With his hot start to 2010 in which he has five home runs and a team-leading .453 wOBA, Colby Rasmus is reminding fans of another Cardinal centerfielder, Jim Edmonds, who also generated a lot of runs for the Redbirds. Rasmus recalls Edmonds in another way: A high percentage of his plate appearances are Three True Outcomes, as Matthew Leach noted earlier in the week.

So where does the young Rasmus rank in the league at the moment? (Our formula for TTO% is =(HR+SO+BB)/(PA-HBP).)

For his career, Edmonds has a 39.5% TTO rate, which puts him 11th on the active players list (min. 2500 PAs):

Noticing Drew on the list made us wonder about how many other Cardinal centerfielders have been TTO guys. Here are the franchise’s all-time TTO leaders (min. 1000 PAs):

Joining Edmonds are Ray Lankford, Ryan Ludwick Drew, Rabbit Glaviano and Andy Van Slyke, all of whom played centerfield at some point for the Cardinals.

If Rasmus continues his high TTO rate, he’ll be in good company. Though he doesn’t at first glance seem like "the type," his minor-league rate — 34.9% — indicates that he might indeed follow in the footsteps of Edmonds, Lankford, et al.

I hit .100. It’s not like I can hit. Throw the ball down and away. Throw a slider, whatever it is. It’s different if you’re Carlos Zambrano, Adam Wainwright, Dan Haren, guys that can hit. You throw 95 miles per hour, chucking balls up high, never mind you can’t control it. Come on. He’s missing by three feet. It’s not right.

… I know he didn’t try to hit me. But there’s no need to do that. If you’re going to throw the ball, throw the ball down and away. That’s what I did to him. I’m not firing balls up there. I’m not going to throw it up there. There’s no need to.

… It didn’t hurt at all. I was so (bleeped) off. I was trying to control my emotions. Any time you throw a ball up, especially to a pitcher, it’s unacceptable.

– Chris Carpenter on Edwin Jackson hitting him with a pitch

He wasn’t throwing at him. I know that. But the fact is he was throwing up. That’s dangerous. If you can’t control it, then pitch down.

– Tony La Russa

For being 6′6" and 230 pounds, Carpenter sounds awfully small. Let’s get the facts straight:

• Carpenter was hit with a pitch that he claims "didn’t hurt at all."
• He was hit on his non-pitching arm.
• Carpenter crouches in his stance and was — understandably, as someone who doesn’t get a lot of plate appearances — slow to get out of the way.
• He and his manager, notoriously sensitive about inside pitching, admit that Jackson wasn’t intentionally throwing at him.
• There’s no rule that gives a pitcher special rights to avoid being hit by a pitch.
• Carpenter himself has hit a batter 65 times in his career.

Given that reality, the proper response would be to simply lick your wound and take your base like a man. Instead, indignant that anyone would dare pitch him inside, Carpenter yelled back at Jackson and generally acted as though someone had insulted his mother.

On the other hand, Carpenter has evidentally never hit a pitcher himself, so it’s possible that he doesn’t others to a standard that he isn’t willing to abide himself. Still, coming from one of the league’s best pitchers, his complaint came across as petty — after all, he can’t expect everyone to have the same pinpoint command or even approach that he has — and getting hit by pitches is part of the game. Jackson was due up in the third inning, so Carpenter could have given him a taste of his own medicine. Instead, Carpenter groused and later took a cheap shot at Kelly Johnson, running at him on a double-play grounder. Call Jackson’s inside pitch what you want, but it wasn’t a cheap shot.

When the benches emptied because of Carpenter’s admittedly "unprofessional" non-slide, Carpenter merely walked away from the buildup. If you can’t stick around to fight for yourself, you probably shouldn’t go around instigating people. When you realize that what you did was bush-league, take responsibility and round your teammates back into the dugout with a "my bad, guys." Don’t make other guys fight your battle for you.

Lost in all the bellyaching over the HBP was the fact that Carp pitched one of the best games of his career. He tied his 18th-best in FIGS:

Carpenter is known for getting chippy on the mound, and he obviously channels his competitive spirit into productive performances. But there’s something particularly unattractive about an elite-level player and a manager who are prone to wussiness. It’s a good thing Chris Carpenter pitches in the NL or he’d he completely out of touch with reality.

