Good afternoon. Hope you’re all having a fine day. The Cardinals have won seven of their last nine. The Rams can’t play any worse than they did in Sunday’s 14-point loss at Washington. Mizzou football is nearing its 2015 SEC opener, Saturday night at Kentucky. The Blues’ exhibition-game season is underway. So much sports. Our cups are full.
St. Louis stadium task force leader Dave Peacock has been proactive in approaching NFL owners about the St. Louis plan.
I’m late for my afternoon nap — a necessary when one arises at 3:45 a.m. each weekday to prepare for hot-take sports radio — so please pardon my typos.
Presenting: your latest serving of the Daily Bernie Bits …
For several months I’ve been writing about, and discussing, the importance of the NFL’s six-owner committee appointed by commissioner Rodger Goodell to oversee the process that could lead to the league’s return to Los Angeles in 2016.
The six owners are Robert Kraft (New England), John Mara (NY Giants), Art Rooney II (Pittsburgh), Clark Hunt (Kansas City), Robert McNair (Houston) and Jerry Richardson (Carolina.)
To review my opinion: I strongly believe the St. Louis task force led by Dave Peacock and Bob Blitz has the committee’s support as long as STL finalizes plans to build a new football stadium on the north riverfront downtown. Without the stadium, we can forget about it.
The stadium is one significant factor in a successful outcome for St. Louis.
The other: the authority and clout of the six-owner committee to control the decision on what should be done (or not done) to relocate a team, or two, to Los Angeles. If the committee has major influence, if the committee’s recommendation will be followed by the other league owners, then St. Louis should be in good shape.
Unless, of course, the committee of six turns out to be as untrustworthy and dollar-driven as some of the league’s more notorious greedheads.
There’s hope.
My personal hope is in my belief that Kraft, Hunt, Mara, Rooney, Richardson and McNair will be fair and ethical and respectful of St. Louis and the genuine effort that’s being made here to preserve NFL football. I’m not saying these gentlemen are saints, but if you’re asking me if I think they have a collective conscience, my answer would be yes. If nothing else, I am optimistic.
If there’s a stadium-related problem that must be solved, and the league tells you how to go about it, and you work hard to achieve a solution, and you make the financial commitment to make it happen — then you don’t deserve to lose your NFL franchise. Period. The six-man committee’s job — among other things — is to cut through the campaigning, the lobbying, the misinformation and the scheming. And make a rather simple, merit-based decision. This committee is not only capable of doing that; I believe it’s determined to do it.
My other hope comes from a story written by Sam Farmer of the Los Angeles Times.
Some excerpts:
“The committee … along with commissioner Roger Goodell, will take a more prominent role in the proceedings in the next few weeks … in the coming weeks, people such as NFL executive vice president Eric Grubman, for months the point man on L.A., will step into the background and defer to Goodell and the committee … it’s no coincidence that influential group includes the chairmen of the Stadium Committee (Rooney), Broadcast Committee (Kraft), Finance Committee (McNair), International Committee (Hunt), and Management Council (Mara).
“On the surface, this might seem like a subtle change — and it might be. The process has been glacial, and the situation hasn’t changed much since the spring, when the Chargers and Raiders got the necessary entitlements on their joint project in Carson to pull even with the Rams in Inglewood.
“But, with the league heading into its fall meetings in New York in the second week of October, this could represent a major shift. The owners are the ultimate decision makers and may choose to nudge the L.A. situation along by making some actual decisions.”
This is encouraging.
Again … because I have faith in the six-owner committee to be fair, and unless something wholly unforeseen occurs I believe they’ll stand with St. Louis in the end.
Why? A few reasons that should be obvious to anyone that has common sense and minimal honesty: (1) never in league history has the NFL abandoned a market that’s willing to put up a vast sum of public dollars to construct a new stadium; (2) St. Louis has done a lot more than San Diego and Oakland to rapidly resolve its stadium problem; it isn’t even close; (3) the Chargers and Raiders play in the league’s worst stadiums, places that make the Edward Jones Dome look like a architectural masterpiece by comparison; (4) if two California-based teams clearly need new stadiums and are willing to partner to build one together, then why would you take away a team from another region and penalize the city that’s close to finalizing a new stadium to keep it’s team?; (5) these six owners know that Rams owner Stan Kroenke has refused to be participate in the process here, which demonstrates a blatant disregard for the rules covered in the league’s official relocation guidelines.
The other good news here is Grubman being moved to the side.
This will at least enhance the likelihood of a fair process.
Meanwhile, Peacock has taken the St. Louis case directly to the owners including most (if not all) members of the six-man committee.
Peacock won’t discuss those meetings, but one source close to a committee member tells me Peacock did an outstanding job of debunking some of the misinformation and false perceptions perpetuated by pro-Kroenke operatives.
In other words, instead of sitting back and blindly trusting the likes of Grubman, Peacock wisely realized he had to take a more proactive approach to saving NFL football here. If motivated to do so, the NFL may still find a way to rig this process, and poison it with corruption — greed does this to people, you see — but it won’t be because Peacock naively believed everything would just fall into place for St. Louis if our town did the right thing.
