This video is from Tuesday night’s Cardinals-Rockies game, which the Redbirds won 6-5.

So Kyle Lohse finally found a job, landing with the Cardinals at 1-year, 4.25 million, plus incentives.

I think it is safe to say that in NO WAY is this fair market value for a pitcher of Lohse’s abilities and background, not in an offseason when Carlos Silva extracted a 4-year, $48 million deal from the Mariners, and just one year after Adam Eaton got a 3-year, $28 million contract from the Phillies and Jeff Suppan got 4 years, $42 million from the Brewers.

To find a comparable deal, you’d have to go back a long time. In 1998, for example, the Texas Rangers signed 30-year-old starting pitcher Mark Clark to 2-year, $9.3 million dollar deal after Clark had given an extremely Lohse-like performance the year before, going 9-14 with a 4.84 ERA for the Cubs.

Of course, that deal was widely panned at the time, and didn’t work out very well for either the Rangers or Mark Clark (who was out of baseball after the contract), but the point is that it was more than TEN YEARS AGO, when baseball had far less money than it does now, that a Kyle Lohse-like pitcher was given less than $5 million a year.

So basically, this deal is a huge steal for the Cardinals. In the best case scenario, Lohse pitches well, saves the bullpen for half a season, and then the Cards can flip him to a contender at the deadline, getting one or two good prospects after having paid Lohse less than the typical signing bonus of a first rounder.

In the worst case scenario, if Lohse sucks or gets injured, the Cardinals will only be out 4.25 million bucks, which in this day and age is the kind of spare change major league teams can find in their clubhouse couches. The Cards wouldn’t even have to buy out Lohse’s option year, because they didn’t even give him an option year. And keep in mind, Kyle Lohse has never been on the disabled list for a even a single day in his whole career.

In fact, Justin Inaz over at “On Baseball…and the Reds” breaks down the numbers and shows that Kyle Lohse is probably worth about the same as Carlos Silva, and that in an ideal contract both pitchers should have gotten about around $7 or $8 million per year for a 3-year deal.

So given that the Cardinals seem to be paying Lohse a little over half of what he should be worth, at almost no risk, and may very well be able to flip him for prospects, why is Cardinals GM John Mozeliak so down about the signing? In fact, he actually laments to the AP reporter,

“If it were a perfect world, we wouldn’t have had to go down this path. But it’s not and we’re going to need someone to pitch every fifth day.”

And how the heck can we explain how Lohse lasted so long on the free agent market without getting a better deal?

I think part of the answer has to be Scott Boras. With messy, high profile breakups between Boras and players like A-Rod, Gary Sheffield, and Kenny Rogers hitting the newswires this offseason, and now Boras’s failure to get reasonable contracts for actually semi-valuable major leaguers like Jeff Weaver, Corey Patterson, and Lohse, we may be seeing a decline and fall of the once-mighty Boras Empire. It seems as if both teams and players may be tiring of Boras’s negotiating style, and while teams may still be willing to talk to Boras when it comes to signing superstars, they simply don’t want to deal with the bother when it comes to the mediocre players.

Another reason may be a glut of amazing young talent this year, as Sarah discussed in a recent post. But I think there is something else in this case, something that has to do with Kyle Lohse in particular. The USS Mariner and East Windup Chronicle have supported the theory that this offseason baseball front offices have suddenly discovered the sabermetric idea of “replacement level” players, who can deliver almost the same performance as the lower tier of major leaguers at a vastly reduced cost, but I have a really hard time buying that argument. While certainly there are a *few* GMs around the game that have embraced some sabermetric ideas, there are plenty of counterexamples of GMs who seem just as enamored of big names and veteran experience as ever.

No, I think what is going on here is that GMs are looking at the same old thing they have always been looking at, which is so-called intangibles. Kyle Lohse has long had a reputation as an selfish underachiever, going back to his Minnesota days, and the fact that he went with Scott Boras as his agent despite being a fifth-starter type only added to this reputation. I don’t think all that many GMs were looking too closely at Kyle Lohse’s actual numbers or his marginal value over a “replacement level” player. They were just considering his reputation as a guy who simply doesn’t have the right “makeup” to make the most of his talent, a guy who isn’t a “winner” or simply doesn’t have enough “heart,” and decided that that simply wasn’t the type of guy they wanted to be bringing into their clubhouse, regardless of the cost.

