This is interesting: MLB.com’s Matthew Leach reports, “If (Matt Holliday) finishes in the top-10 in MVP balloting in 2016, a $17 million option vests for 2017.”

You know what it takes to finish in the top 10 in the MVP voting? This year, it would have taken a total of 49 points. That’s about four first-place votes. Or 2 fourth place votes, 1 fifth place vote, 2 sixth place votes, 3 seventh place votes, 1 eighth place vote, 1 ninth place vote and 2 tenth place votes (that’s what 1oth place finisher Matt Kemp got).

If Holliday has a decent season in 2016 and the Cardinals even sniff the playoffs, he’ll get some MVP love. Maybe he won’t get any first or second place votes. But he could get a handful of sixth and seventh place votes. And that could be enough to put him within spitting distance of the top 10.

If just one first place vote could be the difference between Holliday’s option vesting or not, what’s to stop an enterprising sports writer from approaching Holliday and offering his vote in exchange for some of that cash?

It wouldn’t be a matter of compromising one’s journalistic integrity, as MVP voting has nothing to do with journalism.

It would be a matter of sacrificing personal integrity.

How much money would Holliday have to pay you for your (theoretical) vote?

The Cardinals offense was just so-so in 2009, despite the presence of hitting god Albert Pujols. St. Louis was square in the middle of the pack in slugging, wOBA, and OBP. Where they excelled was pitching. The Cards’ pitchers issued the fewest walks in the league and had the third best FIP, allowing St. Louis to run away with the NL Central.

This offseason, St. Louis is faced with the prospect of losing midseason acquisitions Matt Holliday, John Smoltz and Mark DeRosa — no small potatoes. Joel Pineiro, Rick Ankiel, and Troy Glaus are also free agents.

How will the Cardinals repeat as NL Central champs, in light of this large group of likely departing players?

Let’s start with the easy one. DeRosa isn’t coming back. The Cardinals have a perfectly good third baseman in September-call-up David Freese, who’s hit over .300 at every minor league stop he’s made, and also has a reputation as an above-average defender. Freese might not light the world on fire in 2010, but Cardinals GM expects he’ll be a two-win player, and for a guy making the minimum, that ain’t bad.

In left field, Holliday probably won’t be back. I mean, maybe he will. But as the biggest name on the free agent market there will be a lot of pressure on Holliday to go to whichever team offers the most money. Maybe St. Louis will outbid the Yankees and Red Sox, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Other outfield options include Johnny Damon, Coco Crisp and Jason Bay. The Cards might consider Marlon Byrd, who made about $3MM last season and is generally worth around $10MM (though his value would decrease if he shifted to LF). But I’d be wary that he could repeat his hitting success away from the cozy confines of Arlington and hitting guru Rudy Jaramillo. I’d advocate the Cards pursue a left fielder via trade, but I could only speculate about who would be available and what that player might cost.

The other outfield spots will be manned by Ryan Ludwick and Colby Rasmus, who is primed for a breakout season. (He will be on my fantasy team. Oh yes, he will be on my team.)

As for the pitchers, the Redbirds will return the bulk of their starting staff, including Cy Young runners-up Chris Carpenter and Adam Wainwright. Kyle Lohse will also return. Mozeliak recently told Joe Strauss of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch the team will try to upgrade its rotation if they fail to land Holliday, though John Lackey isn’t in the team’s plans. I say bring back Smoltz, who won’t command a multi-year deal. After Smoltz moved to the NL last season, he struck out 9.5 per 9. The final spot could go to Pineiro, or another B-level SP like Brett Myers, Carl Pavano or Brad Penny (aka the d-bag group).

Conclusion: The Cards have Pujols, a maturing Rasmus, two Cy-Young candidates, a promising rookie third baseman, a loyal fanbase, a pretty stadium and roughly $20MM to burn this offseason. They’ll be fine, even if Holliday doesn’t return.

What They Need Index

Today, the SF Chronicle’s John Shea suggests the NL manager of the year award is a two-man race, between the Rockies’ Jim Tracy and the Giants’ Bruce Bochy.

Here’s his thinking:

Given voters’ tendencies, let’s cross out Lou Piniella (last year’s winner) and Charlie Manuel (no one has won the award after appearing in the previous year’s World Series). It’s also possible to eliminate La Russa and Joe Torre, whose Cardinals and Dodgers are faring as expected.

The Cardinals are faring as expected? Really?

