Occasionally, when I am doing a series, I schedule a post ahead of time and then, when it actually goes up, I’m surprised because it had slipped my mind it was going up. You wonder if perhaps the Cardinals had something similar. That they planned out their roster moves, set them to run on Thursday, then everything went crazy and they forgot to unschedule things.
For whatever reason, the Cards kept making roster cuts, sending down Jake Woodford, Austin Dean, Justin Williams, and Edmundo Sosa. None of these are huge surprises nor are they people you really thought would make the club. Sosa was about the only one that had a real shot, I thought, given his strong spring. The signing of Brad Miller seemed to close the door, but Sosa continued to play hard and with the disappearance of Yairo Munoz, you could maybe construct a roster with him on it. It’d be a stretch, though, and while I’m sure we’ll see him sometime (depending on all the factors a shortened season brings, of course), it’s no injustice that he’ll start his season in Memphis.
As for the others, Woodford’s season last year started hot but didn’t stay that way. Couple that with all the competition for a rotation spot that probably isn’t even up for grabs and there’s no shame in more AAA time for him. Dean and Williams–honestly, if one of them had made it and Dylan Carlson didn’t, there would have been riots. There may still be, of course, but it won’t be because of that.
Still, the timing of this is….weird, isn’t it? I mean, yeah, maybe these cuts were scheduled but why do them when baseball is probably two months away? It’s possible that the club is afraid that there will be major league service time handed out during this outage but…..wouldn’t that mean you keep these guys, who aren’t really going to be part of the long-term plan, and go ahead and demote Carlson? Again, I understand there were some moves (probably these) planned but I think there are a LOT of plans from the last week that didn’t get to see the light of day.
Whatever the reasons, I’m glad of it. It gave me something to write about without stretching too much. Because trust me, if this series is going to continue, there’s going to be a bunch of stretching.
BTW, Allen and I are planning to record a new Musial tonight. We’ll see how long we can talk about these moves and not much else!