As the Cardinals look toward this offseason with an eye toward extending Albert Pujols’s contract, they may want to look at the payrolls for this year’s playoff teams to gauge whether such an expense (as the extension is sure to be) is necessary. After all, the Texas Rangers, Tampa Rays and Cincinnati Reds all have payrolls under the league average. Since 2001, here are the playoff teams with the lowest Adjusted Payroll+, the payroll based on league average (league average is 100):

The Cardinals’ 2010 payroll of $90,711,996 comes out to an adjusted payroll+ of 103. Since they won the World Series in 2006 (and prior to that), they’ve had a better-than-average payroll each of the four seasons, yet as pundits often claim, the Cardinals have "missed" the playoffs three of the last four years.

To this point, the onus has been on the Cardinals to somehow "prove" that they’re a competitive-enough team for Pujols, who once claimed that “it’s not about the money” but merely “being in a place to win and being in a position to win,” to condescend to remain with. But isn’t it also fair for the Cardinals to ask whether Pujols is worth it? After all, if the Cardinals have missed the playoffs three of the last four years, they’ve done so with Pujols on the team. How much has Pujols enabled them to make the playoffs, or more to the point, how much will he enable them to make the playoffs over the next few years? The question of competitiveness cuts both ways, and Pujols needs to look in the mirror before he makes demands about competitiveness.

None of this is to say Pujols isn’t a hugely valuable player or hasn’t been worth his salary to-date. But if the goal is to win championships — or, as we propose, simply make it to the championship crapshoot tournament — will having an albatross of Albert’s contract over the next five to seven years make that more or less likely? After all, the Cardinals haven’t exactly cashed in with Pujols and their relatively high payroll recently, and the NL Central Division winners the last two years (including the Cardinals in 2009) have had league-average or lower payrolls.

We’re all for keeping Pujols — to a point. Given the reality that keeping Pujols will mean a higher payroll, but that higher payrolls are necessary for getting to the playoffs, the Cardinals may want to fundamentally rethink the way their organization works. If they can’t consistently win with Pujols and an attendant high payroll, perhaps they should look at how other clubs are winning and take a new tack.

In the Cardinals’ 6-4 win over the Pirates Monday night, St. Louis had a baserunner score on a wild pitch but another run into the third out of an inning at third base. In a season that has elicited many questions, how much has the team’s baserunning factored into its disappointing record?

If the 2010 campaign has one representative image, it may be Albert Pujols getting thrown out on the bases. Earlier in the season, the Cardinals were among the worst in baseball in Equivalent Base Running Runs (29th in MLB on May 27). But as the year ends, they’ve improved to league average and are now 13th in MLB , despite a net negative of -1.9 EqBRR. (Curiously, one of the reasons for the turnaround was getting rid of Ryan Ludwick, who weighed down the Cardinals with a -4.3 EqBRR.)  Still, team baserunning isn’t what it was last year or during its 100-win seasons earlier in the decade:

In the seasons in which the Cardinals tallied the most wins — 2004, 2005 and 2009 — they were reliable baserunning teams. Even so, whereas sharp baserunning may have been a key to those successful seasons, it’s not necessarily a make-or-break factor. After all, the first-place and soon-to-be division champion Reds are worse than the Cardinals with -2.3 EqBRR.

Another way to assess baserunning is to check total outs on the bases (OOB). And to be sure, the Cardinals have made the second-most outs on the bases in the National League. Since OOB is a counting stat, though, it’s possible that one of the reasons that the Cardinals have made so many outs is that they’ve simply had a lot of baserunners. Indeed, the only NL team that has lost more runners on base is the Reds, the no.-1-hitting team in the league.

The only baserunning stat in which the Cardinals were truly awful in 2010 was stealing bases, which they accomplished with only 66% success, 13th in the senior circuit. Even then, we see that the Reds weren’t much better at 68%, and dismal teams like the Marlins, Brewers and Astros are all in the league’s top five.