It would be nice to think that we are finally getting to an era when pretty much all GMs all around the game are finally coming to terms with spreadsheets and new statistics and are willing to break down numbers in a systematic way to evaluate players more rationally. But I don’t think we are quite there yet. I mean, this is an offseason in which JP Riccardi, a one-time disciple of Billy Beane who has long been touted as one of the more stats-friendly GMs in the majors signed David Eckstein to be his starting shortstop because he thought he needed to be bringing more “gamers” into his clubhouse.

I think that, ironically, the more statheads raise a hue and cry about how overrated a player is, the more attractive many GMs actually find that player. Because in their minds, if a player is outperforming what you would expect, that is not evidence of a routine statistical anomaly or a small sample size but actually just additional proof that that player has “heart,” “grit,” or “intangibles,” and that he is a “gamer” or “just knows how to win.”

Kyle Lohse is the opposite, a player who has consistently underperformed expectations, which I think goes far toward explaining why most teams wouldn’t touch him with a 10-foot pole this winter, and why even the Cardinals are left feeling icky after signing him, despite the fact that they will probably be getting tremendous value out of the deal.

Earlier this week, Sarah pointed out that Babes Love Baseball is previewing each MLB team — in haiku form. Not to be outdone, Jos Posnanski is writing limericks about each team’s chances.

Remember that ESPN Page 2 story about how ballplayers don’t care about politics? Well, Jimmy Rollins is into politics. Maybe he and C.J. Wilson could be buds?

While Rollins is reading up on the candidates, Brett Myers must be spending a lot of time at the lanes. The 700 Level reports that Myers bowled a near-perfect game the other night at a team bowling event — a 279.

Flotsam media uses a golfer’s attack on a bird as an excuse to post video of a Randy Johnson fastball exploding a dove. I will never get tired of that video.

Jim Baker at BP Unfiltered speaks for all of us when he expresses his hatred for making mistakes in his column. We’ve all been there, and we hear ya, Jim.

Here’s a fascinating story, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, via USS Mariner. The St. Louis Cardinals are inviting fans to submit scouting reports on promising college ballplayers.

When the submissions are in, the team plans to send its own scouts to evaluate a handful of the most interesting prospects and, in June, to possibly select one or more of them in baseball’s amateur draft. The winning fan — the one whose entry is judged most compelling, whether a player is drafted or not — gets a trip to St. Louis to see a pair of ball games.

Pretty cool, right?

This is one of a series of posts in which we belittle and berate each team for their blunderous offseason bungling, and sparingly salute them for scarce successful strategems.

A case can be made, and made fairly easily, that the St. Louis Cardinals have been the dominant Major League team of the new millenium. Beginning in the year 2000, the Cardinals went on an incredible run in which they made postseason appearances in 6 out of 7 seasons, including two World Series appearances and one World Championship. In those 7 campaigns, from 2000 to 2006, the worst season record the Cardinals posted was 83-78 in 2006, but they also won the World Series that year, so all in all it was a pretty awesome run.

But that run decisively came to an end last year, just as I had predicted, and the future looks rather grim for the Redbirds, especially in the near term. Since peaking at 105 wins in 2004, the Cardinals have won fewer and fewer games each year. Last year they won only 78, and are very likely to win even fewer this year, thanks to an already subpar bullpen further weakened by Troy Percival’s departure, and one of the worst starting rotations around. It also doesn’t inspire confidence to hear whispers of possible Tommy John surgery for the team centerpiece Albert Pujols, although he insists that he is going to try to play through “high grade tear of the ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow, as well as bone spurs, inflammation and arthritis in the joint.”

The reasons for the Cardinals’ rapid decline since 2004 have been twofold. First, the Cardinals have demonstrated an ironclad determination to refuse to allow their payroll to surpass a threshold $90 million or so, despite opening a brand new stadium two years ago. In order to avoid passing this $90 million threshold, each year for the past four years the Cardinals have allowed virtually all of their free agents to walk, without signing any new impact free agents.

This might have been okay if the Cardinals had a fresh supply of talent from the minor leagues to replace departed stars, but this is where the second problem lies - despite all the draft picks the Cardinals have received for letting top talent depart via free agency, their drafts of late have generally been abominable, and they currently have one of the more barren minor league systems in the game. At present, the Cards do have one true grade A prospect in CF stud Colby Rasmus, but once he makes the big club for good (which will almost certainly be sometime this season), their next prospects with any real projectability are all several years away.

