that out: Pujols may be able to make more money there, but can he name a player since Mickey Mantle that Yankee fans haven’t booed?

So with payroll, winning percentage and attendance all relatively constant since before Pujols even arrived on the big-league scene, the one variable has been the team’s amazing turnaround in its farm system. If anything, then, a franchise that has not only been committed to winning but has actually won, is currently in as good a position to continue that commitment as it has been during Pujols’s tenure.

We suspect that Pujols intuitively knows how good he has it as a St. Louis Cardinal. Now he has some data to back it up. Then again, data and 25 cents won’t even buy you a cup of coffee. So when push comes to shove, we’ll see how serious Pujols is about it not being about the money. As for that commitment to winning, he’s already got it.

When we wrote in April about Tony La Russa’s newfound penchant for strategic, sometimes en masse, late-inning defensive substitutions — we called them "fielding saves — we had no idea how regular the practice would become. Here we are nigh on July and TLR hasn’t slowed down, sending reinforcements into the infield and upgrading his outfield around the eighth inning. A big reason is that Skip "Howie Shanks" Schumaker is still playing nearly every day at second base, which, other than Chris Duncan actually being healthy enough to swing a bat (to say nothing of his .345 OBP — third-best on the club), is probably the most unlikely happenstance of the season. That means he can easily spell the less nimble (but, in our opinion, more adept that given credit) Duncan in left field, opening a role for the team’s more defensively inclined infielders, like Brian Barden and Joe Thurston to slide to his natural second base spot.

Tthe rules for a fielding save are:

• Player cannot be a starter at the position where he finishes
• Player must be in the field for the team’s final defensive out
• Player must enter the game with a tie or lead when he begins fielding (e.g., he can PH or PR then move to the field)
• Player must not commit an error at the new defensive position

As you might have noticed, a player can be credited with a fielding save regardless of the margin of the lead (unlike pitching saves), but in practice the Cardinals have had leads of more than four in only four of the 41 games in which they’ve tallied fielding saves.

So who has the most fielding saves and fielding save attempts so far?

Of the 67 games that the Cardinals have played, Skip Schumaker has attempted a fielding save in nearly half (33). And he’s been reliable in his old outfield spot (where he usually transfers), converting 32 of thost attempts (he made an error against the Cubs April 24). Joe Thurston and Barden, who typically join Schumaker in the deployment, account for the majority of the rest of the team’s fielding saves.

By now, we have a decent-enough sample to see if the strategy is paying off. By our count, the late shift has made only three errors. But errors are of course too blunt an object to measure fielding with, so let’s turn to Defensive-Efficiency Rate, the rate at which a defense turns batted balls into outs. Let’s break it down by thirds of the game — innings 1-3, 4-6 and 7-9:

The numbers are rough, since we had to hack the errors part of the equation (if anyone knows of a place to find fielding splits, please let us know), and since this data includes all games, not merely the ones in which a fielding save was in play. Still, it indicates that the team’s defense in late innings is more formidable than earlier in the game. Is it due to the practice of fielding saves? We’d say probably in no small part. Know, too, that La Russa has inserted his "hands" players when the team has been down a run, too, so those don’t show up based on our rules. We’d like to see the practice continue — not only is it fun to score, it also appears to have a salutary effect on the team’s ability to finish strong in close games.

Much recent debate has centered on the Cardinals’ need for an infusion of offensive firepower, particular in the infield. But until the teams brings in (or up) a new player, how can the team optimize the players it currently has?

Today we’ll focus on the Cardinal infield, sans Albert Pujols, whom we’ll pen in as the lone constant in the lineup. The principle players and their splits by handedness are as follows:

For the purposes of our analysis, we rated the various combinations without regard to defense, which admittedly is no small concern. Another not-insignificant note: We used players’ to-date stats; therefore, some sample size (see Joe Thurston’s split v. LHP) concern is in order. We used David Pinto’s inimitable lineup-analysis tool to run some OBP and SLG numbers for the various combinations of the team’s current infielders to see how many runs above or below league average they would generate. We used the following NL figures (as of 6/15):

So which is the best infield combination to play against righthanded pitchers?

Sadly, the best the Cardinals can do with their current group is 10 runs below average (for the season), or about one win. Clearly, the Schumaker-Ryan-Barden group is the best and should be playing every day against righties. After that, the difference is fairly neligible until you start including Khalil Greene in the equation, at which point any combination with K-Greene is bad. Why anyone is considering the bizarro Ozzie Smith for a move to the hot corner is beyond us.

So that’s a theoretical look. In practice, Tony La Russa has employed the Schumaker-Ryan-Barden combination three times (4/23, 5/22 and 5/30), including against one lefty. The Cardinals won all three of those games.

Okay, so what about the platoon against lefties?

Here the Cardinals seem to have a competitive advantage, to the tune of eight wins above average. However, it’s based largely on that dubious platoon split from Thurston. He’s only had 34 plate appearance vs. southpaws this season and 44 in his major-league career (in which he has an even more impressive .442/.568 line). Yet even in his minor-league career, in which he had 528 ABs against portsiders, he didn’t exhibit much of a platoon differential (.345 OBP vs. LHP, .358 vs. RHP), so it’s not entirely a farce this year. At any rate, for all their troubles against lefties this year — they are 14th in the league in OBP against them — the Cardinals can mitigate that with a correctly configured infield, which is to say, an infield that routinely includes Tyler Greene and Brendan Ryan. Though it goes against platoon-advantage precepts, righties Brian Barden and Khalil Greene have not done well against lefties and shouldn’t be part of the rotation (unless Barden is facing Sean Marshall).

In case you’re wondering, TLR has yet to use the Ryan-TGreene-Thurston trio this season, despite trying 49 different defensive arrangements (not including pitchers) in 64 games so far. So perhaps he hasn’t alighted on the magic combo yet but will.

Speaking of conjury, if the Cardinals were to magically land Mark DeRosa from the Indians (the trade object du jour), how would he impact each scenario? Versus RHP, he or Barden could play shortstop and with Schumaker would produce -0.031 R/G and -5.022 on the season, so DeRosa (.329/.404) doesn’t really offer much of an upgrade over Ryan (.320/.392). But against LHP (.417/.704), he’d be a real boon, combining with Ryan and Thurston to theoretically produce .958 runs above average per game and 155.2 per season (again, based on Thurston’s unlikely numbers). But first things first: TLR needs to make the most of the players he has, starting with the infield.