Peacock is fully alert here; he steered around the slime and tried to cultivate the people that matter … the people that have indicated a strong desire to play this relocation game straight and be as fair as possible to all parties.
That would be the Big Six committee.
Which I’ve been touting for months.
OK, what about Goodell?
I agree with Sam Farmer’s view: “Although it’s unlikely Goodell would go against the recommendation of an L.A. committee he appointed, it’s also safe to assume he has some ability to influence and shape the opinion that comes out of that room.”
And Goodell could go either way here. He’s established a rapport with Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon, and has encouraged Nixon to stay on course with the stadium initiative. Nixon believes Goodell will treat St. Louis fairly. I’ve known Goodell for three decades, and I’ve liked and admired him. And Goodell was on STL’s side during the expansion-team debacle.
Goodell’s rise from humble beginnings in the NFL office to the top spot is impressive. But there’s been so much turmoil swirling around the commissioner these days, I don’t know what to think anymore. I initially thought he’d be fair to St. Louis — and I still want to believe that — but I can’t be sure.
Part of me finds it difficult to believe that Goodell would mislead a sitting governor that has made such a vigorous effort to follow the NFL’s advice on the stadium front … but again, I just don’t know about Rodger. Let’s just hope the six-owner committee takes charge of this mess, to handle it with decency and honesty. As I’ve been writing for quite some time now, it’s our best shot at keeping the Rams or being accommodated in another way by the NFL.
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If he hasn’t started on it already, Peacock soon will be making the pro-stadium case to the St. Louis Board of Aldermen. As a city resident and taxpayer I support the stadium for many reasons. My fellow citizens are entitled to their own views on this, and I’m not here to twist arms or change minds. But it’s always a good idea to communicate with elected officials.
So here’s a link that will put you in touch with the Alderman that reps your district.
The Cardinals close out their three-game home series with Cincinnati tonight at Busch Stadium. They’ll be looking to complete a sweep, but something else is at stake. The struggling Lance Lynn will get the start and a chance to reverse an ominous trend. As of now, there is simply no justifiable reason to make Lynn a member of the four-man postseason rotation. His pitching has eroded.
Just a quick recap…
First 15 starts
2.53 ERA
2.53 Fielding Independent ERA
25% K rate
8% BB rate
3.13 K/BB ratio
11.2 base runners per 9 innings
0.59 homers per 9 innings
.638 opponents’ OPS
Last 13 starts
4.30 ERA
4.64 Fielding Independent ERA
19% K rate
11% BB rate
1.76 K/BB ratio
15.4 base runners per 9 innings
1.07 homers per 9 innings
.821 opponents’ OPS
The numbers should be easy to understand. They reveal a decline in performance. But it isn’t too late for Lynn; he can reestablish command of his fastball, and maybe use a more enlightened approach by mixing in other pitches, something soft, so hitters aren’t sitting on his four-seam fastball and sinking fastball. But unless there’s an injury or a sudden collapse elsewhere in this rotation, the Cardinals’ four-best starters right now are Carlos Martinez, John Lackey, Jaime Garcia and Michael Wacha. … In his career starts working with Tony Cruz, Lynn has a 4.06 ERA going into tonight’s assignment.
Yes, it really is all about pitching — well, most of it, anyway. During their 2-8 skid that began Sept. 2 the Cardinals had a 5.79 staff ERA, with a 6.00 rotation ERA. But in their last nine games (7-2 record) the overall ERA is 3.15, with a rotation ERA of 2.88. And six quality starts in nine outings … the Cardinals still lead the majors with 102 quality starts, seven more than the Mets, who are second on the list. The Cardinals have gotten a quality start in two-thirds of their games this season, winning just under 74 percent of those contests. And when the Cards fail to get a quality start in a game? Their record is 20-29.
The Pittsburgh Pirates are off to a terrific start to their 10-game road trip to Los Angeles, Colorado and Chicago, having won four of the first five games. They Pirates can clinch a wild-card playoff spot with a win at Coors Field tonight. At 91-60 the Pirates trail the first-place Cardinals by four games with 11 remaining for both teams and are hoping to cut into the STL lead in time for the teams’ three-game series at Pittsburgh, which opens Monday. Before that, the Bucs will play two at Colorado and then three vs. the Cubs at Wrigley Field over the weekend. “Our guys have great presence,” manager Clint Hurdle told reporters in Denver last night. “We’re in the moment. We do what we got to do today. We’re not looking at yesterday. We’re not looking at the team behind us. We’re not looking at tomorrow or the team in front of us. We need to take care of our game.”
The third-place Cubs (89-62) go for their 90th win of the season tonight (vs. Milwaukee) at Wrigley Field. The last time the Cubs won at least 90 games was 2008; before that it happened in 1998. The Cubs were pleased with their recent performances in two series against the Cardinals; the Cubs won two of three games at Busch Stadium and two of three at Wrigley Field. “I think we’re a lot better now than we were earlier in the season,” baseball CEO Theo Epstein told reporters who cover the Cubs. “We’re playing good baseball, and you want to play teams like (the Cardinals) when players are feeling good about themselves…Look what it takes to beat us right now. You’ve got to show up and do a lot of things right to beat us right now the way we’re playing. It’s on us to keep playing that way.”
Thanks for reading …
–Bernie
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