I spend too much time thinking about baseball. How bad is it? A few months back I had a dream I was chatting with Dodgers reliever Giovanni Carrarra and his wife while in line for a roller coaster. Maybe there's some Freudian interpretation that I'm missing, but I don't think I'm really supposed to be playing "what-if" scenarios involving random-chance meetings with AAAA relievers and a wife that may or may not exist.

It gets worse. When visiting Acadia National Park a few weeks ago, I saw this picture:

And the first thing I thought of was baseball statistics. You see the ripples in the foreground and the midground? They seem to disappear and converge somewhere in the background. That area in the background, where everything seems so nice and flat and stable, is where baseball statistics work. In the foreground, where the water looks rougher, what we notice first are the waves, and it's bloody hard to explain those fluctuations. The season-to-date has featured a franchise record for wins in April, the Cardinals holding down the fort for .500 ball during Pujols's half-month absence, a pitching collapse in June and now a seven-game winning streak. You even have a wavelet where they struggle to score runs against the crappy Mark Hendickson and the next day bombard All-Star starter Brad Penny. It defies substantive analysis. It's like the butterfly effect. The whole thing is too unstable and our measurements too clumsy to make any kind of sense of the results on a day-to-day, week-to-week or even month-to-month basis.

Maybe year-to-year as well. Watching the games over the weekend (and listening to the game that Fox and MLB wouldn't let me watch), I'm ready to conclude that the 2006 team isn't all that different overall from the 2005 team. Breaking it down, C, 1B, 2B and SS are basically a combined wash versus last year, maybe a slight improvement. There's a merry-go-round for RF, 3B and CF: Encarnacion replaces 2005 Nuñez/injured Rolen, Rolen replaces 2005 Edmonds, Edmonds replaces 2005 Sanders/Walker. While he managed a respectable OBP, Honest Abe has a 355 OPS -- OPS, not OBP -- in 2006 to remind us that the stable talent just wasn't that good. The non-Sanders/Walker corner outfielder -- the two geezers combined for 610 at-bats -- is more or less the same in 2006. The bench looks similar to a year ago.

On the pitching side, in spite of the waves, Carpenter, Marquis and Suppan aren't that different talent-wise from last year. Carpenter elevated his game to Gibson standards in June and July 2005, but he also had a dull April and poor September. I don't want to say he was lucky, but he just couldn't maintain that summer pace. Nobody can. While Mulder has declined from a year ago, he was getting by on Swamp Gas in 2005 more than stuff or command. Talent-wise that's at worst a wash with Reyes. Morris-Weaver is also tricky; both once had "electric stuff" and were/are learning how to deal with the deterioration of said stuff. With a significant caveat that comes with shoulder surgery, I suppose there's an edge to Morris talent-wise. Mulder could come back (the Mulder mending article from Goold is weird) to displace the worst of the bunch, so there isn't much in the way of talent loss here, assuming Carpenter stays healthy.

In the bullpen, I don't know how Isringhausen-2005 managed a 200 ERA+, as he just isn't that good. Give another slight edge to the 2005 squad talent-wise there on the theory than maybe he's lost something, even though I haven't detected it. Looper is Tavarez, Wainwright is Al Reyes (Gio Carrara's inspiration), Hancock is Thompson, the lefties are blah and whoever is Eldred.

OK, so maybe the team is a couple of games worse in terms of mythical stable talent. That isn't to say I'm that high on the 2006 team. Rather, the more I think about the 2005 team, the more I wonder how the heck they did it. The key word is almost certainly overachievement. We statboys are supposed to call that career years or something. After a lackluster offseason Brian Gunn commented that we were seeing the end of an era. Upon further review, I think he got it wrong, that 2004 was the exception and the era of beautiful baseball only lasted one year.

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For reasons that should be clear to all concerned, I believe the Kearns trade was awful for the Reds. Kearns may well have been the Reds' best player, offense and defense considered. The thing I've been wondering about is whether it makes him more available to the Cardinals. It seemed to me the Reds didn't value him that highly while also not wanting to trade him inside the division. OK, worrying about a non-valued player's destination doesn't make much sense, but this was an odd trade. Anyway, as far as Kearns-as-LF is concerned, on the one hand that division restriction is removed obviously and on the other you have Jim Bowden, the GM that drafted and helped develop Kearns. That doesn't sound too promising, does it? I suppose I should hope that Chris Duncan makes that moot.