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2023 St. Louis Cardinals thread -- fuckin' fire him already


Beau Vine

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Nice to see the arch cut into the grass again this year.  Headed over to catch the weekend series with the mariners the end of April. Will be my kid's first major league games. Can't wait!  Except I'll be in Seattle. 

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On 3/30/2023 at 9:39 PM, pops said:

Nice to see the arch cut into the grass again this year.  Headed over to catch the weekend series with the mariners the end of April. Will be my kid's first major league games. Can't wait!  Except I'll be in Seattle. 

I will be there for the weekend!

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Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol questioned outfielder Tyler O'Neill's effort after he was thrown out at home during a 4-1 loss to the Atlanta Braves on Tuesday night.

With St. Louis trailing 4-1 with two out in the seventh inning, O'Neill attempted to score on Brendan Donovan's pinch-hit liner to right. But O'Neill was cut down by Ronald Acuna Jr. at the plate.

Marmol took issue with O'Neill's turn around third on the sharply hit ball to Acuna. 

"That's not our style of play as far as the effort, rounding the bag there," Marmol said. "It's unacceptable."

O'Neill, who was hampered by leg issues throughout the 2022 season, acknowledged a tense conversation with Marmol about the play, but disagreed with the criticism of his effort.

"He didn't think I gave the best effort," O'Neill said. "I'm out here every day grinding my ass off, giving it my all and trying to stay on the field for 160 games out here.

"Like I said, I just got to get a better jump next time and I guess just get around the base a little quicker and be in there in next time." 

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Oli really fucked up on the TON situation.  Unless there have been multiple instances where TON has been talked to about effort, there is no way that should have been put out there for the media.  Personally, I have not witnessed or heard anything about TON being lazy in the field or on the base paths.  Pretty sure that TON gets traded at some point and he'll regain his form from a couple of years ago.

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58 minutes ago, You don't know me said:

I have resigned myself to the thought that this team will not win unless DeWitt sells. Mo is the one that gets the most criticism, but he doesn't set the payroll. Mo pisses me off, but it isn't all his doing.

Pitching isn't our strong suit, but there is zero reason this team should be under .500. The offense is (should) be loaded and other than a few outliers we just don't produce runs. And Marmol's bullpen strategy would be better left up to the bat boy. He has zero situational awareness 

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I've told it before, and I don't care.  When I came to Austin for grad school, my roommate (an equal Cardinals fan from back home) and I used to catch Cardinals games on KMOX-AM in his crappy Celica.  I'm sure two guys sitting in a beat up Toyota in an apartment parking lot didn't look weird at all.

Mike Shannon was well known to imbibe during games.  Late in the second game of a twinight doubleheader the following exchange occurred:

Jack Buck: "Well Mike, we're getting late in the day, we have some ballpark pizza and some ice cold frosty Buds to split up."

<LONG pause> 

Mike Shannon:  "You take the pizza, I'll take the beer."

 

That was Mike Shannon in a nutshell.

Edited by jimmyjazz
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My buddy texted this Mike Shannon anecdote:

Great announcer.  I remember him talking about picking up crabs, and Jack Buck tried to bail him out by saying how wonderful all the seafood was at some particular restaurant, and how the crabs in particular were so delicious.  Mike responded "yeah, you can get those, too."

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1 hour ago, T’Boo Ted Marshall said:

Do y'all really think MO is on the hot seat?  

No, but he should be.  Marmol will end up being the fall guy, although I believe he is in way over his head.  The Cardinals have hired yes men the last couple of hires.  Shildt grew a spine and wanted to shitcan Jeff Albert and Mo wouldn't hear it, so they fired him instead*.  Then Marmol is hired and he is definitely a yes man.  They (Mo and Dewitt) need their yes man and fall guy for when the penny pinching bites them in the ass.

 

* At least that's how I want to believe it went down.

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I agree. Mo has done the job that Dewitt asked him to do. I believe that for Mo to get fired, he would have to “lose” the minor league system pipeline. He is getting butts in seats, which is what Dewitt pays him to do.

At the end of the day, Oli is the fall guy. And I agree that he is not really suited for the job. I am not sure what he is good at in terms of being a manger.

Another fall guy will be Girsch. I am not sure what he does to be honest.

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6 minutes ago, Capn81 said:

I agree. Mo has done the job that Dewitt asked him to do. I believe that for Mo to get fired, he would have to “lose” the minor league system pipeline. He is getting butts in seats, which is what Dewitt pays him to do.

At the end of the day, Oli is the fall guy. And I agree that he is not really suited for the job. I am not sure what he is good at in terms of being a manger.

Another fall guy will be Girsch. I am not sure what he does to be honest.

