You guys will probably think I am nuts, I am, and I do not know the rest of the scenario but I do not know why we could not move Arenado and Goldschmidt put Walker and Gorman at the corners, put Winn at SS and Donovan at 2cd unless we have someone that I do not know of that would be better. I know there are many other holes. Can we fill those pitching and outfielder holes after the season?
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Arenado and Goldy both have no trade clauses. They are going to want to go to contenders and get new contracts to okay the trade.
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They need to absolutely move Goldschmidt. I said so after last year. This team wasn't a real contender, and his value would never be higher.

When they DFA'd Cabrera today they officially closed the book on the Tommy Pham trade. The three players they got in return produced -0.9 WAR.
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Quote the oof gif. Yeesh.
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Thats probably true about 99% of all our trades. It’s so embarrassing. I never thought I’d see 70’s Cardinal baseball again.
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Yet there is some kind of feeling of confidence that we will get a viable return for Flaherty or Montgomery. I have no faith in Mo to not fuck this up.
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the only bright side is these trading deadline deals are usually heavily favored to the non-competing team. So Mo has room to make a bad trade and maybe we can still get like an off season trade value.
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Any contenders need a catcher? I know they never would do it, but it’s clear they made a mistake with Contreras.
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You think a team looking for a catcher is going to trade for Contreras and his contract after the Cardinals have been bad mouthing his ability to catch publicly all year and saying he was calling for pitches that weren't even in the pitchers repertoire?

:-)
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In 'defense' of the Cardinals, the problem isn't that they badmouthed him, it's that he fucking sucks at playing Catcher.

And that was readily apparent BEFORE the Cardinals signed him.

Ask yourself how many veteran Cs with solid offense and strong defensive skills change teams. I can think of one over the last 30 odd years - Pudge Rodriguez.

Teams don't let their catchers go if they can call games, handle the staff and provide average offensive production. They keep those guys.

When the Cubs made essentially ZERO effort to retain Contreras, that should've been a MASSIVE red flag. Then again, the 90 games they played against Contereras over the previous 6 years probably should've been as well and yet here we find ourselves...

Because Mozeliak is just really bad at this. In a career absolutely littered with hideous mid-market FA deals, the Contreras deal will EASILY go down as his worst. Worse than Leake, worse than Cecil or Miller, even worse than Fowler.

And it was yet another completely unforced error. He just isn't good at this job.
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Oh, and the Cardinals didn't say (nor did any of their own reporters) that he was calling pitches that his guys didn't have. It was a NYY reporter that broke that.

I am curious, however, what the mechanics of that would even BE in the pitch-com era. How does one call for a curveball to a guy that doesn't have one - pitch-com, to my knowledge, is tailored to the individual starter.

Maybe Mozeliak got the Freeware version so he could save DeWitt a few bucks...
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How quickly we have forgotten about the catcher you really wanted in the offseason, unless by "change teams" you are referring to just leaving in FA. Realmuto, aswell.
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I mean FA, yes.

There have been some good catchers traded when the team just CAN'T afford to keep them. And of course those guys have substantial market value.

As opposed to...well, that guy the Cubs pretty much couldn't give away at the deadline last season but who Mozeliak thought was worth $80 million guaranteed.

The mind boggles.
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To be fair, catchers dont have a real big market at the deadline because of the whole pitcher-catcher relationship. And the Cubs did have a deal in place to trade him to the Astros for Urquidy, say what you will about how mediocre of a pitcher he is, but it was vetoed by their owner, at the request of Dusty Baker, at the last second and didn't leave the Cubs enough time to get something worked out with another team.
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This was something I was curious about when the story broke that I never really heard anyone discuss. Even without pitch com, it's not like he's yelling pitches at these guys. From everything I've ever heard about it they have pitches numbered 1-4 & he flashes that number. Since there are more than 4 or 5 types of pitches that can be thrown I would have to assume the numbering system is different for each pitcher. (like 2 might be curveball for "pitcher a" & a slider for "pitcher b" who doesn't throw a curve) So if he puts down 2 fingers how would the pitcher know which pitch he actually intended to call? Only thing I can think was he would flash 4 fingers at a guy who only throws 2 pitches.
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