DOWNTOWN — Before leaving Busch Stadium for Oklahoma and the offseason, Cardinals reliever Ryan Franklin said he approached the Cardinals about moving back to the rotation.

He didn’t have a preference, he just wanted a heads up.

“I told them, If you guys are going to want me to start, let me know ahead of time,” Franklin said when he met with the media Sunday afternoon at the Winter Warm-Up. “But they haven’t said anything, so I’m just going to come back for the seventh, eighth inning guy and be happy about it.”

Franklin came to the Cardinals a year ago as an option for the fifth spot in the rotation. From 2003 to ‘05, Franklin made at least 30 starts a season for Seattle, and twice he topped 200 innings. In 2003, he had a 3.57 ERA in 212 innings, yet three years later he slid into a relief role with Philadelphia and Cincinnati. He didn’t really find a comfort level coming out of the pen until 2007 with the Cardinals.

That’s when he signed an extension.

But starting was never really out of his blood.

The Cardinals have reshaped their rotation this winter and considered backups for injured arms, but have been firm in their belief Franklin is best suited for the bullpen. Early last season, Franklin seized the setup role for closer Jason Isringhausen, going 4-4 with a 3.04 ERA. He was one of the most efficient hold relievers in the majors for the first five months of the seasons.

Franklin, entering the first year of a two-year extension (that, yes, has an option), said he wanted to know about starting not for another career change but for his schedule. If he’d start the spring as a starter he would have changed his workouts to increase his stamina. Hearing nothing, he’ll come to spring with a relief-oriented goal.

He wants a cutter that jams righthanded bats.

“My cutter has helped me out a ton,” Franklin said. “That pitch right there made my year a lot easier.”

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– SCENES FROM WINTER WARM-UP –

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Both Skip Schumaker and Ryan Ludwick have mentioned how they’ll miss more than Jim Edmonds ability in the outfield — they’ll miss his guidance in the outfield. Edmonds would position the outfielders based on his knowledge of the opposing batters and the approach the pitcher would take. Edmonds used to tell us about shifting to get a better view of the catcher, just so he could see where the catcher would set up or have a feel for the pitch coming. Knowing that would lead to a better jump.

Seems he’d also pass that info onto his flankers. Shifting the left fielder and the right fielder to better cover the batter’s tendencies. Schumaker said with so many young outfielders out there this year the institutional knowledge will be lacking — they’ll be learning the hitters Edmonds knew as well as the ripples in the Busch Stadium grass.

“Very knowledgable,” Ludwick said. “And that’s an understatement. It was like he knew where the ball was going before the ball was thrown.”

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Wrote about the changing paradigm for the Cardinals’ organization in Sunday’s paper, but I forgot to include an anecdote about how the fans here are embracing that shift. If butts-in-seats in a measurement … they are. Years ago, one fan told me, the session on the Cardinals minor league would be “five or six of us an (then director John Mozeliak)”.

On Saturday, Jeff Luhnow and John Vuch spoke to a packed room, and people swarmed Luhnow and Vuch afterward with questions.

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A couple scores of people stayed around for the next session, too, which was on how the Cardinals have expanded their use of statistics to evaluate players. Matt Girsch and Sig Mejdal presented how the Cardinals blend statistics and scouting — remember the verbal alloy they use for that? “STOUT” — to make their decisions on draft picks and other acquisitions.

It was in that presentation I learned a new vocab word:

Fly-NER (noun): Not quite a fly ball, not sharp enough to be a line drive.

The Cardinals declined to give out details of their “secret sauce” (Luhnow’s phrase), but did give the fans a peek at the results. Sifting through their current team, Girsch said these are the projections for the 2008 Cardinals:

BEST HITTER: Albert Pujols. “Not exactly earth-shattering detail to share,” he said.

BEST BASERUNNER: Brendan Ryan.

BEST DEFENSE: Pujols, though that was before translating the data for importance of position. (Side note: Remember, Pujols scores well for making the plays outside of his “zone”, or when he cuts in front of the second baseman for a scoop.)

BEST OUTFIELD ARM: Chris Duncan. (Side note: Guessing the data on Ankiel was too small of a sample size.)

BEST CATCHING DEFENSE: Yadier Molina. Another “earth-shattering detail”, but the Cardinals ran their metrics across baseball to determine that Molina is the best defensive catcher in the majors.

BEST PROSPECT: Colby Rasmus. Earth-shattering again. But what came next was semi-surprising. The Cardinals ran the numbers on their best RHP prospect and LHP prospect and decided they are Mark Worrell and Jaime Garcia, respectively. The numbers the Cardinals used to determine this was age, age at current level, performance and — and this is what boosted Worrell — proximity to the majors.

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Among the many outfielders coming through the Warm-Up today was Rule 5 pickup Brian Barton. A former Boeing intern, Barton just finished a semester of school at the University of Miami. One of his classes was on rocket propulsion.

The other one was harder.

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Will be at Winter Warm-Up all weekend, filing live updates into the blog from press conferences and panels. On Monday, I’ll be hosting a panel for fans at noon. It’s opposite Tony La Russa’s Q & A on the main stage and Albert Pujols signing autographs. So choose wisely … and get back to me if they say or do anything newsworthy.

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