No team needed Greg Maddux more than the St. Louis Cardinals.
And week after painful week over the winter, Maddux was there for the taking. The Cardinals’ players certainly noticed.
Jim Edmonds offered to defer some of his salary to make it easier to sign Maddux. So did Matt Morris, Scott Rolen and Jason Isringhausen.
Agent Scott Boras tried to generate a bidding war between the Cubs and St. Louis for Maddux. But San Francisco was the only other National League team that would take the bait.
The Cardinals, long the most aggressive franchise in the NL Central, allowed Maddux to get away. Not only did they let the 289-game winner slip through their grasp, they let him land with the rival Cubs, giving Dusty Baker the best five-man rotation in the majors.
“I gave Scott Boras my Gary Payton-Karl Malone speech–that he’s got enough money, he can come get another ring,” St. Louis general manager Walt Jocketty said. “We were not in a position to make him an offer like he needed.”
Manager Tony La Russa acts as if he barely gave a second thought to Maddux’s availability.
“We made a case, but there really wasn’t anything we could do,” La Russa said. “His first choice was a West Coast team, and if he couldn’t go there then he surely was going to a team [that trains] in Arizona, which we don’t. The only way we’d have had a chance was to [overpay]. Sometimes guys fall to you. We had no chance for him to fall to us.”
Fall to you? What about putting together a strong bid?
Maddux earned $15 million in Atlanta last season, when he became the first pitcher to win 15 games for 16 years in a row. His deal with the Cubs pays him $7.5 million per year for two years, with another $9 million in 2006 if he works 400 innings in ’04 and ’05.
If Cardinals owner Bill DeWitt Jr. was committed to giving La Russa a playoff team this season, he could have boosted the payroll enough for Jocketty to make a competitive offer. But DeWitt declined to respond to developments within the division, where Houston did a Texas two-step by adding Andy Pettitte and Roger Clemens from the Yankees.
The Cubs also moved ahead of St. Louis, which has averaged 93 wins over the last four years. Ownership’s interest appears to be more on the ongoing stadium project than building a rounded roster.
Having spent so heavily on a lineup that includes All-Stars Rolen, Edmonds, Albert Pujols and Edgar Renteria, Jocketty has been unable to address the lack of pitching depth resulting from the death of Darryl Kile and Rick Ankiel’s arrested development.
As was true in 2003, the Cardinals’ rotation has a solid 1-2 punch in Morris and Woody Williams and question marks elsewhere. La Russa, however, is encouraged by what he has seen this spring from Jason Marquis, Jeff Suppan and Chris Carpenter.
“Our position players are going to again be a very competitive group,” La Russa said. “By the time we have played enough games this season, people will be talking about our rotation the way they are the other ones in the league.”
You can’t blame La Russa for stressing the positives–that’s what good managers do. But there’s no comparing the Cardinals’ rotation with those in Chicago and Houston.
Suppan is with his fourth team in three years, having gone 22-27 with Kansas City, Pittsburgh and Boston in 2002 and ’03. Marquis, 25, was essentially a washout in Atlanta. Carpenter has worked more than 175 innings once in his career and missed all of last season recovering from Tommy John surgery.
This is hardly an ideal scenario for La Russa, who has fallen out of favor with many fans and some segments of the St. Louis media. He’s in the last guaranteed year of his contract, and there has been little discussion about the option DeWitt holds for 2005.
While La Russa rarely allows a glance into his personal feelings, his wife spoke loudly in a recent interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
“It would be nice to be where he is appreciated again,” Elaine La Russa said.
“I know how he can be hard-core by letting it roll off his back. But you get tired of defending everything, knowing whatever you do, it’s not going to be right. If any of his critics were in his position, I know they wouldn’t have lasted this long.”
La Russa turns 60 in October. The bet here is that, win or lose, this will be his final season in St. Louis. Jocketty, who brought La Russa from Oakland, also is under scrutiny.
The two are in their ninth season with the Cardinals. They have guided the team to the playoffs four times and the championship series three times. But the drought between World Series appearances has reached 16 years, the longest in St. Louis since the gap between 1948 and ’64.
Eight different teams have won pennants since Whitey Herzog brought the last one to St. Louis. That’s tough for Redbird Nation to swallow.
But before DeWitt blames La Russa or Jocketty, he needs to explain how he could look the other way while Maddux was there for the taking.
Winging it
The Cardinals have a formidable 1-2 punch, but the 3-4-5 part of the rotation is full of question marks. A look at their 2003 numbers, except for Chris Carpenter, who didn’t pitch last season:
Solid at the top
No. 1 Matt Morris (above)
11-8, 3.76 ERA, 39 BB, 120 K
No. 2 Woody Williams
18-9, 3.87 ERA, 55 BB, 153 K
Look out below
Jason Marquis (Braves)
0-0, 5.53 ERA, 18 BB, 19 K
Started 2 of 21 app.; 1 save
Jeff Suppan (Pirates)
10-7, 3.57 ERA, 31 BB, 78 K
Chris Carpenter (Toronto)
49-50, 4.83 ERA, 331 B, 612 K
Career stats