Back in March, ESPN’s experts, all 21 of them, made predictions for the 2009 season. Only 4 of them picked the Cardinals to win the NL Central, and the rest picked the Cubs. Only two picked the Cards to win the Wild Card. In other words, an overwhelming majority thought St. Louis, which is currently 10.5 games up in the Central, would miss the playoffs in 2009.

Of course, those were ESPN’s baseball people. What did the real experts predict?

Here at Umpbump, nobody picked the Cardinals to win the Central, and I was the only one who picked St. Louis to win the Wild Card.

If you’re a fan of number crunching, the PECOTA nerds projected the Cardinals to win 80 games and finish in third place, behind the Cubs and the Brewers.

So as you can see, the Cardinals were never the popular choice to make the playoffs in 2009, which is why it’s silly to eliminate La Russa as a manager of the year candidate.

In fact, I’m going to throw my support behind Big T right now. Because, you know, his ego could use a little stroking.

At Coley’s request, here is the WAR pie for the St. Louis Cardinals:

As you can see, the Cardinals are ridiculously dependent on just four players. Albert Pujols and the three aces, Chris Carpenter, Joel Pineiro, and Adam Wainwright, have accounted for more than 58 percent of the Cardinals wins above replacement.

We can also see how well the Cards did at the trading deadline, as pickups Mark DeRosa, Julio Lugo, and Matt Holliday have already combined to add more than 3 wins of value in just about one month’s time. That is some pretty good trading right there.

And finally, if we look at the pie broken down by position players and pitchers, we can see that overall the Cardinals have a very balanced team, with pitchers and position players each contributing 50 percent of the wins, but we can also see that Albert Pujols alone is contributing nearly 20 percent of overall wins and astonishingly, nearly FORTY percent of the team’s offensive wins…

You may not have noticed, but Cardinals starting pitcher Joel Pineiro is having himself one heck of a year: 12 wins already, outstanding 1.12 WHIP, sparkling 3.22 ERA, and even more sparkling 2.94 FIP.

But if you dig beneath the surface a bit, you’ll find one of the strangest seasons by a starting pitcher ever. Basically all of Pineiro’s peripheral stats are on the extreme margins, in different directions.

First of all, Pineiro is one of the worst pitchers in baseball at striking people out this season: his 4.07 K/9 is the third worst in the entire major leagues, among qualified starters, behind only Nick Blackburn and John Lannan. In fact, he has racked up a mere 67 strikeouts in almost 150 innings of work.

But at the same time, Pineiro is leading all major league starting pitchers in fewest walks allowed, with an insanely low 0.94 BB/9. Yes, it’s true, Joel Pineiro has somehow only walked 15 batters all season.  In 148.1 innings. Only 15.

Add the lack of strikeouts and the lack of walks together, and you actually get a pitcher with an incredible K/BB ratio of 4.17 (anything over 4 is amazing).  This puts Pineiro right up there with flame-throwing strikeout gods like Tim Lincecum, Justin Verlander, Zack Greinke, and Jon Lester.

But perhaps the most amazing stat of all is Pineiro’s HR/9, which is a positively microscopic 0.24, which is easily the best in baseball, and it’s not even close. How is such a tiny number even possible???

Well, the obvious answer would be that Pineiro doesn’t allow many flyballs, and this is absolutely true. In fact, Pineiro leads all starting pitchers with the fewest flyballs allowed, at 23.2 percent, and also leads all starters in most groundballs allowed, at a whopping 60.9 percent.  This is even better than Derek Lowe. In fact, far better. Lowe is second place, but more than five percentage points back, at “only” 55.6 percent.

As for line drives, basically nobody ever hits line drives off of Joel Pineiro.  He’s fourth best in baseball at limiting line drives.

But even Pineiro’s incredible ability to get ground balls and avoid flyballs is not enough explain his microscopic home runs allowed numbers. Because on top of leading the majors by far in home runs allowed, Pineiro also leads the majors in fewest home runs per flyball, at an insanely tiny 3.5 percent.  Once again, Lowe is second, but he yields homers at almost twice the rate of Pineiro, at a full 6 percent HR/FB. So basically, even when a hitter manages to hit it in the air against Pineiro, the ball doesn’t go anywhere.

