DOWNTOWN — With National League MVP Albert Pujols topping the charts with a $175 autograph fee, the St. Louis Cardinals announced this afternoon the schedule and cost for the annual autograph pell mell that is Winter Warmup in downtown St. Louis. A total of 81 former or current Cardinals are schedule to attend the autograph sessions that are the headline event at the three-day fanfest, January 17-19.

Admission passes for the event are $40 for adults, $10…

TOWER GROVE — In this crowded field of mailbags and Q&As and message boards and chats and blogs there are only so many questions about Skip Schumaker playing second base to fuel so many different give-and-take platforms. Good thing PostCards has Frank Fuhrig.

The mailbag was loaded with questions answered better elsewhere or answered often before, but on election day into the hopper Fuhrig fired this gem: Who manages the St. Louis Cardinals in 2010?

The poll…

SOUTH GRAND — The only thing worse than Major League Baseball moving toward the World Series becoming some sort of neutral-site circus would be to dismiss the idea entirely and ignore all of the suggestion its inspired.

Coming out of the rain-delayed 2008 World Series and staring at a 2009 postseason that likely won’t end until the first week of November, the drumbeat for change echoed around baseball coverage. “Neutral Site” was the new black. ESPN’s…

TOWER GROVE — I watched Bob Costas’ interview with Willie Mays and Hank Aaron the other day, and while the whole of the interview is brilliant there was a line from it I couldn’t shake. Costas said if there were a Mt. Rushmore for baseball — and why isn’t there, already? — Mays and Aaron would both be on it. Presumably Babe Ruth would be riding shotgun.

That leaves a fourth, the Teddy Roosevelt spot.

Does Teddy…

DOWNTOWN — For parts of four decades Cardinals’ pitching coach Dave Duncan has been a coach at the big-league and this season is his 29th a pitching coach, the most by any person every to hold the position. Manager Tony La Russa is fond of saying that most of the game is pitching and that Duncan handles all of the pitching decisions.

So when La Russa goes into Cooperstown, Duncan will surely go …

Fishing.

Many of the…

TOWER GROVE — The National Baseball Hall of Fame’s ballot for its Veterans Committee was announced this afternoon, and the names on the ballot are only slightly more notable than the names of the voters who receive the ballot.

Cardinal managers Whitey Herzog and Billy Southworth are on the ballot.

Bob Gibson, for example, is on a select committee that gets to vote on that ballot.

The ballot hints at how the Hall is trying to inspire the…

TOWER GROVE — Something tells me the questions are just beginning for the Cardinals this offseason. There’s one big question looming — Where for art thou, Tony? — and many more to follow once we have that answer.

These are capital-Q questions, too.

But in the PostCards mailbag, all the questions are your questions. The first mailbag of the offseason hits on all the big issues. There’s a question about the rotation. There’s a couple questions about…

TOWER GROVE — We temporarily interrupt the natural course of this mailbag to represent the many and different sides of the All-Star Game’s Pujols’ Pickle. After yesterday’s blog and yesterday’s coverage, the inbox at postcards@post-dispatch.com was loaded with questions and comments.

Today, comments. Back to questions tomorrow.

The fanbase is not as one-sided as so many of the chat rooms and message boards implied. Some side with La Russa, though all would have liked to see their mighty…

TOWER GROVE - The offseason starts with a question that may have been the theme of October and an answer that I wish I had handy during the postseason.At one point in time everyone covering the Cardinals mentioned that Game 1 of the NL Division Series was the first time the club had its lineup together. David Eckstein leading off. Albert Pujols batting third. Scott Rolen and Jim Edmonds starting - at that same time! While…