As part of the United Cardinal Bloggers’ final project of the year , we present our top five Cardinal stories of 2010:

5. McGwire returns: For good or ill, Tony La Russa proved that bringing back Mark McGwire was worth dividing Cardinal Nation. In doing so, he embarrassed himself and the organization and put McGwire in a limelight in which he again showed that being honest was more difficult than hitting a baseball out of a ballpark.
4. Ryan traded: We opted to include the Brendan Ryan trade instead of the Ryan Ludwick trade because of its organizational significance. Whereas the Cardinals traded Ludwick for sound baseball reasons — they had depth at corner outfield, they needed starting pitching, they weren’t going to re-sign Ludwick, anyway — the Ryan trade represented more than simply trying to upgrade at shortstop: It was the culmination of La Russa’s impatience with young headstrong players (including Colby Rasmus) and the tipping point for the organizational shift away from knowledge-based decision-making toward a more style-driven approach to roster composition, as a controlling and parochial cult-of-TLR-personality reasserts its dominance.
3. Holliday signs: What bigger way to reaffirm to Albert Pujols the team’s commitment to winning than outbidding the Boston Red Sox (by a lot) to sign the premier batter on the free-agent market? The contract was noteworthy in that it was not only the richest in club history but also was an early signal of the team’s quiet return to the Jocketty Way of assembling a team — trade-and-sign — as well as a possible crack in the Mozeliak foundation, as he succumbed to the Scott Boros machine.
2. Jaime Garcia has best Cardinal rookie season since Albert Pujols: For a pitcher who entered spring training as a dark-horse candidate competing with Rich Hill and Kyle McClellan merely to make the big-league club, Jaime Garcia’s third-place finish in a competitive NL rookie of the year voting was the team’s biggest success story in 2010. He posted the most WAR for a Cardinal rookie (2.8) since Albert Pujols in 2001 and for a Cardinal pitcher since Rick Ankiel in 2000.
1. Cardinals don’t win the Central: For a team with so much promise — and, with all due respect to the Reds, such little competition — heading into the season, the fact that the Cardinals didn’t win the NL Central division title was the biggest failure story of the year. After all, countless sub-stories all summer-long and into the winter dealt with determining what was going wrong with the team, including lack of “clutch” hitting, bad baserunning, bad chemistry, off years, bad bench, etc. They weren’t as bad as many hand-wringers think — they emulated their 2009 Pythagorean record at 91-71 — but injuries and organizational wrongheadedness, from the front office’s inability to address the injuries to the uniformed staff playing headgames and the wrong personnel, undid the team’s chances and left a dyspeptic air on the season — and the next.

Honorable mentions:

• Momentary Reds rivalry
• Ryan Ludwick trade
• Adam Wainwright’s back-to-back Cy Young runner-up seasons
• Rasmus-La Russa kerfuffle
• Cardinals fail to extend Pujols’s contract

On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love sent to me

Seven years a’ signing

Six grands a’ slamming,
Five shining stars,

Four hundred home runs,
Three clutch men,
Two golden gloves,
And a vote for the finest rookie.

On the sixth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me

Six grands a’ slamming

Five shining stars,

Four hundred home runs,
Three clutch men,
Two golden gloves,
And a vote for the finest rookie.

On the fifth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me

Five shining stars,

Four hundred home runs,
Three clutch men,
Two golden gloves,
And a vote for the finest rookie.

On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me

Four hundred home runs,

Three clutch men,
Two golden gloves,
And a vote for the finest rookie.