Now just to throw one more extreme number into the mix, Joel Pineiro has also been incredibly unlucky this year with his strand rate. Pineiro is fourth worst in all of baseball this year with a 65.3 LOB%, so basically the few runners that do manage to make it to first base of Pineiro are highly likely to score.  This rate of 65.3% is far off of Pineiro’s career rate coming into the season of 71%

So what exactly is going on here? Are all of these extreme outlier numbers just random flukes?

Well, to some extent, certainly, but maybe not entirely.

Looking at Pineiro’s pitch breakdown, we notice something very odd.  Suddenly this year, in contrast to the rest of his career, he has started throwing an incredibly high number of fastballs. So something has definitely changed about Pineiro’s approach.

In fact, Pineiro’s fastball percentage of 71 percent is way, way above his previously long established career norm of a much more normal 59 percent, and is in fact is ninth-most in baseball among starting pitchers. But what makes this even weirder is that out of the top 15 guys on the list of highest fastball percentage, Pineiro’s fastball is by far the slowest. The rest of the top 15 pretty much all sling it up there in the mid-90s, so they can afford to get by with a lot of heaters, but Pineiro basically tops out at 88 or 89.

Most of the other pitchers in the top 15 are also basically two-pitch pitchers, which both explains their high percentage of fastballs and also means they set up the fastball with a strong secondary pitch.

But what is odd about Pineiro is that he no longer even has a secondary pitch. When he started out in the majors, Pineiro used to be a four-pitch pitcher, mixing in a slider, curveball, and change.  This season, he still throws all three of those pitches once in a blue moon, but all three have become mere “show-me” pitches; Pineiro throws all three of them only about 10 percent of the time or less, and all three are at or approaching career lows, percentage-wise.

Basically, it seems like Pineiro has discovered some sort of magical, all-powerful 88-mph sinking fastball that can get just about anyone out, and he therefore throws it pretty much all the time.  We are talking near-Mariano-Rivera-type single-pitch effectiveness here.

While the pitch doesn’t really fool anyone in that it is quite easy to make contact with, Pineiro can fearlessly pound the strike zone with it, because the pitch is immune to home runs or even line drives.  The result is a pitcher who walks nobody, strikes nobody out, but also doesn’t give up any home runs. Batters get lots of singles against Pineiro, because just about every pitch is in play, but that’s about it.

Jon Heyman Tweets:

halladay preferences (according to pal): 1. win. 2. quiet. 3. spring in fla.; thinks he’d OK Phil, Stl, NY, Bos, etc. #MLB

Doc wants to go someplace quiet and his four candidates include New York, Boston and Philly? That makes sense.

My brother, a hard-nosed Cardinals fan, wanted to check his bank account, so he tried BOA.com thinking it would take him to Bank of America. He was wrong…

Update: Arg, whoever runs boa.com changed the picture, now a pair of creepy green eyes stare you down. Before the change, the site featured a large aereal view of old Busch Stadium in St. Louis adjacent to a snow-covered lot, and nothing more. Written in the snow in giant letters was the phrase: “CUBS SUCK.”

I was able to salvage this thumbnail:

With the season one-third gone now, it’s become pretty clear which players were only slumping and which players actually just suck at baseball. And yet on every team there is at least one player which for foolish reasons, whether it be an over-developed sense of loyalty, a case of GM-player man-love, a reputation for grit and hustle, or a bloated contract, the team just hasn’t been able to pull the plug on yet. In this post, we have a look at each team in the National League with an eye for the one player who really needs to be cut as soon as possible.

Dodgers – RP Guillermo Mota: This guy looks permanently broken: he gives up too many hits, he doesn’t strike enough guys out, and he walks too many batters. His WHIP is an appalling 1.79 and he needs to be shelved somewhere.

Giants – 1B Travis Ishikawa: The main job of a first baseman is to hit, so when your first baseman is the worst hitter on your team, you are doing something wrong.

Diamondbacks – CF Chris Young: Chris Young was supposed to be one of those guys whose power and speed would somehow make of for his complete lack of any ability to get on base.  Well, now you have a guy whose power and speed have fallen off, but who is even less able to get on base.  It is unbelievable that Young is still on pace for well over 500 at bats this season despite his .220 OBP. He needs to be working out his suckiness in the minor leagues.

Rockies – 3B Garret Atkins: I’ve been advocating that the Rockies trade Atkins for two years now, while there was still some perception that he was a good player, but they waited too long, and now he’s basically untradeable. Few players have benefited more from Coors Field than Atkins, and Atkins also had the benefit of his personal peak coinciding with the Rockies high profile Series run in 2007. But he was always an extremely inadequate defender at third, and now his bat has disappeared as well, even at home.

