With the Major League Baseball winter meetings under way in Dallas, this surprisingly stagnant free agency period is hopefully about to get a lot more entertaining. When the Miami Marlins are providing the only real excitement by signing Jose Reyes and overpaying Heath Bell, we’ve got a problem. Hell, I was at least hoping that 4 or 5 teams would be running smear campaigns against each other for the sake of signing Prince Fielder. But nope, bunch of jerks running these teams.

Thankfully, we have journalists like Jon Heyman, of Sports Illustrated and Scott Boras’ supple teat fame, who strapped a car battery to the testicles of this week’s meetings with a Tweet that would make Donald Trump proud.

If albert pujols wants to beat $200M 9-yr cardinals offer, he should produce birth certificate. skepticism abounds over 31 claim

Ah yes, the age thing again. You see, Albert Pujols is from the Dominican Republic, so he is most certainly lying about his age. It’s just like how all Iranians are terrorists, Greek men have sex with sheep and the Irish are all drunks. OK, maybe that last one is a bad example. But Heyman’s accusation – which echoes that of Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria – is pretty ballsy.

Let’s pretend for a minute that Pujols isn’t 31-years old. Let’s also go ahead and assume that he’s completely loaded up on steroids and HGH like some ignorant baseball fans like to believe to make themselves feel better about their teams sucking. Wouldn’t someone out there, some young, hungry bloodhound journalist, be trying desperately to reveal the truth? You know, instead of Tweeting it like a keyboard hard ass?

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What you’re watching, should you be able to get through all 35 seconds without blacking out and waking up in the perfume section of a Dillard’s, is MLB (or approximately MLB) stars Albert Pujols, David Ortiz, Jose Bautista, Bryce Harper, career .205 hitter Ryan Vogelsong and a lady who I’m gonna guess is Mrs. Marucci introducing “Marucci Black”. They do so by taking turns saying “introducing”, then taking turns saying “Marucci Black”. The bat says “Marucci” up the side so hopefully that’s what they’re talking about. Apparently I’ve been waiting for this for a long time.

My favorite part, besides the random Overstock.com-looking woman, is how they’ve got a commercial starring Pujols, Ortiz and Bautista but the 19-year old with no Major League experience is the only one actually swinging the bat. All David Ortiz had to do was show up and say “introducing”. He didn’t even have to take off his glasses. Further investigation of the product reveals a weirdly racist ad campaign called “Beware of the Black” where the blonde from this commercial takes a porno camera crew out to abandoned houses and hotel rooms where she gets stalked by the phallic Marucci.

Thank goodness they’ve been introduced, now she’ll be able to identify him in a line-up.

[h/t to Mr. Irrelevant]

For the first time since 2000, the St. Louis Cardinals’ roster on the team’s official website is missing the name Albert Pujols. And while that’s simply routine procedure, it is certainly cause for panic and dismay in Baseball City, USA, with free agency well under way. Pujols is arguably the top free agent available, unless you see Prince Fielder’s youth as an advantage to Pujols’ upcoming “32nd” birthday or Jose Reyes’ value as a shortstop more appealing. And I hope that you do, as I also hope most general managers see it that way as well so it becomes that much easier for the Cardinals to re-sign Pujols and let him finish his career where he started.

Alas, with the free agency period beginning, the rumor mill cranks into full gear as well. My favorite rumor of the day is one that most people surely saw coming – Tony LaRussa and Albert Pujols joining Theo Epstein and the Chicago Cubs.

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There are currently 10 statues honoring St. Louis Cardinals legends at Busch Stadium, including Stan Musial, Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, Ozzie Smith and 6 other old dudes. Yesterday, an 11th statue was unveiled for Albert Pujols, commissioned by an anonymous donor and designed by the same man who created the statues at Busch. The only problem is that this statue isn’t at Busch. It’s at the Pujols 5 restaurant in St. Louis’ West Port Plaza.

It’s a pretty nice start, though, in showing El Hombre that the community loves him. It’s more than can be said for a lot of cities and fans when a superstar athlete is on the verge of leaving.

