UCB roundtable: Which Cardinal will have a big 2010?
[The UCB preseason roundtable continued over the weekend with a double play of questions from Mike Metzger of Stan Musial's Stance.]
1. Which Cardinal do you expect to have a big 2010 season and why? And you can’t pick AP, he has a big season every year.
2. There are millions of Cardinal fans across the country and around the world, but only a handful decided to write, either professionally or for fun, about the team. What compelled you to start writing about the Cardinals? Or for our professional brethren, what led you to a career in sports journalism?
1. Jason Motte will have a relatively big season. He had an abnormally high HR/FB rate in 2009 (especially given his home park) and healthy K/9 and K/BB (second-best among relievers) numbers. His BABIP against was slightly high at .308 despite having a low line-drive rate (16.7%). If La Russa gives him some opportunities, he’ll be the setup man and possibly the closer by the end of the season.
2. It’s ironic that we now write about the Cardinals, since when we began Fungoes back in 2004, we were still a Mets fan. The blog actually started as way to share our thoughts with some friends on the playoffs that year (the original name was “Fall Classic”). We loved writing about baseball so much that we simply kept going, retitling the blog and focusing more on the Cardinals. Having been cursed to follow the Mets, we found that blogging about the Cardinals was a way to escape our fate and enjoy a more salutary relationship with the game (and it probably allowed us to cover the team with a little more objectivity). We converted (or, as we like to say, reverted) to the Cardinals after they broke the Curse of Keith Hernandez, which we wrote about back in 2006.