FanHouse TonyLaRussa

Mark McGwire will end his baseball exile and accept a position with the St. Louis Cardinals as their hitting coach, a Cardinals source confirmed to FanHouse's Ed Price Sunday afternoon. He'll replace Hal McRae, who's held the position for five years. The story initially appeared on Brian McRae's Twitter account, though it's since been deleted.

Tony La Russa and his pitching coach Dave Duncan go together, as the saying goes, like peas and carrots. They've been coaching together since 1985, when Duncan joined La Russa's staff with the White Sox. Since then, they've jointly moved to Oakland and then St. Louis, with Duncan's strong pitching staffs anchoring La Russa's perennial contenders.

That's why it's so surprising today to read in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that Duncan seems to be growing disillusioned with the Cardinals and may not return to the team, even if La Russa does come back for a 15th year with the Cards in 2010. Duncan's growing disillusionment seems to stem from two places: the trade of his son Chris to Boston -- which he believes the St. Louis media fueled -- and anger over the way the Cardinals are developing their minor league pitchers, which he believes is different from his own pitching philosophies.

Every Sunday, MLB FanHouse empties out its notebook in Baseball Brunch.

In two days, major league teams will begin playing with different rules than they did for the first five months of the season.

Some clubs will have 25-man rosters. Some will have 28-man rosters. Some will have 32-man rosters.

Some will have extra relievers if the game goes to extra innings. Some won't.

Some will have a pinch-running specialist. Some won't.

That's what we get with expanded September rosters.

At this point, whatever remaining Mets players are healthy should be encased in bubble wrap.

A day after second baseman Luis Castillo sprained his left ankle on the dugout steps -- the Mets said he is day-to-day, and when they say that, they usually end up being wrong -- lefty Jonathon Niese left Wednesday's start in the second inning with a strained right hamstring.

"From what I understand right now we suspect it to be a tear," manager Jerry Manuel said.

As it turns out, it was a complete tear of the right hamstring from the bone, and the team announced Niese would have surgery and miss the rest of the season Wednesday night.

Over the last few months, Cardinals manager Tony La Russa has been involved in a complicated legal matter with social networking site Twitter over the unauthorized use of his name and person for a parody, kinda-sorta identity thieving Tony La Russa Twitter page. Now that the matter has been settled, it is safe for us to write about without Tom Nieto (or whoever) rushing to his legal team to protest the idea that he once dropped a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on the ground outside of a Radio Shack.

This afternoon's Dugout is @ the jump.

Starting Five is our wrapup of the previous day's baseball action, with a quick nod to what is ahead.

You Oughta Know ...
That the Rays seem to be putting it all together. The reigning American League champions left New York with a series victory over the Mets thanks to a big Sunday afternoon from B.J. Upton, who homered and had four hits. Tampa Bay is now 12-6 in the month of June and two games back of the Yankees in the AL wild-card race.

Upton has played a big part in the surge after slumping for the first two months of the season. The center fielder came into June hitting .204, but he's hitting .329 this month.

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Well, that was disappointingly fast. One day after Tony La Russa announced his intention to sue everybody's favorite social media client o' the month, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is reporting that La Russa and Twitter, Inc. have settled their lawsuit out of court. There's no exact terms of settlement listed, but it looks like Twitter will agree to cover La Russa's court costs and make a donation to La Russa's animal shelter charity, ARF.

I'll admit it, I'm a little disappointed. If this thing pressed forward, there would've been some fun mudslinging (La Russa sued on the grounds of his reputation being damaged and, as David Pinto pointed out, his reputation ain't exactly great) coupled with the public completely misunderstanding terms like "parody" and "satire" and "freedom of speech." Nothing quite gets me fired up like people talking about things they don't understand and this court case would've had that written all over it.

Sadly, it's not an incredibly uncommon occurrence for some loser, who has nothing better to do in their life, to create faux Myspace, Facebook or Twitter accounts of public figures. Why in God's name someone would ever waste their own personal time to do this is absolutely beyond me, but it happens. Something else that happens frequently these days: lawsuits.

Thus, it was probably inevitable we'd see the two happenstances collide. Recently, the sports world helped make it happen. Tony La Russa, the revolutionary manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, is suing Twitter because some low-life started a Tony La Russa Twitter page. His grounds are on trademark infringement and "dilution, cybersquatting, and misappropriation of name and likeness."

SAN FRANCISCO -- Ever since Khalil Greene was a kid, he knew that he took things more seriously than the other kids.

And not in a good way.

On the day that Greene was placed on the disabled list because of social anxiety disorder, the Cardinals shortstop described a long-running pattern of emotional problems in an interview with FanHouse.

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.