*stares blankly at city of Orlando*

Pujols told the crowd, 20-people deep in places, that he points “to remind me it’s not about me. It’s about Jesus Christ.”

Pujols, as he has done before, spoke highly of Cardinals fans, calling St. Louis “the best city to play baseball.”

(Via the STL Today)

And now it just has to be the wealthiest city. As Darren Rovell pointed out this morning on Twitter to people who loathe him, there won’t be a Christmas this year for kids who wanted an autographed St. Louis Cardinals World Series team ball. Pujols apparently wanted too much money to sign WS balls, making the ball “cost prohibitive.” That beeping sound you hear is a Brinks truck pulling up to Bill DeWitt’s house. This is about to get messy.

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The St. Louis Cardinals won Game 7 of the World Series on Friday to secure the franchise’s 11th title (11 in ’11 is not ironic, despite what Shane Victorino thinks) and they had a whopping 48 hours or so to enjoy it before the entire world crumbled around them. Yesterday morning, Tony LaRussa announced his retirement after 33 years of managing and three World Series wins (16 and 2 with the Cardinals, respectively). Instead of celebrating an incredibly improbable championship run, Cardinals players and fans now wonder, “Who will be the next manager and will it affect whether or not Albert Pujols stays?”

Only one man – St. Louis GM John Mozeliak – knows the answer to that first question, and only one man – Albert Pujols – knows the answer to the second question. Granted, his agent, wife and kids probably know, but he’s the only man who matters for right now. That doesn’t mean, though, that every sports writer, blogger and Internet commenter on Earth won’t make predictions, some of them accurate and most of them way off base. First up, former Cardinal and the grittiest shortstop ever, David Eckstein.

“Albert would stay if (Jose) Oquendo got the job.”

“My initial reaction (after learning of La Russa’s retirement) was, ‘It needs to be Jose Oquendo,’” Eckstein said. “When you played for Tony, you didn’t want to disappoint him. When I was playing infield for Jose, I didn’t want to disappoint him. I know how much he has put into this. When you can get a player to play outside of himself, for someone else, that’s when you get the best out of a player.”

(Via Fox Sports)

LaRussa has long lobbied for Oquendo to get his shot at managing a big league ballclub, and he certainly has a nice foundation and situation in St. Louis. He makes sense as a replacement, as the fans and players love him. But that really doesn’t mean much of anything.

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For the second time in 6 years, the St. Louis Cardinals are the World Series champions. And for the second time in 6 years, people are scratching their heads and wondering, “How the f*ck did the Cardinals win the World Series?” On August 25, the Redbirds were, of course, 10.5 games back in the Wild Card race. At that same time, the Milwaukee Brewers had also established an insurmountable lead in the NL Central, so it seemed like the Cardinals didn’t have a snowball’s chance. Then they simply did what everyone loves to hate them for – they played gritty and determined, and they took advantage of other teams’ misfortunes.

It has been building for a few years now, but the Cardinals have finally developed into that team that people love to hate for no other reason than, “I hate them.” It has spread beyond the usual divisional hatred into a full-blown National League contempt. Fans of the Philadelphia Phillies despise the Cardinals for ruining “their season.” Atlanta Braves fans hate the Cards because it’s their fault that the Braves fell into one of the biggest regular season collapses in league history. And as one Milwaukee Brewers fan put it to me at Game 3 of the NCLS, “You’re the Yankees of the National League.”

I could debate that rhetoric for days, but I don’t want to spoil the moment with nonsensical arguments. Instead, the Cardinals spent yesterday celebrating with their city of “baseball’s best fans,” a title that certainly fuels the growing fire of hatred. The Birds also stopped by Edward Jones Dome to give the St. Louis Rams a little luck in their defeat of the New Orleans Saints. And the attention has already mostly turned to Albert Pujols’ destiny, but we’ll get to that later. In the meantime, Cardinals fans rejoice, everyone else – haters to the left.

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