LOS ANGELES — Through an intermediary, St. Louis Cardinals third baseman Troy Glaus has received suggestions from pinch-hitter guru — and, you’ll recall, hitting coach to the stars (OK, well, Shaq) — John Mabry. In the past week or so, Joe Thurston picked Mabry’s brain for suggestions on how to better prepare to be all but exclusively a pinch hitter, and he took that info to Glaus.

Mabry, as he has done with others since his time…

LOS ANGELES –For Troy Glaus, it has been seven years. For John Smoltz, it’s 17.

The two St. Louis Cardinals veterans know a thing or seven about what it takes to be successful in the postseason, and they each have personal hardware as an October spoil. Glaus won the World Series MVP in 2002 with the Los Angeles Angels, and Smoltz, the winningest postseason pitcher ever, won the National League Championship Series MVP back in 1992….

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…

DOWNTOWN — For the second time in as many playoff games, St. Louis Cardinals prospect third baseman and St. Louis native David Freese homered to provide the only run Triple-A Memphis needed.

In the clincher of the Redbirds first-round playoff series against Albuquerque, Freese hit a opposite field home run that proved the difference in a 1-0 victory. Last night, in Memphis, Freese broke a scoreless tie in the sixth inning of the Pacific Coast League championship…

TOWER GROVE — Even though his team has gone unbeaten in 11 consecutive series and will be visiting a division rival that is 24 1/2 games back in the race, manager Tony La Russa will have that familiar, unsettled, and caustic sensation in his gut before tonight’s game at PNC Park.

Blame those Baseball Gods.

As if delivering a sermon from the mount atop the NL Central standings, La Russa has invoked the phrase “baseball gods” at…

TOWER GROVE — Twice this season, St. Louis Cardinals starter Joel Pineiro has had streaks of four consecutive starts without walking a batter. Thirteen times this summer, he has started a game and not allowed a walk. For this, he credits his father.

“My dad taught me that,” he said this past weekend. “You don’t want to walk people. You don’t want to let them get on base. You don’t want to help them start their…

TOWER GROVE — John Smoltz, the St. Louis Cardinals’ recent booster shot for their rotation, freely admits that he’s had a lot of time to think about things in his highly decorated major-league career, and one day he decided to figure out his personal odometer.

For every year of his big-league career but this one, Smoltz had the same route to the ballpark. It was a 70-mile round trip from his house to the parking lot…

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…

HOUSTON — St. Louis Cardinals third baseman Mark DeRosa didn’t see his first hit for his new team as a relief. He described it as progress.

In DeRosa’s first at-bat Monday night at Minute Maid Park, he stung a single to left field and a couple at-bats later he had his second hit of the game and his second hit as a Redbird. Like the first one, DeRosa’s hit went to the left side of the…

TOWER GROVE — On the last day of the first half of the Major League Baseball season, the St. Louis Cardinals put the band back together and celebrated two returns — one actual, one implied.

With Kyle Lohse off the disabled list in time to make a start Sunday, that mustachioed mafia of starters had its five arms back in the rotation, ready and healthy for the second-half. With Ryan Ludwick reanimated on that road-trip finish…

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…

TOWER GROVE — The first big headache and the first big trade of John Mozeliak’s tenure as general manager of the St. Louis Cardinals are forever linked because he used one as the aspirin to cure the other.

At Mozeliak’s first Winter Meetings at the helm of the Cardinals, his manager popped off publicly about a ruptured relationship with third baseman, Scott Rolen, and how Rolen had to re-earn some “points” with the organization and with…

TOWER GROVE — The St. Louis Cardinals have managed three runs total in the first two games of the series that concludes tonight at PNC Park. Albert Pujols has driven in two of those three runs. Two of the three runs have come from solo home runs, by Pujols and Skip Schumaker.

Where has all the offense gone? Why, it’s on rehab.

The R&R of what Bernie Miklasz called appropriately this morning the Cardinals’ “first crisis stage…

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…

JUPITER, Fla. — It took one coach to hold the pitching machine so that it pointed down, another coach to feed the machine baseballs and two St. Louis Cardinals teammates/spotters to make sure Skip Schumaker wasn’t putting himself too far into harm’s way.

“Those grounders,” Schumaker said, “were coming in hot. Hot.“

The education of an infielder continued this morning on the backfields of Roger Dean Stadium with the help of a pitching machine dialed up almost as…