As you've probably heard, Cal Eldred has retired. It's a bit hard to wax poetic about a middle reliever who was only with the club for a few years, although his return following a serious heart problem obviously was a great story. Looking back at the 2005 season, the 9th inning GIDP he induced against the Dodgers was one of the highlights of the season, as the Cardinals battled back to win in extras. I guess I got used to having Old Man Eldred around, which is something of a surprise considering his first impression was looking completely overwhelmed in the 2003 opener against the Brewers.

While I'm thinking about it, I wanted to mention the other recent retiree Larry Walker. If my corporate masters suggested my job performance might improve if they stuck a needle in my neck once a month, then I'd tell them to go fly a kite. Walker didn't have to do what he did, and I, for one, appreciate it. I suppose the question of whether Walker should've been benched in the playoffs had to be asked, but as ungrateful as it sounded, I wish it hadn't been.

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With Eldred, Walker and others departing, the Cardinals naturally have some big holes to fill. Since the Cardinals won't win a lot of bidding wars for the premium free agents, and since they're in win-now mode and they don't have any redundancies at the major league level, they need prospects either to keep or to trade. Nothing new there. Part of the problem with being in win-now mode though is that the Cardinals have had lower draft picks and another part of the problem is they can lose draft picks when they sign free agents. For example, the Cardinals lost their first and second round picks in 2002 -- guys who would be arriving just about now -- when they signed Izzy and Tino (the signing that keeps on giving). So how does a mid-market contender build a good farm system?

The Post-Dispatch has a special series covering one solution. Jeff Luhnow's closed his spreadsheets so he can go build a Latin American program for the Cardinals. This could be a huge deal, and it's great to see the Post-Dispatch going into this kind of depth. Read it all and save it to your hard drive.

One related matter I'll point out is Nate Silver's article back in July at Baseball Prospectus, which in turn pointed out this article on population growth. The Dominican is poor, but its economy is considered "developing" and the result has been a population boom. As Silver put it:

The exponential growth we’ve seen in Latin American ballplayers since 1985 is a mirror of the exponential growth in populations of those countries during that period. At the risk of sounding a bit crude, more Latin American babies means more Latin American shortstops... But birth rates in places like Mexico and the Dominican Republic are more than 50 percent higher than in the United States... And so, it’s almost certain that the number of Latin American born players in the Major Leagues is going to continue to increase over the next 15-25 years.