This all means that Cardinals fans will have to suffer through at least three years or so of mediocre baseball before the team might have a shot at having hope again. This might have been a nice time for the Cardinals’ ownership to open up the wallet and use some of that new stadium and World Series cash to reward what by all accounts is one of the most devoted and loyal fanbases in the game with at least some semblance of a competitive team, but instead it was just more of the same, letting free agents walk or trading away salary while signing no one new of any consequence.

2006 World Series MVP and working class hero David Eckstein was allowed to leave as a free agent, and long-time centerfield human highlight reel Jim Edmonds and his no-longer-in-the-budget $10 million salary were traded to San Diego for basically nothing. There was also the “challenge trade” of injury-ridden third basemen which sent Scott Rolen to the Blue Jays for Troy Glaus, which is basically a wash, but other than that the only other additions the Cardinals have made this entire offseason have been to sign Matt Clement, Cesar Izturis, and Jason LaRue (a catcher too awful for even the Royals), and to bring in Juan Gonzalez as a circus sideshow non-roster invitee to spring training.

In short, it was another utterly dispiriting offseason for Cardinals fans, really the fourth one in a row, and if you get the feeling that Cardinals ownership might be taking that famous loyalty of its fanbase for granted a bit, you would not be the only one.

Offseason Grade: D-

Additions: 3B Troy Glaus, SS Cesar Izturis, SP Matt Clement, C Jason Larue, 1B Josh Phelps (NRI), OF Juan Gonzalez (NRI)

Losses: 3B Scott Rolen, OF Jim Edmonds, SS David Eckstein, RP Troy Percival, OF So Taguchi, SP Kip Wells, OF Preston Wilson, C Gary Bennett, 3B Russell Branyan, 2B Miguel Cairo, OF John Rodriguez

Projected Lineup, Rotation, and Closer:

RF Skip Schumaker - .333/.358/.458, 2 HR
CF Rick Ankiel - .285/.328/.535, 11 HR
1B Albert Pujols - .327/.429/.568, 32 HR
3B Troy Glaus - .262/.366/.473, 20 HR
LF Chris Duncan - .259/.354/.480, 21 HR
2B Adam Kennedy - .219/.282/.290, 3 HR
C Yadier Molina - .275/.340/.368, 6 HR
P Mediocre Pitcher Du Jour
SS Cesar Izturis - .258/.302/.315, 0 HR

RHP Adam Wainwright - 14-12, 3.70
RHP Joel Pineiro - 6-4, 3.94
RHP Braden Looper - 12-12, 4.94
RHP Matt Clement - 5-5, 6.61 (2006 stats)
RHP Anthony Reyes - 2-14, 6.04

CL Jason Isringhausen - 32 SV, 2.48

-Hot Offseason Action Index-

ASTROS - pitching depth.
Besides Oswalt, Houston’s rotation currently features Woody Williams, Brandon Backe, Wandy Rodgriguez and Felipe Paulino. That’s a lot of finger crossing.

The ‘Stros have Jose Valverde closing games. And that’s awesome. But other than Valverde, the bullpen offers little beyond Doug Brocail. Geoff Geary and Oscar Villarreal do not inspire confidence.

It’s easy to point to the bevy of all-star names in Houston’s lineup and think that the team’s offense might make up for it’s crappy pitching, but players like Tejada and Berkman are past their primes, while Kaz Matsui is overrated.

Verdict: The Astros need one more top of the rotation starter and some middle relief help.

CARDINALS - starting pitcher.
Go to the ESPN.com stats page. Check out the NL batting stats. The top 75 players from 2007 include just one Cardinal — Albert Pujols. That’s gotta change in 2008. How is that going to change? Three things have to happen. 1. Troy Glaus has to stay healthy. 2. Rick Ankiel has to live up to the Babe Ruth comparisons and 3. Chris Duncan has step up his game. If all three of those guys hit, and Pujols continues to be Pujols, the Cardinals will be dangerous.

Of course, those are a lot of maybes. And even if all of those things happen, that still doesn’t change the fact that St. Louis’ starting staff includes Anthony Reyes and Braden Looper.

Verdict: The Cardinals need one more top of the line starting pitcher. And a lot of luck.

BREWERS - steroids
This offseason, Milwaukee acquired Guillermo Mota, Eric Gagne and Mike Cameron. They already had Derrick Turnbow. That’s three relievers who were mentioned in the Mitchell Report, plus one CF who will start the season suspended. How do they sleep at night?

Verdict: The Brewers need to stay one step ahead of the drug testers.

