Lindbergh Reference or ABA Reference?
Yesterday afternoon, while the internet's ostensibly enlightened St. Louis Cardinals fandom continued to bask in the glow of their newly empowered general manager, Derrick Goold sank a knife deep into their collective heart: The Cardinals were planning to not only resign Skip Schumaker, long considered Tony La Russa's scrappy white totem, they were going to sign him to a two-year deal.
It's bad enough that they're going to resign Schumaker, a thirtysomething middle infielder who is neither a satisfactory second baseman nor a satisfactory center fielder nor a broadly useful bench bat—they're going to resign him despite having replaced him as starter at both those positions with two separate players who, collectively, form a kind of superior Skip Schumaker Voltron.
In center field, Jon Jay is a left-hander with a precariously high average, but he hits for significantly more power and has a better reputation; at second base, Daniel Descalso is a left-handed hitter who might be a middling defender but will hopefully make up for it with an above-average positional bat. That's both of Skip Schumaker's roles.
Which means the Cardinals just signed Skip Schumaker to back up two better versions of Skip Schumaker.
Which means we can no longer blame Tony La Russa for the Skip Schumaker era. Sorry, internet.
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Edited by Dan Moore
Dan Moore has been writing about baseball on the internet since that was a novel thing to do. A graduate of the University of Missouri, he lives in Springfield, Illinois. See my profile
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