So the mediocre baserunning can’t explain all of the team’s demise. Surely it hasn’t helped matters, but it’s likely only one of several factors that have worked in concert to bring down the Cardinals’ once-promising season. As the Reds have shown, if you want to be a careless baserunning team and still win, you’d better get on base a lot.

The votes from the United Cardinal Bloggers on the Cardinals best prospects at the end of the 2010 season, and we’ve compiled the results. To come up with an overall ranking, we took the average rank for ballots cast for the player then divided by the total number of ballots on which he was named. Steve Sommer of Play a Hard Nine appears to be the spokesman of the group; his was the only ballot that included all of the group’s aggregate picks. We encourage you to read each blogger’s report.

Is Ludwick "clutch"?

In his weekly chat Wednesday, Joe Strauss sneaked in a personal reflection about how "clutch" he found Ryan Ludwick to be as a Cardinal:

I’ll say this. Even when in a funk, Ludwick found a way to contribute in RBI situations. Coincidentally, the Cardinals have struggled badly in those situations since his departure. (Lud’ led the league in average w/RISP at the time of his trade.) The deal confused a team that was in first place at the time. When offensive help failed to arrive, it made it easier to rationalize the club’s spastic production.

Strauss and his colleagues have trotted out the "clutch" trope a lot this season, but does it even stand up on Strauss’s on terms with Ludwick? It’s true that in 2010, Ludwick has a .377 batting average with runners in scoring position and was even better with RISP and two outs, at .383. But go back a year and you’ll find that Ludwick batted only .323 with RISP and was decidedly unclutch with two outs, hitting a feeble .211. What gives? How could a guy be so awful in the clutch one year, then so money the next? The answer is simple: Anytime you split stats to yield a smaller sample, you’re going to see more variance. Further, correlation does not imply causation. Plenty of research on the subject of clutch hitting exists; w riters of all sorts — present company included — need only avail themselves of it.

Speaking of stats, Strauss came in for some deserved criticism for his proud ignorance in dismissing new ways of thinking about how to evaluate pitchers:

There increasingly appears a campaign to discredit pitcher wins as a consideration. They are considered by some as a derivative of "luck," much like RBI, in the estimation of some spreadsheet voters. Law didn’t give the vote to Lincecum. However, there is an increasingly strong smartest-guy-in-the-room element that frowns on more traditional numbers now assigned the pejorative "peripherals." Personally, I thought Wainwright the NL’s best pitcher in 2009 only to later be informed he was merely "luckier" than Lincecum. Who’da thunk?

It’s particularly rich that Strauss strikes a "smartest-guy-in-the-room" attitude while petulantly complaining about the type and dissing "spreadsheet voters." We guess the irony is lost on him. Or perhaps he’s so smart that he is above irony.

Meanwhile, the chief cause of Strauss’s insecurity, Keith Law, addresses the win stat in a calm, well-reasoned article (subscription required) that begins:

More than a century ago, it’s true the starting pitcher had more impact on whether or not his team won a game, and that may be why the "win" statistic for a pitcher was invented in the first place. When my good friend Old Hoss Radbourn started 73 games and completed all of them in 1884, perhaps his total of 59 wins meant something, since he threw every pitch, took nearly 300 turns at the plate, and might have even slipped something into the other teams’ Gatorade.

Will Strauss take the time to read it and open his mind, or will he continue to demagogue the issue in an effort to keep his followers ignorant and worshipful?

A meaningful milestone
It’s easy to criticize some stats for being meaningless, so we’ll offer up some stats that we think do have meaning, such as total bases. TBs has the additional benefit of being easy to understand — trust us, we ran it by our seven-year-old daughter, who was able to comprehend it. So as others celebrate Albert Pujols’s 10th 100+ RBI season, we commend him for his frabjous feat of 10 seasons of 300 or more total bases, which makes him only the eighth in history to do so:

We should remember that both Pujols and Barry Bonds played in the steroid era. But as long as we’re overlooking that small fact, we may as well celebrate using some worthwhile stats.

