Ending the Chris Duncan Era

The Cards have traded Chris Duncan and either a PTBNL or cash to the Red Sox for Julio Lugo and cash; the collective Cardinal Nation is finally able to exhale.


The Chris Duncan Era is over, to quote a cliche, before it ever truly began. In a swift trade with the Red Sox for the also-fan-disgruntling Julio Lugo, the move was really about giving Duncan a new home.

Dunc never fulfilled promises of an excellent 2006 inaugural campaign, a year where, in just 90 AB's, he hit 21 home runs with a .952 OPS. Where we all expected a mediocre power hitter with decent on-base skills upon his call-up, we all got a potential slugger capable of becoming a mainstay in the outfield. A pleasant surprise.

Since then, we got injuries, questionable camera poses, cautions of nepotism, drama between the Skipper and the rest of the world, and looming frustration from a Cardinals fan base that wanted to forgive and forget Duncan of his awful one-and-a-half-year slump but simply couldn't.

Duncan never amounted to the big-time, 30-hr outfielder some hoped he could be, and the result of The Slump and a surplus of struggling lefthanded outfielders was one of the most obvious sell-low trades for the Cardinals this decade. Duncan, once the rising 25-year-old on a World Series team, now Duncan, the lefthanded slugger who couldn't hit home runs. The poetics of the situation are simply too tragic to bear, son of a coach, prodigy upon arrival, ushered out failing to do what he does best.

Even though Tony La Russa talks about how Chris played baseball the "Cardinal Way", you have the feeling Duncan never quite could live down the prospect of being a coach's son. It was always in the same paragraph, even if it escaped the sentence. Playing the game "right" doesn't mean anything if you're stuggling massively and are the coach's son. It won't work that way, it just won't.

Now, the Chris Duncan Era is over, before it even began. We'll be able to move on, as Duncan had become a redundancy on the team that will be better-suited being replaced by Julio Lugo, who has made a mark of hitting lefthanded pitching well. At least, I know I will.

How will you choose to remember him? I think the picture above will do just fine.