With Kyle Lohse on the mound tonight, the Cardinals have their #1 starter going — #1, that is, if you’re talking about finesse. So far in 2010, Lohse has the lowest K/9 and BB/9 rates on the rotation. And consequently, he also has the worst expected FIP, prone as he is to the vagaries of balls in play:

Even though it’s early, don’t expect Lohse to significantly upgrade his strikeout rate as the season wears on, given his recent rates:

With the exception of the slight uptick in both K and BB rates last year (though over only 117 2/3 innings), Lohse has been on a steady decline, becoming more and more of a pitch-to-contact pitcher. That works for Carpenter and Wainwright, except that they can also dial up a strikeout when needed.

We mentioned the other day that Lohse was the Ryan Franklin of the starting rotation. For the same reason, 2010 could be a long season for both of them.

After a 20-inning game in which Tony La Russa continually outthought himself, Adam Wainwright simplified things for the Cardinal skipper, sparing a national TV audience the embarrassing sophistry of the night before.

In throwing a complete game, Wainwright provided just what the trainer ordered, not only for La Russa, but for the bullpen. He threw the most innings for a starter following a 20-inning game since Tom Seaver gave 8 1/3 innings to the cause of La Russa’s White Sox on May 9, 1984. The Astros’ Ken Forsch threw the last complete game following a 20-inning game, though his was a day after an off day. In case you’re wondering, the Mets’ Tracy Stallard has to hold the record for worst followup performance, getting only one out the day after the Mets’ 23-inning affair in 1964.

And Wainwright tossed not only quantity but quality innings. The 66-FIGS start tied the third-best of his career, which he also equaled in his previous start:

It was Met manager Jerry Manuel who perhaps blew the game by going with conventional wisdom. After lefty Pedro Feliciano struck out righthanded-batting Felipe Lopez in the eighth inning, Manuel replaced him with righty Ryota Igarashi, who surrendered the game-winning home run to Ryan Ludwick. The righthanded-hitting Ludwick actually has a pronounced reverse platoon advantage: He hits righties better than lefties. Other notes:

• Unless La Russa overthinks the situation, he’ll keep Ludwick in the no.-2 spot in the order, where he been getting on-base at a .500 clip so far.
• Wainwright’s release point was lower and more to the side than it’s been in a while. He’s not three-quarter-arming it, but perhaps that inch change is key.
• Wainwright’s swinging-strike rate has been on the rise since 2007:
  2007: 7.7%
  2008: 8.5%
  2009: 8.9%
  2010: 10.8%
• Wainwright is eighth in the league in xFIP with 3.14.

Notes from the comeback win over the Mets Friday night:

• Chris Carpenter was atypical in two ways: He struck out a lot of batters — he earned double-digit Ks for the 13th time in his career — and he walked a lot. He allowed three walks in only three games last year, but they were all at the end of the season (Aug. 22, Sept. 2 and Sept. 25), and that doesn’t even include playoff game in which he walked four. Has he carried something over into the new season? It’s hard to complain about his performance, when he allowed only one line-drive hit, but the trend in walks is curious.
• Carpenter had 10 Ks but half were of the eighth- and ninth-place hitters, so perhaps the total is deceiving.
• With six total bases, a walk and only one out, Felipe Lopez created 4.7 runs by himself.
• Lopez has now started more games than Freese and Schumaker, and he deserves to be in the lineup every day. It would be interesting if he started 150 games but no more than half at any one position.
• David Wright and David Freese both made clutch defensive plays at the hot corner.
• When reliever Fernando Nieve entered the game, he probably thought he was going to face the eighth-place hitter and then some replacement-level pinch hitter. Instead he faced two regulars, one of whom was Matt Holliday.
• Why didn’t the Mets use their top LOOGy, Pedro Feliciano?
• Freese had a couple of terrific at-bats against Perez, but he benefited from some home scoring on his grounder to Jose Reyes. It should’ve been ruled an E6, since his throw was offline, and Freese isn’t that fast.
• When Carlos Beltran returns, the Mets will probably be a good fielding team, what with Wright and Francoeur, who made an excellent running grab in the rightfield corner. Jason Bay and Mike Jacobs keep them from being great, however.
• When La Russa summoned Matt Holliday to pinch hit, why didn’t Jerry Manual bring in his theoretically best reliever, Francisco Rodriguez? It was probably going to be the highest-leverage situation of the game (4.24), so why not use your best? It looks bad when you lose a game that you led in the seventh inning with your best two relievers on the bench.
• Blake Hawksworth pitched well despite appearances. He struck out two, including Bay with runners in scoring position.
• Ryan Franklin still has not struck out a batter, and we saw what happens when you rely on balls in play to go your way: sometimes they don’t. The Cardinals aren’t always going to have a three-run cushion to roll the dice with.