A notes entry:

• Fungoes notes that Pujols projects to be the Triple Crown winner according to ZiPS. Dan Szymborski showed up and posted this long comment that's worth a look:

These are purely computer-generated projections - I like to keep what the computer says and what I think separate. What's taken into account is the past years (with the most recent past year with the heaviest weighting, as is typical with these projections), historical aging trends by player type (this is something I've been meaning to compress into a presentation for a while, but haven't gotten around to it) and historical aging trends for certain indicators. They are translated to the future team's park and my estimate of the run environment (I weight the last 3 years since I don't have a time machine!)... It seems sort of odd for someone who's developed a complex projection tool to be saying this, but I probably have less faith in projections than most of the big stat geeks.

Darn it, I really meant to use the phrase "starting point" in the ZiPS entry. Using ZiPS as a starting point, I'd guess the Cardinals are a 92-93 win team, but I don't have good reads on guys like Mulder and Bigbie. I can see Mulder winning the Cy Young, pitching like he did from 2001 to 2003 (compare Mulder's 2000 and 2005 seasons), and I can see Mulder being released in mid-July.

• Scott of CN has a bias series up. You know, Hector Luna does remind me of a rodent and I'm not exactly sure why. This merits further study. Scott touches on a point about first base coaches. What does Dave McKay do and why has he been doing it for Tony LaRussa for so long? I mean, I once attended a minor league game where the Chicken was the 1B coach for the home team. There's got to be more to Dave McKay.

Having just finished a book on the 1934 season, I've also been wondering what the gut reaction to Dizzy Dean would've been if the media complex had been then what it is now. He bragged, he put down some of his teammates and of course he also had his mid-season strike and suspension (unrelated to the strike). While what I read didn't portray any kind of mean streak, ole Diz would've been perfect fodder for talk radio and the Internet. In 1934 they'd chant "We Want Dean!" at games, but it doesn't take a big leap to see Dean popularly perceived like Terrell Owens in 2006.

A commenter at CN pointed out this weird picture of Pujols wearing a #68 jersey. The Cardinals front office is pondering the merchandising opportunities.

• I've been playing around with pitching numbers from Tangotiger's website and running them through his FIP formula. Some quick and dirty analysis suggests that pitchers as a group decline from Day One, basically putting on 5-10 points of ERA each and every year. Obviously you'll find the occasional Carp swimming upstream or a MattyMo going faster than the current, but it's a consistent slide from start to finish. Tango's charts for K-rates suggest the best way to get power pitching is to pick it off the tree, because after it's been in the barrel for a few years it's rotted some. Anthony Reyes, Anthony Reyes, Anthony Reyes.

Kinda related to what Szymborski and CN are saying, the more I look at pitcher numbers, the more sympathetic I am to the idea of going with your gut. The actuarial models like ZiPS don't seem to have a lot of use beyond serving as a sanity check to avoid a rotation back-end of Tomko, Stephenson and Simontacchi.

• I haven't lived in St. Louis in many, many years and when I go back, I generally don't venture far from the stadium. So I'm wondering if the Civic Courts Building is an inside joke. From Michael's Architecture Page:

On top of the pyramid are two aluminum griffins that are twelve feet tall. Unlike mythological griffins, they have human faces that symbolize human mercy tempering justice.

Wow. Somebody paid money to put those things on top of that building?