REDS - Jay Bruce
Rumors abound that the Reds are considering trading their entire farm system — including OF prospect Jay Bruce — for Baltimore ace Erik Bedard. This would give Cincinnati a scary rotation led by Bedard and Aaron Harang. But it wouldn’t solve all of the team’s problems.

Last season, David Ross cought 107 games for the Reds. His OBP was .271. So there’s that.

Also, Ryan Freel is penciled in as the team’s starting CF, now that Josh Hamilton has been dealt. But what happens when Ken Griffey Jr. gets hurt? The Reds need Bruce to get major league ready quick, allowing Freel to serve as a super-sub and giving the team a little more depth and power. If Bruce pulls a Ryan Braun and shows up swinging, the Reds could be contenders, even without Bedard. (Of course, nobody in history has ever pulled a Ryan Braun to the extent that Ryan Braun pulled a Ryan Braun in 2007. But I digress.)

Verdict: The Reds need to keep Jay Bruce.

CUBS - an ace.
Outside of the continuing development of CF Felix Pie, the Cubs’s question marks are all on the pitching side. A handful of relievers, including Kerry Wood, will battle it out to be this season’s closer. Meanwhile, Jason Marquis will attempt to return to form after 2007’s late season collapse.

Chicago has a few good starting pitchers, like Rich Hill, Carlos Zambrano and Ted Lilly. But the team really needs at least one of those guys to step up and pitch like an ace.

Verdict: What the Cubs really need is for Carlos Zambrano to cut down on his walks.

PIRATES - a miracle.

Strengths: ummmmm…
Weaknesses: oy!
Verdict: sigh.

Maybe it’s because I’m getting a bit tired of hearing so many trade rumors, but I’m feeling mighty childish/punchy today (more so than usual, anyway).

And maybe that’s why I find this this headline on ESPN to be hysterical:

“Rolen seeks trade; LaRussa won’t ‘please Scott’”

Now Scott, you knew very well going into this relationship that Tony had the reputation of being a bit stingy in that department. There’s a long line of guys that couldn’t convince LaRussa to please them. And trust me, they’ve tried everything. A box of Ferrero Roche chocolates, a pocket full of posies, won an MVP Award, posted his bail, and all were denied.

I don’t blame you for trying, though.

I just finished watching Rick Ankiel go 0-4 in this afternoon’s game against the Cubs. He struck out all four times at bat — twice looking. In the Cardinals’ last four games, Ankiel has gone 1-14. The Cards are 0-4.

It’s hard to think this doesn’t have everything to do with last week’s revelation that Ankiel used HGH. When the Daily News story broke, Ankiel was on fire, with nine home runs and 29 RBI since his minor-league call-up Aug. 9.

It’s not like Ankiel would be the first guy to tank following reports of drug use. Remember how badly Rafael Palmeiro slumped after he flunked a steroids test?

Ankiel the pitcher was always held together by a very thin thread. So it shouldn’t come as any great shock that Ankiel the hitter is choking under the heat of media scrutiny.

Of course, it’s possible that Ankiel’s slump has nothing to do with his mental state. Maybe pitchers have just figured out how to approach him.

It’s also possible Ankiel will rebound and that tomorrow he’ll go back to being a slugging sensation.

But I’m not holding my breath.

And I wonder how we’ll view Ankiel years from now.

Up until the HGH revelations, the Ankiel story was painted as a Roy Hobbes-esque tale. The moral, it seemed, was “never give up.”

But I was never comfortable with that version. There’s no doubt that what Ankiel accomplished — reinventing himself as an outfielder after a failed pitching career — was noteworthy. But this wasn’t a story about overcoming adversity. Not exactly.

This was a story about a guy with a fragile psyche who gave up on one dream — pitching in the bigs — and embraced a new one — hitting in the bigs.

But he seemingly never dealt with the underlying problem. He never overcame whatever it was that suddenly and bizarrely robbed him of his ability to throw strikes.

Now it seems that Ankiel has come unraveled yet again. And I can’t help but wonder if maybe his is less of a Roy Hobbes tale and more of a “Moonlight” Graham story. Maybe Ankiel wasn’t meant to be an All-Star slugger. Maybe he was just meant to experience one month as the best hitter in the National League.

That’s probably not the ending Ankiel was hoping for. But it’s still a pretty good story.

A’s GM Billy Beane is fond of saying that the first two months of the baseball season are for finding out what you need, the second two months are for getting what you need, and the last two months are for having what you need and making your push for the playoffs.

