TOWER GROVE — Maybe it’s the time of year, what with the season just ending and the playoffs still going on. Maybe it’s how the season ended, with a St. Louis Cardinals team riding high expectations and fizzling when it mattered most. Maybe it’s a fanbase adopting the win-now attitude shown by the front office.

Maybe it’s just a lack of patience.

Whatever the reason, the Bird Land Community Top 21 is two votes old and already…

TOWER GROVE — As detailed in the first of Joe Strauss’ post-season autopsies on the St. Louis Cardinals, manager Tony La Russa said a year he enjoyed with a team he professed a fondness for “from Day 1 of spring training really” left a sour, morning-mouth taste because of the way things finished. Not just the sweep in the National League Division Series, but specifically the performance in Game 3 of the playoffs.

“The first two games…

TOWER GROVE — As St. Louis Cardinals general manager John Mozeliak has been describing it recently, he and manager Tony La Russa have been in “constant contact” over the past week or so about the playoff roster. Mozeliak has said that La Russa carries an informal final say with the roster because it is La Russa who will pull the levers and push the buttons and deploy the pinch runners available to him on said…

TOWER GROVE — It was only last year, barely more than 13 months ago, that the St. Louis Cardinals were changing Mark Mulder’s arm slot and still waiting to see if Matt Clement could pitch his way to the majors. General manager John Mozeliak called Clement “a lottery ticket”, and really the description applied to Mulder as well.

The Cardinals banked plenty in 2008 on what the scratch of a coin revealed.

This year, as the Cardinals…

TOWER GROVE — Having already added an All-Star elite bat, a grinder third baseman and a second-chance middle infielder to his executive-of-the-year bid, St. Louis Cardinals general manager John Mozeliak is poised this afternoon to add a future Hall of Famer to the club’s pitching staff. Righthander John Smoltz is expected to finalize a deal with the Cardinals if he clears waivers by noon today, Post-Dispatch baseball scribe Joe Strauss was the first to report last…

TOWER GROVE — The accepted halfway spot of the Major League Baseball season is the midsummer classic, the All-Star Game, but for the St. Louis Cardinals the mathematical midpoint of the year came sometime during the flight to Cincinnati on Thursday night.

The Cardinals are the first National League team to complete 81 games, and they arrive at Game No. 82 tonight at Great American Ball Park in a virtual tie for the lead in the…

DOWNTOWN — Before he and his baseball ops staff took a record plunge into international waters, St. Louis Cardinals general manager John Mozeliak jetted down to the Dominican Republic to see for himself the player that had caught the eyes of his people.

Mozeliak met with outfielder Wagner Mateo. He met with Mateo’s representative, and he met with Mateo’s parents. Mozeliak said Thursday, the day the Cardinals announced they had agreed to terms with the 16-year-old…

TOWER GROVE — The St. Louis Cardinals showed a pulse offensively Tuesday night in Florida, but it still wasn’t enough as they failed to score more than three runs for the 12th time in 16 games. They have produced the fewest runs and the fewest baserunners in baseball since the beginning of May. They have the lowest on-base percentage (.276) this month in the National League.

But, hey, they conjured their fourth three-run inning in the…

TOWER GROVE — What the St. Louis Cardinals have needed for at least several weeks was articulated as what the club wants in the coming weeks Monday when general manager John Mozeliak said he’s shopping for a bat, and that he’s checking the trade blocks for a third baseman who can spur the offense.

He all but wrote the opening lines of a want ad in his comments to the gathered media Monday:

HELP WANTED: BAT. Preferably…

CREVE COEUR — It’s a story worth telling again: As the 28th pick of the 2005 draft approached for the St. Louis Cardinals, their plan was to take the athletic shortstop from Georgia Tech, a middle infielder who many believed had a safe-best and projectable path to the majors. And then they caught wind that another team was sniffing around the high school, high-ceiling player the Cardinals planned to take 30th.

The Cardinals, led by Jeff…

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — The best way that St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa believed he could keep Skip Schumaker’s bat in the lineup was to put his glove to use elsewhere.

The official pronouncements came in the past week from GM John Mozeliak and La Russa that Schumaker will open the regular-season as the Cardinals’ starting second baseman — will, in fact, be now designated on the roster as a capital-I Infielder. Schumaker openly…

TOWER GROVE — When it comes to the St. Louis Cardinals, the question “Who’s on first?” is rhetorical. You might as well ask who is hitting eighth. What’s going on at second was discussed in this morning’s Post-Dispatch with Joe Strauss’ latest dispatch from Jupiter, Fla. But when it comes to wondering which player will be at third base on Opening Day …

Don’t know.

Just yet.

The 11th-hour news that incumbent third baseman Troy Glaus required a January surgery…

DOWNTOWN — Cardinals starter Todd Wellemeyer has said a few times this offseason that his goal for 2009 — if really pressed to come clean about it — is to pitch in a certain July game at Busch Stadium.

“I’d like to be in that midsummer classic,” Wellemeyer said. “It’s here. That would be neat. An All-Star.”

First thing’s first. Now, at least, he has a contract for 2009 finalized.

Wellemeyer and outfielder Chris Duncan agreed to terms Monday…

DOWNTOWN — The St. Louis Cardinals top prospect Colby Rasmus resisted the team’s request that he go play winter ball, make up for the at-bats he lost to injury last season and regain some momentum for the 2009 spring training. He said he needed a break.

On Sunday, he showed what he did with that time away.

A significantly bulked-up Rasmus arrived at the 13th annual Winter Warm-up on Sunday, explaining his winter was spent with the weights,…

DOWNTOWN — Infielder Adam Kennedy guesstimated that a healthy Chris Carpenter is worth an additional 15 or 20 wins in a season, and while that is certainly a generous theory it is laced with truth: A healthy ace Carpenter has always meant one thing for the Cardinals.

October.

As detailed in this morning’s paper by colleague Joe Strauss (”Carpenter gives upbeat report”), Carpenter and the St. Louis Cardinals are optimistic about how he’s recovering from his nerve issue….