Not easy for a Cards fan to watch this season. It isn't just the losing. Sometimes you just don't have a great team and that's that (ask Bubba about the Braves). Hell, sometimes that's easier. What is painful is to watch a team become less than the sum of it's parts. Lack of clutch hitting, pitching and making big plays is OK on occasion. It doesn't work for 75% of a season. The errors that show up in the box score are frustrating but the mental errors, poor execution and sloppy play is just inexcusable for guys making millions to do one thing, play baseball... I realize they aren't robots but when you make it to the bigs, you should know what base to throw to, where you should be on any given play, the fundamentals of base running and when to take a pitch or two and when you can swing freely... Swinging at a first pitch, down by two in the 9th, after the two men in front of you walked, should be an executable offense...

At the end of the day, this team is just hard to watch and the season is really hard to get into. I hope it turns around but I am not optimistic. Never been a Matheny basher and won't start now. But when the day comes to replace him, I won't be too upset. I think he's grown about as much as he's going to grow, in terms of evolving into a great manager. Unfortunately, his growth has stopped well short of "great".

I hear a lot of talk about who we could play in the Wild Card game. All I have to say to that is "Payoffs? Are you kidding me? Playoffs? I'm hoping we can just win a game..."