With the season quickly approaching the two month mark, it’s time to look at each team and see what their biggest need is.  Let’s start with the NL Central…

Brewers – a third baseman

With the Brew Crew firing on all cylinders in just about every other phase of the game, third base stands out as a gaping abyss.  Corey Koskie is still out from the concussion he suffered last July, and there are no signs he will be back any time soon, and meanwhile the scrap-heap platoon of Craig Counsel and Tony Graffanino is batting a combined .214. Fortuitously, the Brewers best hitting prospect is none other than AAA third baseman Ryan Braun, who is batting .339 in Nashville with 9 homers and a 1.099 OPS.  Braun was on the DL recently with wrist tendonitis, but is now back in action and should be playing in Miller Park soon.

Reds – a set-up man

Cincy’s lineup is stacked and they have been getting solid work out of their starting rotation, but their bullpen is 12th in the National League in ERA and second to last with 10 bullpen losses.  Closer Dave Weathers has been excellent, but the pitchers behind him have been mediocre to awful.  More than anything, the Reds need a capable setup man to bridge the gap from the middle innings to Weathers in the ninth.  When your second best relief pitcher is Todd Coffey, that is just not going to get it done.

Pirates – a fifth starter

Let’s face it, the Pirates have a lot of holes.  They are lacking power hitting, guys who can get on base, generalized defense at pretty much every position, and relief pitching. But the most glaring hole of all is fifth starter, where Tony Armas, Jr. flamed out after allowing 43 hits in 29 innings and yielding an 8.16 ERA in seven starts.  The Pirates have been going with a four-man rotation of Zach Duke, Ian Snell, Paul Maholm, and Tom Gorzelanny and occasionally spot-starting Armas, but it is increasingly clear to everyone but the Pirates that Armas has nothing left and any number of minor leaguers would put up better numbers if they were thrown out there.

Cardinals – a starting pitcher, or five

After letting their entire starting rotation except Chris Carpenter leave via free agency after last season’s World Series title run and then seeing Carpenter go down with an injury this spring, the Cardinals have been left with no starters whatsoever and have scrapped together a rotation which makes the Pirate’s mediocre squad look like a passel of aces.  The Cardinals rotation is last in the National League (by more than half a run) with a 5.43 ERA and worst in the league with 23 losses as a squad.  Meaning that adding a warm body who could throw 5 innings every fifth day and yield an ERA of around 5.00 would actually constitute and improvement for the Redbirds.

Cubs – a change in their luck

The Cubs spent a fortune on free agents in the offseason, and so far their spending spree hasn’t panned out, but the main culprit has been bad luck.  The Cubbies have what is probably the best rotation in baseball so far this season, and that’s even with putative ace Carlos Zambrano sporting an ERA of 5.61, as Rich Hill, Ted Lilly, Jason Marquis, and even fifth starter Angel Guzman all have ERAs in the 2’s with the season already 1/3 over.  Meanwhile the Cubs lineup has a competent player at every position as well as good depth on the bench in both the infield (super-sub Ryan Theriot) and the outfield (Matt Murton, Angel Pagan).  Indeed, the Cubs have actually outscored their opponents by 25 runs so far, so according to the Pythagorean method they should be a healthy 24-19 at this point rather than the anemic 20-23 record they actually have.  More than anything, the Cubs need to not panic, wait for their luck to even out, and hope they can make a mid-season run.

Astros – a rightfielder

The platoon of Jason Lane and Luke Scott is just not working. Together, they are batting .217 out of an outfield corner.  If that’s how they hit when they platoon, I’d hate to see what either man would hit if he batted against all comers.

Today I embarked on my whirlwind tour of the Grapefruit League, which will involve me and my mother attending eight spring training games in six days.

Today’s game featured the defending World Series champion St. Louis Cardinals facing off against the Washington Nationals at Space Coast Stadium in Viera, Florida. Although Space Coast is putatively the home park of the Nationals, no Nats fans were in evidence, as the entire park was filled with Cardinals fans sporting “Eckstein” and “Pujols” jerseys and cheering every ball or strike that went the Cardinals’ way.

We were treated to a rare spring training pitching duel. Redbirds starter Kip Wells looked sharp, going five strong innings and allowing only two runs to “raise” his ERA to 1.06 in five games this spring. But even more impressive were the 5.1 innings pitched by Nats starter Shawn Hill, who allowed only two unearned runs on two hits, and did not allow a hit between the first and the sixth innings. With a spring ERA of 0.93 in five starts, Hill has literally come out of nowhere to blow past established starters Jerome Hill, Jason Simontacchi, and Pedro Astacio to be named the Nats no. 2 starter. And given so-called staff “ace” John Patterson’s history of injury woes, I’m going to go ahead and name Hill the true ace of the Nationals staff as we head toward opening day.

