***Official 2015 STL Cardinals Thread III.***

[BigRedChief]

2011 World Series Championship
2012 NLCS. One win from another WS appearance.
2013 World Series. Two wins from another World Series Championship
2014 NLCS. Three wins from another WS appearance
2015 Central Division title. Won 100 games. Lost in the NLDS.

• Made the postseason 11 times in the last 15 seasons.
• Only 1 losing season since 2000.
• Reached the World Series 4 times since 2004 and won as many championships (two) the past eight seasons as it did from 1965 to 2005.
• Made the NLCS 9 times including the last 4 years 2011-2014
• Three million attendance? Take it to the bank.
• 65 post season wins since 2004. 22+ wins more than any other team.

[ChiefsCountry]

Can you guys please put the Cubs out of it. I'm tired of the national sports media slobbering their knob.

[New World Order]

Time for cards to crash and burn.

[Pasta Little Brioni]

Originally Posted by O.city

4 years 70 mil. Easy pgm

That wouldn't be....terrible to be honest

[Pasta Little Brioni]

Originally Posted by New World Order

Time for cards to crash and burn.

Oh knows they've only won a billion playoff games the last decade plus!! The depression!

[Pasta Little Brioni]

Originally Posted by ChiefsCountry

Can you guys please put the Cubs out of it. I'm tired of the national sports media slobbering their knob.

They are good...real good. Would be a worthy opponent to take us out. Those Giant teams and Babe Ruth Ishikawa though...

[DJ's left nut]

Originally Posted by O.city

Alot of it looks like the typical Mabry approach to me dj. Let it travel as far as you can before commiting. He never gets to one out in front of the plate.

That's absolutely the case, which is why I say they've steered into the skid with Heyward.

Heyward's spent the last 3 years trying to shorten his swing and close what he perceived to be a hole on the inside of his swing. I swear it looks like he's done nothing but fence drills for the last 36 months (and seriously, fence drills are ****ing reeruned). In the process he's cut down his strike outs but at way too high a cost. He's absolutely destroyed his power potential. To some degree, that even limits his OBP because pitchers will attack him inside the zone now. Power hitters draw more walks because guys are intimidated to come into the zone against them - not so with Heyward.

Then when you pair him with a guy like Mabry that encourages and reinforces those self-destructive tendencies he's had, it absolutely wrecks his ability to be a true difference maker offensively.

The worst thing you could have done with Heyward was pair him with a hitting coach that told him he was right to be doing what he'd been doing the last couple of years.

[DJ's left nut]

Originally Posted by Pasta Giant Meatball

They are good...real good. Would be a worthy opponent to take us out. Those Giant teams and Babe Ruth Ishikawa though...

Yeah, I can live with losing to this Cubs team. It sucks they have to be the Cubs, but that's a team that's built itself up the right way and has created a !@#$ing monster.

There's no shame in losing to those guys.

Losing to the !@#$ing Giants in 2014 and 2012, OTOH, will always bug the hell out of me. It really does make me wonder if this era of Cardinals baseball won't be looked back on similarly to the Braves of the 90s - lots of chances but just always coming up a tick short and losing to teams they were better than.

[jd1020]

Originally Posted by O.city

4 years 70 mil. Easy pgm

Why on earth would Heyward accept something like that?

He was a top 10 NL WAR player at age 26. He'll be getting a nice "mega contract". Pablo Sandoval just got a 5/95 contract. Heyward is looking at 100+ if not 150+.

[jd1020]

Originally Posted by ChiefsCountry

Can you guys please put the Cubs out of it. I'm tired of the national sports media slobbering their knob.

That wont stop if the Cubs lose. They were the 3rd best team in baseball with 4 starting rookies.

[Hootie]

Heyward is going to get nearly $200M you guys are kidding yourselves

[New World Order]

If you're going to spend that kind of money you might as well just throw it at cespedes.

[DJ's left nut]

Originally Posted by Hootie 2.0

Heyward is going to get nearly $200M you guys are kidding yourselves

Probably.

It's hard to know how teams are pricing defensive win shares these days; it doesn't seem like they're nearly as willing to pay for defense as they are for offense. That's especially true when the defense is coming from a corner OF rather than CF.

But the contract I'm looking at is Jacoby Ellsbury. Like Heyward, Ellsbury showed intermittent power but good OBP skills. Like Heyward, he showed he can play a credible CF but may be more suited for a corner. Ellsbury had the 'gamer' reputation and a championship on his resume, but he was also 4 years older.

I'd say you start with the Ellsbury contract and you'll probably have to add about 10% due to age and inflation.

Ellsbury was at 7/$153 million. Plus 10% gets you to 7/$180 million. Now that's a slightly higher AAV than Stanton, which I doubt anybody's going to want to pay but to get to the $180 million figure that an agent is likely to target (so as to best Ellsbury) without surpassing the $25 million AAV that Stanton got, you'll probably end up having to put an 8th year on there.

So 8/$180 seems like a likely outcome to me. It will probably have a fairly substantial backloading to it with a player opt-out after 4 years.

$15/$16/$20/$23/$24/$26/$27/$28

AAV of about $22.5 million; less than Stanton's but a higher total number than Ellsbury's. Heyward can opt out after 4 but with the bulk of the deal in the last 4 years of it, there's incentive for him not to do so as well, thus protecting the Cards a little bit if they wanted it longer term but giving him an option to cash in huge if he outplays the deal and wants to re-enter the FA market at 30 yrs old. The smaller amounts up front give the Cards some buffer while they wait for their new TV contract to start.

Seems like a pretty likely outcome to me.

[New World Order]

Originally Posted by Pasta Giant Meatball

Oh knows they've only won a billion playoff games the last decade plus!! The depression!

Can I have my moment please?

[DJ's left nut]

P.S. That's based an a faulty premise - notably, that $153 million plus $15 million = $180 million. In other words, I can't ****ing count but I put enough effort into the goddamn post that I'm not going to delete it now that I've re-read it.

Those numbers still seem right to me, it just takes an even larger premium over what Ellsbury got (which is already a damn albatross of a deal). Perhaps I'm overshooting by about $10 million there though. Maybe a $21 million AAV with each of those years reduced by about $1.5 million?

[O.city]

Originally Posted by jd1020

Why on earth would Heyward accept something like that?

He was a top 10 NL WAR player at age 26. He'll be getting a nice "mega contract". Pablo Sandoval just got a 5/95 contract. Heyward is looking at 100+ if not 150+.

It would allow him to cash in again, similar to greinke. I doubt they do it as the talk of that has died down though