FanHouse John Mozeliak

Footprints in the Snow is FanHouse's look at the paths to be forged by MLB teams this winter as they look ahead to 2010.

The Cardinals increased their win total from 86 to 91 in 2009, and in so doing they won the National League Central going away. They had both the presumptive NL MVP (Albert Pujols) and two of the top candidates for the NL Cy Young (Adam Wainwright and Chris Carpenter) on their club.

Despite that very good season, there were promptly dumped out of the playoffs in three games by the Dodgers, and they suddenly find themselves facing an uncertain offseason with key free agents and the contract of a certain once-in-a-generation first baseman looming over everything. To say this offseason is important for the Cardinals would be an understatement.

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Matt Holliday will not be signing a contract extension in St. Louis. If he returns to the Cardinals in 2010, it will almost certainly be via the open market and at top dollar value. Hey, his agent is Scott Boras. What did you expect?

We've known all that for awhile. We knew that when Holliday was with the A's, just like we did when he was a Rockie.

Holliday alone is not what is so interesting about the deal that sent him from Oakland to St. Louis Friday afternoon. Rather it is Holliday's addition viewed through the prism of the first-place Cardinals.

The Cards are 53-46, 1 1/2 games clear of the rival Cubs in the NL Central, but only three up on the fourth-place Brewers. They added Mark DeRosa at the end of last month and now have the best hitter known to be available at the deadline in their lineup protecting the game's best player -- Albert Pujols.

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CBS Sports' Danny Knobler is reporting on his blog that St. Louis Cardinals general manager John Mozeliak is placing Troy Glaus' odds of returning to the Cardinals' lineup in 2009 as "50-50." Given that Glaus is currently recovering from surgery on a shoulder that's bothered him on and off for six years and the constant changing of his return timetable, this isn't really surprising news, but I don't suspect that that makes it any easier for the Cardinals to hear.

If Glaus can't make it back (and to be fair, a 50-50 chance he doesn't return means that there's a 50-50 chance he does), the Cardinals are going to need more help from someone at third base. Neither Joe Thurston (.224/.336/.364) nor Brian Barden (.259/.315/.414) have been particularly good in Glaus' absence, and Tony La Russa has already chewed up and spit out rookie David Freese, who got 22 miserable at-bats before being demoted back to Triple-A Memphis.

Usually when a team benches one of their players it's because he is doing the team harm. That's definitely the case with Khalil Greene in St. Louis. His OPS is .586 and he's done a poor job defensively as well, each of which is reason enough for the Cardinals to try out a new shortstop for the immediate future.

And that's what they're going to do. Tony La Russa told Greene that he'll move into a utility role for the immediate future, but his play is only part of the reason. The other part is the damage that Greene is doing to himself as a result of his struggles. It seems that Greene isn't able to leave his troubles in his locker at the end of the day.

There's no doubt that the St. Louis Cardinals and their fans had their fingers crossed this season that Chris Carpenter would be able to get through an entire season healthy after missing most of the last two seasons. After seeing the way he pitched in his first start of the season, they probably broke those fingers for them being crossed so hard. Of course their hopes came to an end when Carpenter was placed on the disabled list on Wednesday.

Now the question becomes how much time is Carpenter going to miss because of his strained rib cage. Well, if you ask Carpenter's manager Tony La Russa, he'll tell you that you shouldn't hold your breath. La Russa thinks Carpenter may not be back on the mound until this summer.

Now that the other giant picture of Albert Pujols has fallen back several pages, it is safe for me to repost this classic photo depicting Albert appropriating both the George Gervin finger roll and Michael Jordan tongue wag. Is there anything this man can't do? No, there isn't. I mean, unless "having an acurate birth certificate" is a thing.

Last year's Spring Training Dugout for the Cardinals caused a bit of controversy when I chose to be preachy and somewhat dated instead of doing what I usually do, which is "read comic books, then write off the top of my head." I assure you, the problem has been remedied.

Today's Spring Dugz Dugout is after the jump.

Earlier this month Albert Pujols made some waves when he said that once he becomes a free agent in two years money will not be the most important factor in his decision. The Cardinals could offer him more money than anybody else, but if he felt that the team wasn't doing enough to try and win another World Series, he'd "somewhere else that I can win."

Well now his owner and general manager have responded, sort of. While they didn't say anything about doing whatever it takes to keep Albert in a Cardinals uniform, they did say they'd love for him to be a Cardinal for life.

See this face? This is the face I make when I log on to a baseball news site and have to read about how a grown-up millionaire discovered the internet and thought the best way to deal with a /b/-chan baseball fan was a snarky, wordy version of "your mother." The only way I can imagine it being better is if Mozeliak copy/pasted what the troll said and responded to it sentence by sentence. BECAUSE THAT IS ALWAYS ENTERTAINING.

To counteract this, The Dugout used its pull as the credibility of FanHouse to get our own live-chat with the Cardinals general manager, and here it is. Read more, after the jump.

One of the things I've always hated about the online chats at sites like ESPN is the filtering of questions asked to the "talent" being featured in those chats. I don't want to see Joe Morgan answering a question about how he feels about CC Sabathia's deal with the Yankees, I want to see him answer a question like: "How in the hell do you keep your job considering that you don't know about anything not concerning yourself or the Big Red Machine?"

Which is why I applaud the folks at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who hosted one of their live-chats on their website with Cardinals general manager John Mozeliak on Wednesday when this question from a reader named I Hate Bill DeWitt! came through.

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.