The Cards Wire: Albert the Underrated

Do you want some great reading material? Check out Joe Posnanski's blog entry titled "Albert the Underrated." No sabermetrics or complicated analytics here, just plain ole' good baseball writing. An excerpt:

One, I remember a Cardinals fan once sending me a list — I wish I could find that — where he charted Albert Pujols for 30 days and tried to determine how many winning plays he makes. These were relatively objective things — going first to third on a single, scoring from second on a single, a stolen base, making a great defensive play like taking out the lead runner on a bunt or stealing a double, hitting a sacrifice fly, having a ferocious eight or nine pitch at-bat, and of course the obvious stuff, the doubles, the home runs and all that good stuff. He said that he tried to be a very tough grader and he still found that of the 30 games he charted, Pujols made two or more winning plays in 28 of them. He made at least one winning play in 29. He made a total of 75 winning plays, if I remember right. I don’t have anything to compare that to, but I remain in awe.

Especially after last night, it's definitely something worth reading.

By the way, I plan to start posting interesting Cardinals or baseball news I come across under "The Cards Wire", so when you see it on your RSS feed, that's what you can expect to find.