Molina out, Anderson in?
The season of slow-moving Yadier Molina has ground to a halt, according to Derrick Goold:

So Molina, in all probability, won’t be playing any more this season after he underwent an MRI on his right knee Thursday in St. Louis.

With the Cardinals out of playoff contention, Molina’s shutdown is a perfect opportunity to see what directionless prospect Bryan Anderson can do. Rather than platoon him with Matt Pagnozzi, whom the club probably doesn’t need to see perform on the big-league stage, seeing as he is likely destined for backup status next year, Anderson should get the rest of the starts this year. The team has something to gain — a possible showcase of his talents — and nothing to lose, except a few more games.

Why wait to dump Lopez?
That’s a question that Bernie Miklasz and others have asked. It’s really a simple answer, in our opinion: Hope and expectation that he could produce. Given Lopez’s career numbers and 2009 season, it was reasonable that he would regress to his norms. Most people recognize the futility of arbitrary data points — excepting Miklasz, who has a bad habit of slicing time periods to fit his hypotheses — so it was right to wait for Lopez to produce. The problem was that, whether due to injury or personal issues, he never did. If the behavioral problems were that much of a concern, the the team wouldn’t have signed him in the first place. Players aren’t automatons, so just because the Flip experiment didn’t work doesn’t mean it was a bad experiment.

Fish-on-fish violence
Carp allows slam; Cards blanked by Fish — MLB.com

Metaphor alert
Cards gain steam on Reds by bashing Friars — MLB.com

His back was so bad it had its own body parts with injuries
Padres’ Hairston back on DL with leg injury — AP

Never scratch with a migraine
Twins’ Hardy scratched with migraine — AP

"I remember that guy!"
RHP Brackman recalled by Yankees — AP

Bottom stories of the day

• Cards score. . . but so do Bucs — Stltoday.com
• Cardinals field familiar lineup today — Stltoday.com
• Jack Clark pulls out as FSM analyst — Stltoday.com

Of Stars and Scrubs
Baseball Prospectus’s Eric Seidman weighed in on the Cards’ collapse this week, explaining that "The Cardinals are widely considered to have a stars and scrubs roster." He laments that "Both Pujols and Holliday are legitimately great and Rasmus is looking more like an offensive force every day, but aside from those three, nothing in the lineup stands out." This sounds like an accurate and useful analysis, but on second glance, is it really that unique of a situation? Depending on the definition, "Stars and scrubs" could describe just about any team except the Yankees. For mid-to-small-market clubs like the Cardinals, "stars and scrubs" is more like a recipe for success rather than a disaster waiting to happen, as Seidman infers. Don’t believe us? How would you describe the main players on the 2006 championship team?

Was the team that left spring training any worse than that club? The reality is that the Cardinal "scrubs" didn’t play to their expectations, which were certainly above replacement level, whether because of injury, bad "luck" or simply a down year. It may not have been a "perfect storm," but the team had several different elements come together to sink their season. The original composition of the team wasn’t one of them.

The Cardinals’ farm system may not offer the jewels it once did, though we’d say that Jaime Garcia and David Freese were pretty lustrous recent plucks from the collection, but we found that in coming up with our top seven prospects as part of the United Cardinal Bloggers’ September project fans have some reasons to hope. In devising the list, we placed a premium on a prospect’s major-league readiness (closer the better), age (younger the better), position (prefer rightward on defensive spectrum and starting pitchers) and recent performance. Note: In our original list, we left off Zack Cox (since added).

Others receiving consideration:

• Allen Craig: Posted his second-consecutive AAA season of .400 wOBA but failed to translate at major-league level (.252) in limited action in 2010; already 25 years old
• Mark Hamilton: Posted best hitting numbers in organization at AAA in 2010, with .389/.585/.413 OBP/SLG/wOBA but age and position limit
• Fernando Salas: Dominant K rate (11.1) in limited innings at Memphis and St. Louis (8.31) in 2010; still hasn’t had enough action to warrant confidence in projection
• Eduardo Sanchez: Great ERA (1.67) hid ballooning walk rate (4.00 BB/9) but 3.42 FIP in 27 IP at Memphis is still good