Padres – 2B David Eckstein: GM Kevin Towers calls David Eckstein the MVP of the team so far this year. He couldn’t be more wrong. Eckstein was only barely adequate defensively and offensively when he was at his peak about 5 or 6 years ago, and now at age 34, he’s pretty much got nothing left.

Cardinals – SP Todd Wellemeyer: Todd Wellemeyer shows that maybe there are limits to what pitching coach Dave Duncan can do. Kind of. Actually, it’s pretty amazing that the Cardinals have gotten as much out of Wellemeyer as they have, considering he was nobody’s idea of good starting pitcher material. But with Mitchell Boggs waiting in the wings, there’s really no reason to keep Wellemeyer around.

Brewers – 3B Bill Hall: Bill Hall couldn’t hit his way out of a paper bag right now. Sure, he hit 35 homers back in 2006, but he’s done nothing at all since then, and he still has no real position defensively. For some reason, Hall still has the image of a youngster who is still developing, but when you actually go look at his age you find out he is already 29 years old, and what you see, which right now is total suckage, is probably what he really is.

Cubs – RP Aaron Heilman: Heilman was once a highly touted prospect, and did manage to throw up a few good seasons, but it’s becoming more and more clear that he’s just not all that good. Nothing about his peripherals suggests that anything is particularly wrong. His velocity is the same as ever, as are his FB/GB rates, his home run rate, his K/9 rate etc., and his BABIP is a very modest .299. Heilman simply walks too many batters, posting an unsightly 6.26 BB/9, and until that changes (if ever), he needs to be in AAA somewhere until he can learn better control.

Reds – SS Alex Gonzalez: Gonzalez was once an elite defender at shortstop, which meant that his extremely weak bat could be somewhat justified, but now he is no longer anywhere near that class, and his bat seems weaker than ever at .209/.250/.302. He needs to be cut.

Erstad is still playing?

Astros – OF Darin Erstad: Yeah, I know, Erstad is supposed to be this super-gritty former football player (except he was only a kicker), but we are a decade removed now from his last actually good season in 2000, and I’m almost surprised to see that he is actually still on a major league roster. He’s hitting .137/.211/.196.  Why is this man still anywhere near a baseball diamond?

Pirates – OF Brandon Moss: Lots of people have mentioned how one good side of trading away Nate McLouth was that it has “cleared playing time for blocked prospect Andrew McCutchen.”  But hardly anyone mentions that one of the players who was allegedly “blocking” McCutchen is Brandon Moss, a corner outfielder who has been playing every day this season despite posting a .310 OBP and only a single home run.

Marlins – 3B Emilio Bonifacio: The fact that Emilio Bonifacio, who has no business being in a major league lineup at all, is actually batting leadoff for the Marlins, despite his .294 OBP, is an indictment of the entire Marlins coaching staff and front office.

Bonifacio whiffs again

Mets – C Omir Santos: It’s a joke that the Mets actually traded away Ramon Castro to clear a spot on the roster for this guy. It’s going to be fun watching as the numbers left over from his fluky hot start rapidly sink toward the Mendoza line.

Braves – OF Garrett Anderson: I laughed out loud when I heard that the Braves signed Anderson in the offseason, and I pretty much haven’t stopped laughing since.  The poor old guy has a .289 OBP to go along with a -15 UZR/150 in left field. At this point you could probably drag Bernie Williams out of the recording studio and run him out there for better production.

Nationals – CL Joel Hanrahan: You can anoint a guy your closer, sing the praises of his “live arm,” and run him out there in save situations as much as you want, but that doesn’t mean he is going to pitch like a closer, just because you really really want him to. In what may be the worst bullpen of all time, no reliever has done more damage in more high leverage situations than Hanrahan. His 1.90 WHIP (for an alleged closer!) pretty much says it all.

Phillies – P Chan Ho Park: Park has looked finished for years now, at least when you look at his peripherals. He managed to reinvent himself as a serviceable reliever in the pitcher-friendly NL West last season, fooling the Phillies into taking him on, but it’s kind of an understatement to say that his game does not play well in Citizen’s Bank Ballpark. The Park-as-starter experiment was basically doomed from the get-go, but ironically, Park has pitched even more poorly this year as a reliever than he did as a starter. This man should be enjoying his retirement somewhere, not getting thrown to the wolves every other night.