Baseball. TV.

Cardinals. 12:10.

Today!

Holy ass shit, baseball is really here. I'm pretty sure you knew that already, seeing how you're all baseball and/or Cardinal fans. I know many of you come here for the unparalleled humor and sex appeal that Hooks and I have to offer (too bad we paid all that money for a Cards Diaspora market research study to confirm that), but once in a while you want some useful baseball information.

I was considering doing a live blog, but let's face it - during spring training games (and regular season games against most of the NL Central) the announcers have nothing to talk about after the third inning. I'm pretty sure most of my live blog posts past 1pm would be about the links I tried to open at work but led to blocked sites.

So instead of me doing all the labor, here is a handy guide of links to keep you in touch with today's game if you are unable to watch on MLB Network:

(Updates all day! More as live gamecasts/boxscores hit the internet)

MLB.tv

Live Box Score or Gameday (mlb.com)

1pm update: Watch the game online here

Lineup/batting order:

Schumaker 2B, Lugo SS, Stavinoha DH, Ludwick RF, Rasmus CF, Freese 3B, Mather 1B, Jay LF, LaRue C, with Evan MacLane on the mound.

-

Cardinal Twitterers:

Derrick Goold (Post-Dispatch) - he's doing the same live blog I would have done, but with less cursing and Megan Fox pictures. (link working now, again)

Joe Strauss (Post-Dispatch)

John Marecek (550 KTRS) - also, lots of good updates from him on the KTRS blog; could use some drunk rambling from Hadley.

B.J. Rains (Globe-Democrat)

Fake Mike Shannon - a definite click, he's had some great updates today

Matthew Leach (stlcardinals.com) - who brings you Taco In A Helmet (genius idea, but there better be a lot of beef under that lettuce)

Jeff Luhnow (VP Amateur Scouting/Development)

Will Leitch (Deadspin, NY Mag, fellow Cardinal dork)

Brian Feldman (101 ESPN)

-

Or hear it from the Mets' side on Twitter:

NY Miracle Mets

Mets Grrl

-

Message Boards:

Cards Talk (enter at your own risk)

InsideSTL McKernan's Corner (tell them you know Hooks, they'll love you)

Viva El Birdos Game Thread

-

Or if you're dying to buy regular season tickets today, there is a presale going on...

Anything else? Post them in the comments below.

In an effort to do something about the miserable cold that has run rampant over the Midwest these past 2 months, I will be traversing to Mexico the next four days to investigate why the sun, liquor and knockout women are all hanging out in Playa Del Carmen.

I don’t expect many thanks in return for my tireless humanitarian work, but if you’d like to make a donation to the Human Fund in my name, that’s on you.

In the meantime:

• Read new Bleacher Report- 7 Boldest Predictions for the Cardinals Season You’ve Ever Seen
• Follow my Twitter- Link Here (I’ll be updating on my expedition)
• Check in on- Inside STL Friday. I’ll have a column on the ways the Cards can LOSE the NL Central in 2010
• And stick with the CD- HMW has agreed to post the rest of the week in my absence. And he’ll have the Friday Links… and possibly even a pretty sweet give-a-way.

Thanks for the support.

Adios, hombres.

Cards Diaspora gets links from all sorts of people all the time. We've also been known to troll the internets for odd shit as well. Most of the time I try to save them for a big Friday link dump that you can watch at some point over the weekend.

The sometimes you get something so awesome, you have to just suck it up and post it ASAP.

This is one of those links.

The new music video for OK Go's song "This Too Shall Pass" is SICK. Perhaps I'm a big sucker for rube goldberg's, but still, you've got to appreciate this video regardless.

And yes, it's real. HT Farhad Manjoo.

The Top 10 Things Bothering Cards Diaspora Today

10) The Olympic condom shortage: 14 condoms per athlete weren’t really enough? I bet some of the participating athletes hadn’t even heard of a condom before they left their home country. I bet the Bulgarians were making balloon animals or something and the international AIDS organization had to waste about 500K to get a bunch of rubbers to Vancouver so Olaf could finish his bike spokes.

9) CNN: Put on a suit Cooper. Just because you’re in Haiti or Sengal or Batswana looking for blood diamonds doesn’t mean I don’t want my evening news in a Tasso Elba tie. You smug son of a bitch.

8) Turkey Dogs: Gobble, gobble motherfuckers. Get your waddles out of my tube meat and stick to the Thanksgiving table. You have no place in a baseball stadium or a grocer’s shelf. Your assholes are no healthier than a pigs and they are far less tasty. I hate you.

7) Four Square: You don’t go anywhere cool. We don’t care to know for sure.

6) Buzz Aldrin: You walked on the motherfucking moon Buzz. The moon. And now you’re dancing for a miniature disco ball? Could somebody please start a PayPal account to keep American icons from having to whore themselves out to reality TV for some pension money? Could NASA not kick back a few bucks for an old buddy? The Russians won in the long run, eh?

