Chone Figgins is the official 2013 free agent option of people frozen in carbonite since 2009

Chone Figgins--released Tuesday by the Seattle Mariners with one year left on his long-term deal--is a middle infielder. He's a 2013 free agent. The St. Louis Cardinals need a free-agent middle infielder. If you've been frozen in carbonite since just after the 2009 season, and you're interested in the Cardinals signing Chone Figgins, I have some things to tell you:

1. The Cardinals won the World Series in 2011! It was awesome, and you should buy the DVDs. (We still use DVDs in 2012, but mostly just for commemorative sports box sets. Nobody has a DVD Netflix account anymore.) Basically, David Freese is the most popular man in St. Louis. And it's been a whole year now.

2. Phones are huge now. The iPhone 5's screen is four inches, diagonally, and it looks tiny at Best Buy.

3. Chone Figgins had an extraordinary and depressing decline phase, and it started immediately after the Mariners signed him to a four year, $36 million contract following that awesome season he had before you were frozen in carbonite. In 2010 he was just pretty bad, and we all assumed he'd caught Safeco fever, but in 2011 and 2012 he's en awful--no power, not really a lot of speed, terrible defense, OPS around .500.

His BAbip has been brutally low both years--.222 altogether--but few who saw him expect that to go up as he enters his age-35 season. A team with better starters at second and short and no backup at third could do worse than to give him an invite to spring training and hope for the best, but the Cardinals aren't that team.

Anyway, congratulations on being unfrozen from that carbonite. I'm not sure why your first move was to ask a website that didn't exist back in 2009 about a baseball player, but I'm glad to be the one to tell you that our alien overlords are benevolent, which is not what I was expecting after the First Space War last year.