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MLB Power Rankings: Where MLB FanHouse's editors, writers and bloggers team up to break down the who's who and the what's what in the baseball world.

While it's entirely possible the Blue Jays do hit a snag, isn't it about time columnists across the internet stopped doing Can the Blue Jays Really Keep This Up? pieces by now? I've seen at least 10 in the past three weeks. There are almost as many The Rangers Are For Real posts. The discrepancy in the media's faith in those two is likely due to the divisions in which the teams reside, but seven weeks isn't a small sample. At some point, you have to start giving credit where it's due.

After a nearly seamless start to the season, the St. Louis Cardinals are all-of-a-sudden reeling. Tuesday night, they lost 7-1 to the hapless Pirates, but that likely wasn't the worst occurrence. A single game in a season of 162 isn't a really huge deal, after all. Losing your power-hitting protection for Albert Pujols, however, is.

Ryan Ludwick gave chase to a ball off the bat of Nyjer Morgan early in the game and came up lame with a strained right hamstring. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Tony LaRussa anticipates the Cardinals will have to put Ludwick on the disabled list -- where he'd join fellow starting outfielder Rick Ankiel.

Categorically Speaking is designed specifically for Rotisserie GM's. The information is great for all fantasy baseball formats, but for those of you who could use some help bolstering a specific roto category, this is for you. We're going to pay close attention to players who might be readily available on your waiver wire or who you might target in non-blockbuster trade talks.

Over the past few weeks nobody has been driving in runners like Evan Longoria. His 28 RBI over the last 14 days is tops in Major League Baseball, and head and shoulders better then anyone else. But, he's not available in any fantasy leagues and you're not prying him away from the owner who drafted him for anywhere close to fair value.

Let's look elsewhere for some help if your rotisserie team needs some more RBI.

MLB Power Rankings: Where we care what you've done for us lately when we break down the who's who and the what's what in the baseball world each week.

HAVE YOU HEARD? YANKEE STADIUM HAS A WIND TUNNEL!!! Does it matter/is it real? Probably not. In fact, it might actually be on the other end of the spectrum of importance when compared to MLB Power Rankings. This week, we welcome another brand new No. 1 at the top of our rankings, although, all spoiler alerts aside, it's from the same division as last week! Debate the quality of your team, after the jump.

We haven't even completed two full weeks of the Major League Baseball season yet, but the (arguably) best rivalry in the National League is already giving us a taste of what an exciting race the NL Central could be this year. With all due respect to the Reds, Astros, Brewers and Pirates, and with all due disclaimers about how long the baseball season is, it seems blatantly obvious the two best teams in the division are the Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals.

For the past three days, the two teams have put on an entertaining show for anyone fortunate enough to be watching. Each game went down the wire, with both teams showing a flair for the dramatic.

FanHouse continues its 2009 MLB Preview with a look at the St. Louis Cardinals.

The pride and joy of Gateway City, the Cardinals certainly have a stacked resume of success both historically and recently. In Tony La Russa's 13 seasons, the Cardinals have reached the playoffs seven times -- which, in turn has yielded two trips to the World Series and one championship. In that span, they have only finished below .500 three times, while winning at least 93 games five times.

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* Former Orioles skipper Leo Mazzone on his old employer: "Once I got there and saw how they operated compared to the Braves, I knew I made a mistake the first week of spring training," he said, before chuckling and adding, "I said to myself, 'You know what? I done messed up.' The lack of organization. The lack of discipline. The lack of overall professionalism. I was shocked, and I couldn't believe it."

After news leaked out yesterday that the Cardinals were interested in entering the bidding for A.J. Burnett, GM John Mozeliak pretty quickly started denying those rumors. Of course, he only denied that the Cards were interested in Burnett. It's still pretty clear that the team is looking to add pitching, though now his focus seems to be more on doing it via a trade involving his surplus of outfielders.

Given the amount of money that Burnett is likely to command coupled with the amount of starts he's likely to make every year, it's hard to blame St. Louis for this approach. It's always hard to see who's available on the trade market and who isn't, but an offer of Ryan Ludwick or Rick Ankiel could probably elicit a pretty positive response that could result in some solid Chris Carpenter insurance or some bullpen help if Carpenter is indeed healthy.

Looking at the makeup of the Cardinals outfield, I'd guess that Ankiel is a lot more likely to be dealt than Ludwick at the moment, simply because he's the most valuable of their left-handed hitters (which includes Chris Duncan, Skip Schumaker, and Colby Rasmus) while Ludwick is the only right-handed bat they have in the outfield at the moment. From there, the Cards will likely size up what's available and then decide who they want to move out of the trio of Ankiel, Duncan, and Schumaker.

It looked like the Cardinals were finally going to catch a break this week. After a year of hard luck and injuries, the Brewers lost four straight games to the Cubs and the Cards, who were left for dead after a four-game sweep of their own at the hands of the Brew Crew last week, are suddenly tied for the NL Wild Card lead again. Things didn't stay positive for long, as news out of St. Louis today makes it seem likely that Chris Duncan is out for the year.

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Duncan's back injury is a herniated disc, which is much more serious than the previous diagnosis of a bulging disc. It may require surgery and while John Mozeliak won't rule out the chances that he'll be back this year, things look pretty bleak. The injections the team has been trying to treat the injury with haven't been helping and it seems to me like going under the knife is a pretty likely outcome for Duncan.

I want to say that the Cardinals have had nothing but bad luck this year, but they're in contention in one of the best divisions in baseball despite a slew of injuries and a roster that's just not as talented as their rivals in Chicago or Milwaukee. I don't know how they're doing it and I've written them off at least nine teams this year, so I'm just going to assume that this is another attempt of Tony La Russa's to spite me.

For a couple months now, skeptics (read: me) have expected the Cardinals to fold up and collapse in the National League Central race. They stubbornly refused to do so and with a four game series against the Brewers this week, they had a chance to prove that they were really for real. Instead, they got swept by the Brewers and find themselves three games behind them for the NL Wild Card as July closes up.

The kicker is that the Cards had leads in three of the four games and their bullpen took three losses in the series. With a chance to salvage one win from the series and stay within a game of Milwaukee, Ryan Franklin served up a two-run homer to Ryan Braun in the ninth inning last night to turn a 3-2 lead into a 4-3 loss. The Cards' pen has been a problem all year, but this disaster of a week suddenly puts their playoff push in jeopardy.

Of course, it's not fair to just blame the bullpen. They only scored nine runs in the four game series and barely even presented a road block to the cruising CC Sabathia on Wednesday night. Now that Chris Duncan is back on the DL, the Cards could probably use both a bat and several relievers before next Friday. That's a tall task for new GM John Mozeliak. The Cards' aren't out of the race yet, but if they don't right the ship in the next week or so, they will be.