Yeah, Girsch is definitely another fall guy.  We all know that Mo and Dewitt are essentially the same person.  The POBO title for Mo didn't come with any change of duties, just a newer, fancier title.  Girsch is basically what George Costanza was for the Yankees.  He's Mo's secretary/fall guy.

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JoePos:

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As we continue to talk about reasons why we love baseball, here’s one that comes to mind: Your hometown baseball announcer doesn’t have to be quote-unquote “good” to be absolutely wonderful. I’ve written at length about my lifelong love of Herb Score as Cleveland’s baseball announcer. Herb, it’s fair to say, was not Vin Scully. Around town you’d often hear him called Herb “No” Score, because among his many talents was forgetting to give the game’s score for astonishingly long periods of time.

So what? We loved him unconditionally. He was our voice of summer.

On Sunday, St. Louis Cardinals legend Mike Shannon died at the age of 83. There probably has never been anyone more St. Louis than Mike Shannon. He was born in St. Louis on July 15, 1939. The Cardinals lost to Boston that day. But the next day, Mike Shannon’s first full day in the world, St. Louis beat the Giants 3-1 behind strong pitching from Mort Cooper and a three-for-three performance from a shortstop named Lynn Myers.

Shannon grew up in St. Louis; he was an athletic phenom. As the newspapers wrote, he came by it naturally — his father, Tom, was a police officer and then a lawyer, and he was known throughout the city for his dominant pitching in the St. Louis MUNY league.

At Christian Brothers College High School — CBC, as it’s known in town — Mike was named high school player of the year in both football and baseball. Like so many St. Louis kids, he went to the University of Missouri, where he was such a promising freshman quarterback that Tigers’ coach Frank Broyles would say that Shannon might have won the Heisman Trophy had he stayed. Instead, he signed with his hometown Cardinals for $40,000 to play baseball. (“There was no money in football,” he would say.)

Shannon was a big, athletic guy who began his career as a centerfielder. In Albany, as an 18-year-old, he hit .322 with some doubles power. But his breakneck style of play led to numerous injuries, including a dislocated shoulder, a concussion and a broken nose. At 19, he married his high school sweetheart in St. Louis. At 22, he was called up for the first time to play for the Cardinals.

They called him Moon Man, or Moon for short. Shannon told different stories about how he got labeled with the name, his favorite being that once, when Bob Gibson was struggling, Shannon went to the mound, pointed up at the sky, and said, “There’s going to be a guy that’s going to walk on that moon one of these days.”

It’s just as likely, though, that he got the nickname because he was out there. “He’ll talk for 15 minutes,” Gibson said, “and when he’s through, you’ll go away scratching your head and wondering what he said.”

Shannon had his share of good moments for the Cardinals. In 1964, in his first World Series game, he homered off the legendary Whitey Ford. In ’68, he finished seventh in the MVP voting after hitting 29 doubles and 15 homers in the Year of the Pitcher. He spent his whole career playing for the Cardinals, and then he joined the team’s marketing department, and then he became a Cardinals radio announcer for 50 years. His home run call “Get up, baby!” became a St. Louis treasure. “Mike Shannon’s Steak and Seafood,” became a St. Louis landmark.

Was Mike Shannon a great announcer? See, that’s not for me to say.

“Mike Shannon is not a national treasure,” Bob Costas would write in his foreword of Shannon’s book, Get Up, Baby! “He is a Cardinals Nation treasure.”

Yes, that’s right, and so I am going to leave the stage for my friend M.A. to explain what Shannon meant. M.A. is the biggest Cardinals fan I know; he lives and dies with the team nightly. And when I asked if he liked Mike Shannon, he said, “Great question … it’s more that he was so completely familiar than actually liking him. He was one of the primary voices of the Cards my entire life until he retired a couple of years ago. He kind of mumbled a lot, as you know. And he did not have in any way that classic announcer’s voice. At times, he had a somewhat surprising lack of emotion in how he called games. He was known for his malapropisms. I can’t say I really had any sense of what kind of person he was.

“But he was just so much of the sound of summer for all us Cardinals fans. I know you know exactly what I mean.”

I do know. All us baseball fans know. Calvin Trillin once wrote that he wouldn’t want to know someone who did not believe that their town had the best hamburger or barbecue or chili in the world. I feel the same way about baseball announcers. You love your own no matter what.

M.A. then told a little story about the time in college when his father sent a letter filled with his favorite Shannon-isms. M.A.’s father has been gone for many years now, but he will always remember how much his father loved when Mike Shannon was talking about the rule requiring earflaps on batting helmets. “Some players, like Keith Hernandez, don’t have earflaps on their helmets because they were grandfathered in,” Shannon said. “They are extinct from the rule.”

Extinct from the rule. “Funny how things like that always stay with you,” M.A. writes. Rest in peace, Mike Shannon.

 

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  • Beau Vine changed the title to 2023 St. Louis Cardinals thread -- fuckin' fire him already

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