On the Cardinals side, another no-namer who continued to shine brightly today was centerfielder Skip Schumaker, who went 3-5 to raise his spring average to a team leading .405, and showed his desire to make the team by beating out two tough grounders for singles, including a head first slide into first on a ground ball to the 5.5 hole. Schumaker entered camp with no place to play, absolutely buried on the oufield depth chart behind Jim Edmonds, Chris Duncan, Juan Encarnacion, Preston Wilson, So Taguchi, Scott Spezio, and even some guy named John Rodriguez. But anemic spring play by Wilson and Taguchi, injuries to Encarnacion and Edmonds, and Schumaker’s all-out hustle on the basepaths and in the outfield, have put him on the edge of winning a spot on the opening day roster.

Looking toward the negative side, watching him play today made me wonder: is there any regular player in the major leagues worse than Nationals shortstop Christian Guzman? Although Guzman is having a ridiculous spring training, raising his team-leading average to .438 with a 2-3 performance today, this is the same Christian Guzman who was too injured to play a single game last season, and the same Christian Guzman who has a career on-base percentage of .298. Statheads like to talk a lot about “replacement level” players, but the iron-gloved, wildly hacking, power-less, increasingly slow-footed Guzman is so far below “replacement level” that you feel like you could run Frodo Baggins out there and get more for your money. After all, hobbits are pretty spry.

In any case, thanks in large part to 4 errors by the Nats (and two missed plays by Guzman which probably would have been made by any shortstop above A-ball), Washington fell to the Cards 4-2 in ten innings.

On the way back to our car, we noticed a monumental bronze statue off in the distance, right at the main entrance to the stadium. Who could it be we thought? The Nats have only been around for two years…could it be one of the glorious Montreal Expos from days of yore? Andre Dawson? Hall-of-Famer Gary Carter? Maybe even shrine to beloved erstwhile Expos mascot Youppi? But no! It was in fact an enormous statue of Casey from “Casey at the Bat” sporting a handlebar moustache and his “smile of Christian charity.”

Indeed, we decided, who is more fitting a symbol for one of the most hapless organizations in sports than the man who is the ultimate symbol of baseball failure? Sure, hope springs eternal in the human breast when you see a young player on the Nats like Shawn Hill…

But there is no joy in DC, for Christian Guzman still mans short.

Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa was busted for DUI last night by the Jupiter PD. But something about this story seems awfully fishy. From the AP:

Undercover officers saw La Russa’s SUV partly in an intersection around midnight and not moving despite two green lights, police said. Officers knocked on the vehicle’s window and La Russa did not initially respond.

The SUV was in drive and running, with La Russa’s foot on the brake, police said. When he eventually woke up, the officers asked him to get out of the car.

He was arrested and booked at the Palm Beach County jail on the misdemeanor, according to police and jail records. He was released about 8:30 a.m. after posting $500 cash bond, said Paul Miller, a Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office spokesman.

Okay, first of all, LaRussa was barely over the legal limit. Here’s a list of the different blood alcohol levels and the behavior that is associated with them, courtesy of habitsmart.com:

02 MELLOW FEELING. SLIGHT BODY WARMTH. LESS INHIBITED.

05 NOTICEABLE RELAXATION. LESS ALERT. LESS SELF-FOCUSED. COORDINATION IMPAIRMENT BEGINS.

.08 DRUNK DRIVING LIMIT. DEFINITE IMPAIRMENT IN COORDINATION AND JUDGMENT.

.10 NOISY. POSSIBLE EMBARRASSING BEHAVIOR. MOOD SWINGS. REDUCTION IN REACTION TIME.

.15 IMPAIRED BALANCE AND MOVEMENT. CLEARLY DRUNK.

.30 MANY LOSE CONSCIOUSNESS

.40 MOST LOSE CONSCIOUSNESS; SOME DIE.

.50 BREATHING STOPS. MANY DIE.

LaRussa was passed out, behavior you’d expect from somebody with three times the booze he had in his system. According to his blood/alcohol level, he should have been somewhere between “impaired” and “embarrassing”.

Maybe LaRussa got too much sun Wednesday afternoon. Or maybe he’s been having trouble sleeping. But I think there’s more to this story than has been reported. You don’t pass out at the wheel after only a couple of drinks — unless you’re a total wuss. And Tony LaRussa is no wuss.