Need to go get a few pitchers.

Rosenthal to the rotation?

You'll just sign Buehrle. He'll probably even pay for the right to pitch there.

Why not try to re-sign Lackey now?

Yep, we need to buy an arm. We need a boost on offense too so thats going to cost us in trade. Lynn would have been a good bait piece but alas.....

He won't be back full strength until 2017 either. No one comes back as they were before surgery the first year,

Why not just transition?

Look, I know nobody wants to hear it, but every goddamn year cannot be a championship year. The window on the Holliday/Molina cardinals is closing and closing quickly.

With Lynn down, the road to the title in 2016 becomes tougher. The roster doesn't have enough flexibility to make substantial changes due to the age related declines of Holliday, Molina and Peralta not to mention the unknown futures of Wong and Adams.

Let's just exhale, look around for some possible long-term solutions and yes, if necessary, keep our powder dry.

This may just be a sign that perhaps too much duct tape has gone into keeping this shit on the rails. There are worse things than taking a moment to decompress and re-load.

You mean 2018. 2017 will be the year he rediscovers his feel for pitching and finds out just exactly what he'll have.

And in 2018 he'll be a FA.

I said it at the time, but if you can't get a screaming bargain or buy out at least one FA year, never extend a pitcher through his arb years. The Cards gave Lynn almost exactly what he'd have made in arbitration and didn't get any years of FA bought out in the process.

And now it's burned them.

Yes, that was a stupid deal. Why guarantee the money and not get the additional year of control?
Shit, I thought we had him in control for 2018. Should have traded him at the trading deadline. You could tell he was off from his normal.

2016 we still have Molina/Waino/Holiday/Peralta. You can't just punt in their last year.

Yeah, you can.

Holliday is gone in 2017 and Peralta is cheap enough to make a bench player. You're stuck with another year of Molina.

Sentimentality has crippled many a franchise. The 80s Chiefs were garbage because the Hunt family wanted to keep giving the old champions another shot until the whole damn team decayed to dust. Walt Jocketty lost his job because the myopia created by the 2006 WS closed his eyes to the fact that the 2007 Cards had aged beyond their competitive cycle.

We're here now and the worst thing the Cards can do is hold on too tight.

Let someone else piss away their money on heyward and the money is there.

Pujols cured me of the sentimentality of holding on to a beloved player. That being said, we are better off in 2016 playing those players. They are not blocking anyone.

I'm not saying bench them.

I'm saying don't make any moves with 2016 in mind. And if somebody comes calling for a player that isn't in the plans for 2018, make the move.

Don't go out there and change your bargaining position w/ John Lackey. He's still more valuable to us as a draft pick than he is as a starter during a 2016 season that's probably not going to yield much. Don't overpay for a starting pitcher just because that's what there's an abundance of this off-season when you have a farm system that is pretty much exclusively pitching.

Don't tank the season, but don't make moves with an eye on it either.

So why can't you trade some pitching for offense?
I've heard multiple times that the Cardinals have a projected lineup of the next 5 years. They make FA, trades and signing their own players based off that projected 5 year line up.

Tommy Hanson dead at 29. Wow.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/10/us/tom...her/index.html

EDIT: Just saw the thread on it.