[The United Cardinal Bloggers offseason roundtable discussion has begun. Bill Ivie led of I70 Baseball off with the following question.]

Albert Pujols is no longer a Cardinal and has moved on to greener (see what I did there?) pastures.  Put your General Manager hat on for me and tell me what moves you feel need to be made if the team desires to be competitive in 2012.  Is there a key free agent or specific position that Mo should attempt to upgrade?  Should he stand pat?  Anything other than reacquiring Pujols is on the table.

Part of the wisdom of re-signing Lance Berkman was to provide insurance for just this scenario, so the pieces rotate into place: Berkman plays first, Allen Craig goes to right field. That of course still leaves a firepower gap for the offense, which was the team’s strong suit in 2011. Happily, for whatever productivity loss the team incurs with Craig, it gains in payroll, so the Cardinals could afford to buy some offense.

The open spots then are shortstop and second base, with the possibility of centerfield. The rotation of Wainwright, Carpenter, Garcia, Lohse and Westbrook has some high highs and low lows, but overall is actually set up better than 2011’s was. We’re not convinced that a secondary LOOGy should be high on the shopping list, given their relatively low replacement value (for example, take Arthur Rhodes — please!).

Going outside the organization, the Cardinals might end their shortstop revolving door by bucking up for Jose Reyes, though his 2011 OBP of .384 belies his .341 career average. The price tag obviously matters here. Maybe it’s the former Mets fan in me, but Reyes would revive some of that top-of-the-lineup thrill from the Herzog years. And if Cardinal fans can embrace lifetime Astro Lance Berkman, surely they can warmly receive Reyes, right? Otherwise, we agree with Malcolm that Drew would make lot of sense at shortstop, but clearly Arizona, who extended his contract earlier this year,  thinks so too. We’re not sure Mozeliak has any more high-talent ne’er-do-wells to offer in trade. Thinking outside the box a bit, Carlos Beltran (yes, the hated Beltran and another ex-Met) would be a fascinating late-career short-timer (had the fourth-highest WAR among RFs last year). The only problem would be positional, since he probably couldn’t return to center.

Certainly finding a new manager is a important, but the pool of would-be managers isn’t as scarce as top players, so we would actually deprioritize it. And given that the team likely wouldn’t need to spend as much on its manager as it did La Russa (~$5 million), they could use the extra payroll on the field.

Source: FanGraphs

With the local and national media pouncing on Tony La Russa for mismanaging the Cardinals to a Game 5 loss last night, we’re actually for once content to let them do the covering (though it’s worth noting that many of those who only days earlier heralded the Cardinal micromanager as genius are just as cognitively dissonant as their hagiographied subject). As observers are wont to say, ultimately the players win or lose games, and so a player — Albert Pujols — deserves some of the blame for the Game 5 fiasco.

After all, TLR wasn’t the only person on the team who suffered vapor lock. What kind of player a) calls his own hit-and-run b) then doesn’t even swing at the next pitch, hanging his running teammate out to dry and c) finally, when confronted, churlishly asks “Is that a problem?”

Well, for starters, you foolishly cost the team a baserunner in the seventh inning of a tie game. You tell us.

To that point in the game, it was the Cardinals’ fourth-biggest loss of win-probability behind only Matt Holliday’s third-inning GIDP, Craig’s strikeout with runners on second and third in the fifth, and Holliday’s bases-loaded groundout in the fifth. But it was different from those plays in a crucial way: It could have been prevented.

Is that a problem?

Former player Doug Glanville, in defending Pujols’s prerogative to call his own play, nonetheless wrote:

This is where I scratch my head. Maybe the pitch was unhittable, but if you take the time to call your own hit-and-run, then as a hitter my next thought would be, “I need to throw this bat at the ball if need be, and if nothing else, make Mike Napoli blink for just a split second.”

As Allen Craig observed, “It was a hit-and-run and an unhittable pitch. It was a perfect play for them.” A perfect play — for the opposition. Is that a problem?