5) Seinfeld: You’re better than that. We saw you on Curb last season. You’re still funny. Do better, Jerry. Do better.

4) Winter: Haven’t you embarrassed Al Gore enough. Leave us the hell out of it and give us one day over 50 degrees. ONE DAY!

3) Tiger Woods jokes: He slept with a ton of women that weren’t his wife. Guess what- that’s what athletes do. They bang chicks as they please. The worst hockey player on the worst NHL team? He’s gotten more BJ’s than Jake after proposing to Vienna.

2) The Horny Toad: How can this Lake of the Ozarks landmark NOT have a Bachelor viewing party in case Vienna won? They missed the boat on this one.

1) The CD: This site has been awful lately. Just abysmal. Sorry*.

*Not really.

Oh, Jerry. You were the co-creator of what may be the best :30 minute comedy of all-time. Your mysterious absence from anything but stand-up only heightened our expectations of what was coming next. Bee Movie? Ok, everyone deserves a mulligan. Marriage Ref? Hmmm. Larry David’s legacy thanks you, sir…

Brilliant signing this weekend to get Felipe Lopez for 1.2M plus another 1M of easily achieved incentives. I was under the impression he was like 35 (which he might be), but he’s listed @ 29. He’s boys with Albert. He can play every position on the field. And he’s the perfect utility guy that TLR can get into the starting line-up 120 times a year. Barring injury, I think this one might give Johnny Mo his first MLB Executive of the Year award…

The Yanks probably shouldn’t have been in that Gold Medal game yesterday to close out the Vancouver Olympics. But that doesn’t make Sidney Crosby’s face any less punchable. Not related to the game in anyway, but did you know that there is an actual debate in Pittsburgh centering on the thesis that Crosby would be a better captain for the Penguins if he moved out of Mario Lemieux’s house. No, seriously…

Blake Hawksworth, the Cardinals reliever, had a grandpa that was pretty much responsible (his words) for bringing the Olympics to Vancouver. He details the process in his blog over at the Globe-Democrat…

Movie Snot: The Informant!  A movie about price fixing on ag commodities in international markets. There are 0 titty shots. And that shouldn’t surprise you. Though about 40 minutes of this, I was thoroughly convinced that any critics that thought this was a good movie were on crack. The back half when things start to get untangled, though, is much better. I am confused as to why the Matt Damon character can come out of jail and immediately get a job as another CEO. He must have been shrewder than he was portrayed. Also, the early 90’s were a rough time for clothes…

I used a $25 gift card at Kohl’s Online for a high-powered nose hair trimmer. I feel like I’m getting too much air now. Very odd sensation…

First Spring Training game is Thursday for the Cardinals. Via Jason Stark (ESPN), yesterday was the last Sunday a baseball game will not be played until November 7…

Maybe someone can enlighten me, but I thought South Korea was a warm weather locale? How in the hell do they have enough athletes to win 14 medals at an Olympics? That’s 3 more than China. Or 13 more than England! I’m pretty sure whatever training camp they have there is not something you or I could survive for more than 3 hours…

If you have 7 minutes to burn, check out the worst sportscast you’ve ever seen. How dude manages to keep his composure the entire time is beyond me. You’d think he’d have to laugh at some point…

Women are not very good at hockey*. I’m sorry to say it, but it’s true.

After catching a bit of the USA vs Canada gold medal game yesterday, I came away unimpressed with the quality of the sport I was watching. Generally, in Olympic sports, the female competition is a decent approximation of the men’s. Sometimes it’s even superior. But ice hockey is not one of them.

In fact, if puberty sponsored a sport, this might be it. Awkward for everyone!

InsideSTL: STL CARDINALS- MOST BORING TEAM EVER?

My opinion crystallized later in the evening when I saw a late-night replay of the Missouri High School State Championship on FSN. Either of these two schools from Middle America would beat Canada roughly 200-0 on their worst night. And these are high school kids. In Missouri.

Equality is good. We can all agree on that, right? Good. But it doesn’t need to go tit for tat. Us men can have some things and you women can have other things and it’s all good. So let’s end this ice hockey charade.

* When I hit Google image search for "Women's Ice Hockey Funny", the above was the best result on page 1.

In other Olympic news- Kim Yu-Na is a star. Boner Stabone is dead. And Shani Davis hates you with the passion of a thousand Sean Penn’s.

