TOWER GROVE — While a lot of attention was paid to the pitchers a few of the National League Cy Young Award voters did and didn’t vote for, lost in that hubbub was how much money one pitcher made because of one single vote.

By receiving a solitary second-place vote, Atlanta Braves righthander Javier Vazquez finished fourth in this year’s Cy Young voting. Per a clause in his contract with the Braves, that netted Vazquez a…

TOWER GROVE — There are many things that St. Louis Cardinals recent third baseman Mark DeRosa brings to the table, not the least of which is his classification as a free agent.

He’s a Type B and loving it.

Each fall, on the eve of free agency, the Elias Sports Bureau releases a ranking of players that help classify free agents as either Type A or Type B players. The rankings are based on the previous two…

TOWER GROVE — With the teeth-gnashing about the Cy Young Award still in full grind around these parts, baseball’s free agency opened at 11 p.m. St. Louis time Thursday, and Cardinals outfielder Matt Holliday could officially entertain offers from all 30 teams.

No more footsie. They can talk financials.

And, yet, according to reports around the majors, more teams were talking about how they wouldn’t be talking to Holliday than teams prepping to talk with Holliday. It’s…

TOWER GROVE — The numerical bounty (especially when it comes to types of pitches) available at Fan Graphs has made that Web site increasingly valuable when it comes to using and exploring some of the — what’s the phrase we learned yesterday? — nouveau riche’s statistics that are out there.

But Fan Graphs, like so many sites these days, are also in the prospect-ranking business.

Marc Hulet, a writer at Fan Graphs, posted his St. Louis Cardinals…

TOWER GROVE — Come Friday morning, Bryan Burwell & Company will have to find something different to ask me about and a new way to introduce me on radio shows, if they have me on at all. As of this afternoon, I no longer hold a secret ballot in one of the more talked about award votes in years.

A fellow baseball beat writer, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Henry Schulman, aptly called it “by far the…

TOWER GROVE — It seems that St. Louis Cardinals’ first-round pick and shortstop prospect Pete Kozma is often judged for the player he isn’t and never will be as opposed to the player he is or could be.

Kozma is not Rick Porcello. No news there.

Yet, that fact seems to bludgeon Kozma’s chances in prospects polls like this one, the Bird Land Community Top 21. He’s dismissed because of something he had no role in and…

ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. — Asked within the past couple days if he expected the St. Louis Cardinals to make a move on his client, outfielder Matt Holliday, before the window for exclusive negotiations slides shut this week, agent Scott Boras stated the obvious: “Uh, no.”

The Cardinals and Boras have said since before the club clinched the National League Central Division title that both sides expected the righthanded-hitting, All-Star outfielder to hit the open market…

ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. — The St. Louis Cardinals’ free agent most often linked to the New York Mets this offseason as a buoy for that franchise’s floundering has been the Cardinals’ free agent most often linked to any team with pinstripes and/or a pocketbook: Matt Holliday.

Turns out, there may be a Cardinals’ appetizer that interests the Mets first, and perhaps most.

Joel Pineiro, who is set to be a Type B free agent when the…

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Back in 2005 and 2006, Matt Holliday, then an outfielder for the Colorado Rockies, began experimenting with a leg kick — a high, pronounced, flamingo-like kick of his leg that he could use as a timing mechanism for his swing. Holliday would try it. Abandon it. Try it. Abandon it.

Then, in August 2006, a former slugger with a fair reputation for hitting visited a friend or two who worked for the Rockies….

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Not even the prom was enough to keep Robert Stock out of college.

Three years before his preference to play catcher helped make him a draft pick for the St. Louis Cardinals, Stock’s preference to get his baseball career started led to a pretty good line for a 17-year-old college freshman: Guess, he wasn’t going to the prom.

He said that in this television news report from his early days on campus:

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TOWER GROVE — Earlier this week, MLBTradeRumors.com — a site that has become an essential clearinghouse and one-stop shop of reports, rumors and, yes, even tweets this time of year — handicapped the 2010 Free Agents by ranking them No. 1 through No. 50 and predicting where each of those free agents will land when the dust and dollar signs clear. Granted, such guesses are little more than blindfolded pin-the-player-on-the-donkey games this time of year.

You’ve got…

TOWER GROVE — The St. Louis Cardinals admittedly don’t have the level of prospects out in the Arizona Fall League that they’ve had in the past. There is no Brett Wallace out there this season, for example. There are a few players auditioning for a spot on the 40-man roster — like Tyler Greene did last fall — but they aren’t expected to use that roster spot to vault into a major-league debut, as Greene…

TOWER GROVE — The Topps 2009 Update packs are now out in stores*, and card No. UH263 features Matt Holliday reaching up to catch a fly ball, all decked out in his St. Louis Cardinals home whites. With this being the first week of baseball’s blockbuster equivalent of a big card swap meet — trade you one Carlos Gomez foil-stamp for a slightly dog-eared J.J. Hardy All-Star card — and the rhetoric flying, a look…

TOWER GROVE — After a brief hiatus to artificially inflate the click totals on the previous poll — or so that I could play father for a few days, whichever — the Bird Land Community Top 21 returns today and will continue each weekday until it’s finished. There are seven spots remaining in the top 20, and then the 21st spot in the poll will be reserved for the Community Sleeper — the player that…

CREVE COEUR — They are at very different stages in their careers, at very different positions and they were talking about two very different subjects, but St. Louis Cardinals ace Chris Carpenter and minor-league outfielder Tyler Henley hit on the same theme during interviews I had with them Wednesday.

In discussing how his career changed when he won the Cy Young Award back in 2005, Carpenter described how expectations changed around him. He wasn’t just the…