If Pujols had stopped to think about it, he might’ve realized that the chance of seeing another strike after Ogando’s first-pitch get-ahead strike and given how the Rangers are pitching him — Ron Washington’s pitchers have intentionally walked him four times — was infinitesimal. But that’s Pujols’s achilles heel: His competitive desire often overwhelms his rational side, and he eschews smart choices in favor of reckless ones. In some ways, it’s a refreshing vestige of the breezy and brash character of childhood pickup games, but it manifests itself as folly in a World Series game.

As Glanville makes clear, in many cases it makes sense to give players leeway to make decisions about positioning and other on-the-spot events. That’s why, in additional to his tortured explanation about his eighth-inning managing, TLR’s claim that Pujols doesn’t have special privileges is also ridiculous. When Allen Craig, the betrayed baserunner, returned to the dugout, La Russa made him give an account for what happened. Did La Russa similarly question Pujols — the one who actually messed up the play? Furthermore, why did La Russa not initially admit to Pujols calling the play himself? The fact is clear that Pujols does indeed have special privileges, and saying otherwise doesn’t make it not so. Can La Russa at least be honest with fans, who after all aren’t as stupid as he takes us to be?

Make no mistake: Pujols is and has been the most productive player in the game, in no small part because of his feel for the game, and deserves that on-field trust. But Pujols, for all of his accomplishments and instinctive knowledge, has a longstanding pattern of abusing that decision-making trust. Even though he errs on the side of aggressiveness — which was the case in Game 5 — he still costs the team.

Pujols gets a pass on this behavior during the regular season as an understandable “cost of doing business” — Albert being Albert, in which case you take the considerable good he does with the frustrating bad. But when it matters — like say, in the World Series — he needs to be called to account. For all of the dozens of articles properly critical of La Russa’s mental boners and subsequent prideful sophistry to explain them, few writers have pointed to another momentous play in Game 5, Pujols’s half-hearted audible. La Russa doesn’t need to strip Pujols of his freedom, but he needs to make his superstar face the music and be subject to critical analysis — including from the manager — if for no other reason than that it can make him a better player. Even the best in any occupation — perhaps especially the best — need to be questioned.

Pujols may return to the Cardinals next year. It would be a shame if part of his Cardinal legacy was that his considerable talent combined with considerable pride to run the Cardinals out of a potential comeback in Game 5. Hopefully in Game 6, Pujols’s habit of overreaching won’t be a problem.

The Texas Rangers and St. Louis have plenty of things in common, not the least of which is their top-flight offenses. But one attribute that certainly distinguishes them is their ballparks: The Rangers play in the hitter-friendly confines of Arlington, and the Cardinals reside in a relative pitchers paradise in Busch Stadium. The World Series already is a microcosm of the environments: In two games played so far in St. Louis, the teams combined for eight runs, and in two in Arlington, they have tallied 27. Here’s how the ballparks compare since 2006, Busch Stadium’s inaugural season, by runs and home runs (according to ESPN.com; Park Factor compares the rate of stats at home vs. the rate of stats on the road. A rate higher than 1.000 favors the hitter. Below 1.000 favors the pitcher):

Matt Kemp led all National League players in 2011 with a sabermetric MVP score of 15.13 and is our pick for the Baseball Bloggers Association’s Stan Musial Award for most valuable player. Based on his combined Wins Above Replacement and Win-Probability Added, the Dodger centerfielder edged Ryan Braun of the NL Central Division champion Milwaukee Brewers. Cardinal Lance Berkman finished sixth:

Despite Matt Kemp’s Dodgers not coming anywhere near the postseason, the National League’s playoff teams were well represented, with seven of the top 10 (and eight of the top 11) players playing in October. Speaking of playoff teams, the Cardinals had three — a modern-day “MV3″ — in the top 20. Beyond their top three, here’s how the rest of the team stacked up:

Interestingly enough, the team’s worst three performers — Trever Miller, Brian Tallet and Ryan Franklin — were no longer with the team by the end of the year.