BL Blogcast: Adam Wainwright’s Show & Tell
DOWNTOWN — The story as you’ve read it often in print and heard it more often on the radio is that St. Louis Cardinals Adam Wainwright was pulled into the video room earlier this season by teammate Chris Carpenter to see where his season was going awry.
It’s the arm angle, of course. Wainwright has felt better ever since.
Wainwright saw in one clip how his arm was up higher — like it used to be when he was a green pitcher — and that the angle was throwing off not just his breaking pitches, but his fastball. His two-seam fastball. The pitch that he used to get ahead, get outs and get on with the game. The “arm slot” phrase is one that is often easier to write than it is too explain. We know last season Matt Clement struggled with his, Mark Mulder changed his and the Cardinals drafted a few players because they were thought to have a classic one. But just how many ways can we say “arm angle” and throw around the 9 o’clocks and 11 o’clocks and sidearms without submitting visual evidence?
As Wainwright finds himself pitching in the role of stopper tonight opposite burgeoning star Matt Cain and against the San Francisco Giants, Bird Land’s new toy offered Wainwright the chance to show instead of tell what pitchers talk about when they talk about arm angle.
But first, he has to explain what’s the deal with the starters’ new upper-lip caterpillars:
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Derrick Goold said he was going to Mizzou for capital-J journalism, but after growing up in the Time Zone Baseball Forgot he was really drawn to MU sitting between two major-league cities. Goold joined the Post-Dispatch in 2001 after working for The Times-Picayune and Rocky Mountain News, covering sports from LSU to NHL and every level of baseball in between. 
Nice micro-journalism, Derrick. Good stuff!!