Now, some links…

• Everything that's wrong with pop culture in two photos. LINK HERE
• Payback for a cheating girlfriend. What would you have done? LINK HERE (HT:FWC)
• Figure this out. You're smarter than the computer. LINK HERE
• Is it raining? Find out. LINK HERE
• Drunk Canadian begs for taser? Yes, please. LINK HERE (HT:JH)
• The offical John Wall Dance music video. Seriously. LINK HERE (HT:AT)
• This arrived via IM the other day with little explination. None needed. LINK HERE (HT:FWC)
• Awesome piece on the best mayor of all time. LINK HERE

That's it for the week. Please do us a favor- download the iPhone/Android app if you haven't already. It's an easy way to stay connected to the site and if you pull it out at bars, you're 78% more likely to get laid. Boys or girls.

Gather 'round kids. This will be that moment when you realize your buddies athooks and HMW (middle and right, respectively) aren't the geniuses you think we are (fucking Hooks always gives me the bunny ears; I was gonna score that night).

It's really reminiscent of the day - maybe you were about 11 or 12 years old - and you realized that your dad wasn't the best at everything, or the strongest guy in the world (unless your dad is Magnus ver Magnusson; for both). And when it came to picking where this off-season's free agents would land - we looked like a couple of idiot assclowns who write for Fungoes or something.

(Oh. Just went to Fungoes to see what they're all about. Okay, we're still the idiot assclowns, not them)

With a small handful of meaningless FA's still to go, Hooks has me kidnapped in the trunk, and on the way to Beatdown City:

athooks: 3 (M. Scutaro, D. Davis, A. Pettitte)

HMW: 1 (D. Davis)

Yup, you read that right. After predicting the top 25 free agents plus 5 wild card/take whoever you want picks - I nailed fucking Doug Davis. If I hadn't looked it up, I wouldn't have known who Doug Davis signed with (Brewers...watch out for them?).

We both have a few to go still:

Jermaine Dye (Hooks: Cardinals; HMW: Rangers)

John Smoltz (Hooks/HMW: Cardinals)

Carlos Delgado (Hooks wild card: Orioles)

Hank Blalock (HMW wild card: Cardinals)

Thus we need the team who won the huge one-man bidding war over Matt Holliday, and went on a spending spree with Brad Penny and Rich Hill, to get busy on three of the four guys listed above. And Carlos Delgado is out for four months due to oldness; so yeah, I'm calling it.

I know all of you hold us in the highest regard, and despite the fact that a monkey throwing darts (or better yet, poop) at index cards with team names could probably do better than us - hopefully we'll get a free pass for sucking so bad

And technically, I don't see anyone else recapping their Free Agent predictions, so maybe we are the best.

Oh, just heard Hooks say there's some skank in trouble at The Pepper Lounge. To the Batmobile!

I know everything.

I know nothing.

A week has passed since the first pitcher reported to Cardinals Spring Training in Jupiter Florida. In 7 days time, every player has reported to camp, every player has spoken thousands of words into hundreds of mics without saying a single thing.

And as we wait patiently for another week to pass and an actual game to dissect, I wonder- is there perhaps too much coverage of the St. Louis Cardinals?

It wasn't long ago when only a few reporters and/or media types took the month long sojurn to south Florida to send back intermittent reports on players that we may or may not have heard of. The local news might have a couple nights of reports on the team closer to the end of camp and Joe Strauss might have had a daily update blurb in the Post-Dispatch...

But now?

It's a fucking media orgy.

I thought I'd be thrilled at the notion of exhaustive coverage of the Cardinals in February. But I'm starting to think I'm not. Only so much I can hear about an 18 year olds bullpen session before I realize that I'm not getting paid to pay attention- it's just meaningless fodder. Wake me up when the games start and I can draw my own conclusions.

I don't mean to sound rude. Because sometimes interviews can be insightful. But 9.9 times out of 10, they're just talking points re-configured for whoever's call letters are on the mic flag. Guys like Ozzie Guillen aren't any more bombastic than players in the 70's or 80's- it's just more scrutinized now. He didn't grow up learning how to deflect any tough question.

In fact- most of the Internets popularity in the 2000's was created to fill the void that interviews used to serve. Nobody can get a ounce of usable to quote to hold a discussion- so blogs were kind of spawned to fill this void. To provide opinion where the athletes and teams they cover won't.

But still, the vestiges of time abound. Tomorrow, we'll get all the big names in front of all the usual suspects again.

And again the answers will be trite, meaningless and certainly forgettable. Because nothing has happened. No games have been played. No decisions have been made.

In fact, we've got a week before we can even lay eyes on a real, live game.

Great.

I don’t know how this one has been hiding out on the YouTubes for this long and no one has picked up on it- but it has.

Considering the boys over at Global Sports Fraternity took the time to animate a worn out joke BUT... actually make it kind of amusing again; well we had to post it. Stick with it until the end.

Enjoy.

Marquis Daniels is a very average basketball player for the Boston Celtics.

He's also commisioned a gold & diamond encrusted mini-Marquis head so he can wear it around his neck.

It just may be the best thing man has ever made

Via Deadspin