Quit making excuses for getting it handed to you more often now days and right the ship. Or, give me someone who can!

Getting beat with whatever garbage he’s throwing up there is just as bad. I don’t think that he will see his 300th save as a Cardinal, at least I hope. It’s no fluke we won the series when he was out.

it seemed to me that the other pitcher’s breaking balls were bending just fine. i have lived at six thousand feet for years and i don’t buy the difference that altitude makes. it makes a difference, just not as much as most think. ask a golfer. they say figure about 7%. in golf, where the ball is traveling much farther than a baseball, the difference is much more apparent. but any golfer will tell you it makes much more difference with a driver than a nine iron. on a long shot, the altitude factor will necessitate a club change. yet inside a hundred yards, not really. and izzy’s curve ball is only going sixty feet six inches. i think he just lacked confidence with the breaking ball and altitude just sounds like an excuse. so far this year, his curve has looked pretty good to me.

After the game Wednesday, Isringhausen said he didn’t think his pitches or command were bad. He said,”That’s baseball. It’s just the way it goes.” That seems too blaise’ when you are making $8 million. I guess I just don’t understand how it is to be a millionaire I wonder if that is any consolation to Wainwright or Looper. It’s probably just an emotional reaction on my part, but it seems like everybody on the team isn’t quite as upbeat as they were. Maybe it’s the lack of timely days off. However, it’s the major leagues and your performance should reflect that you are worth the millions you are being paid, with the exception of a bad game once in a while, of course.

When I recently read that a few STL fans go to the bullpen area in STL to shout obcenities at Izzy when’s going bad, I wondered what kind of Cards’ fans would do that. I find that following the Birds since 1962 has made me like whoever wears the bird on the bat. The negative jerks who are uncivilized and frankly cruel at the ballpark, and write some of the garbage I see here, probably also wanted Ankiel executed, back in the day. They make me freakin’ ill.

I don’t think it’s fair to call Izzy blasé. He cares immensely. A reliever has to keep himself on an even keel, because whatever the outcome one night, chances are he has to go out and do it again the next night or the one after that.

I don’t know where else to say it, but this redesign is awful. Graphically, it’s not attractive. More importantly, the usability is several steps down from the old website. Derrick gets a raw deal in this redesign, for example. He’s farther down the page, and the loss of his headshot makes it harder to find Bird Land. There are only links for particular Bird Land posts, but no direct link that I can find to get the page with headers for the last 10 Bird Land posts, where I used to check for new comments on recent posts. Having a separate link for PCQ (rather than mixing them in with the regular Bird Land posts) almost guarantees that there will be fewer hits for PCQ. And all those giant shadow quotes on the blogs are a trademark of designers with their feet in the clouds and their heads up their … I’ll bet the people in the Post-Dispatch building who handle words and substance can’t stand those designers.

What genius decided to put Cardinals Basics at the bottom of the page? Do you really want to bury Hummel like that behind the other columnists? He’s a Hall of Famer, for pete’s sake. The pull-down menus at the top of the page are terrible and the links on those menus are organized badly. When I hold the cursor over Sports to get the menu, the columnists and live chats are close by, but the main links to specific local teams, which must be what people want most, are all the way over on the left. This whole redesign reeks of being ill-prepared and badly thought out. I wonder how many months the “design team” wasted on it. I’m sure there will be some tweaks, but you’ll never get the whole thing fixed. Is this the third redesign in as many years?

I’m actually starting to wonder if this redesign is intentionally user unfriendly to force readers to scroll more down the page and search longer for what they’re looking for, in some misguided attempt to get more eyes on the advertising. That would be a lousy strategy for a printed newspaper; it’s a catastrophically misguided strategy on the internet. Once I’ve bought a newspaper or had it delivered to my home, there’s a huge barrier to getting a different paper (if there even is a competitor). But if you make my web experience annoying or even unpleasant, I’m a click away from migrating to a competitor.

Its time to shuffle around around the Pen. Whether it is an injury or Izzy’s stuff just isn’t what it used to be…he needs to find another club. They need to try and find a buyer while he still has some value.Why not give Kyle McClellan a chance or call up Chris Perez to close.

Izzy’s problems also include walking too many people. He seems incapable of getting a one-two-three inning any more. Given his atrocious ERA, it’s time to look at someone else as a closer.

Izzy has done great things for the Cardinals over the years, so we by rights should be grateful to him. But nothing and nobody lasts forever. Izzy definitely does not fit the youth movement that has brought us out of the doldrums this season. However much credit the Cards front office, manager, and coaches (let’s make the latter singular, for Duncan) may be due for personnel moves in recent years, they also let Haren, Renteria, and Polanco get away. A 6.60 ERA and a 1-3 record just doesn’t hack it for a “closer”, veteran or no veteran, so how about sending Izzy down to Memphis to see if he’s able to get himself right, or not, and bring up Perez to test his mettle in the Big Show. It’s to be the “best five” as starters, and it needs to be the “best one” as closer.