Recently I acquired a copy of John Leptich and Dave Baranowski’s book, This Date in St Louis Cardinals History. As the name implies, it is a compilation of transactions, significant events, player birth dates, and statistics for the team from its inception through the 1982 season. Although 28 seasons have passed since its publication, it remains a great resource for all kinds of Cardinal trivia. As I thumbed through it this week, I noticed an item from January 20, 1958. That day the St Louis Chapter of the Baseball Writers Association of America voted on the all time St Louis All-Star team. Here’s who they chose (STA are the Browns, STN the Cardinals):

• 1B – George Sisler (STA)
• 2B – Rogers Hornsby (STN/STA)
• SS – Marty Marion (STN)
• 3B – Frank Frisch (STN)
• Utility IF – Red Schoendienst (STN)
• LF – Ken Williams (STA)
• CF – Terry Moore (STN)
• RF – Stan Musial (STN)
• Utility OF – John Tobin (STA)
• Catchers – Hank Severeid (STA), Bob O’Farrell (STN)
• Pitchers – Dizzy Dean (STN/STA), Jesse Haines (STN), Urban Shocker (STA), Grover Cleveland Alexander (STN)

How different would that list look if they updated it today? Let’s try to answer that.

First Base. George Sisler was the 1922 AL MVP, and over the course of his career led the league in hits twice, triples twice, stolen bases 4 times, and total bases once. He hit .400 or better for the season in 1920 and 1922. Truly a great hitter. He’s no longer the best professional first baseman in the history of the city, though. Sisler’s career high OPS+ (181, 1920) is only 9 points higher than Albert Pujols’ average OPS+ over his 10-year career (172). With the 2001 ROY and 3 MVPs on his resume, Albert Pujols is the clear choice now.

Second Base. Rogers Hornsby is still the greatest at that position. One could argue for Schoendienst, but since the 1958 panel chose Hornsby over the Redhead, I will not.

Shortstop. I think people forget how good Marty Marion really was. One of the first tall shortstops (he stood 6 feet 2), Marion was considered the Captain of the Swifties 1940 Cardinals teams. He won the MVP in 1944, finished in the top 10 on two other occasions (1942, 1945), and was a 7-time All-Star. He might still be the best shortstop in Cardinal history had the team not traded for Ozzie Smith before the 1982 season. While in St Louis, the Wizard finished second in the 1987 MVP vote, won 11 Gold Gloves, and was a 14-time All-Star. He also set the gold standard for defense as a shortstop. Ozzie Smith is the pick.

Third Base. Third base is interesting. Frank Frisch, the incumbent, was the 1931 MVP and a 3-time All Star (1933-1935). But here’s the thing: for most of his career he was a second baseman. Frisch only played 459 career games at third, and every year he was a Cardinal he played more games at second than third. Luckily we now have two other players to choose between: Ken Boyer and Scott Rolen. Boyer was the 1964 NL MVP and finished in the top ten in 3 other years (1959-1961). He won 5 Gold Gloves and was a 7-time All Star at third base. Scott Rolen today is widely considered one of the best defensive third basemen of all time. While with St Louis, he finished 4th in the 2004 MVP vote, won 3 Gold Gloves, and was a 4-time All-Star. Had he remained a Cardinal after the 2007 season he might have eclipsed Boyer as the best third sacker in city history, but he did not. Ken Boyer is my choice at third.

Utility IF – Red Schoendienst was selected, and remains a stellar pick. Since over 50 years have passed, I will create a second Utility IF slot, and fill it with George Sisler. Teams can always use a guy with that kind of bat control.

Outfield. The outfield is tough. Two of the men selected – Williams and Tobin – played for the Browns in the dead-ball era. There are three Cardinal outfielders since 1958 who merit selection to this team, Lou Brock, Curt Flood, and Jim Edmonds. And Terry Moore was no slouch himself, a 4-time All-Star who finished in the MVP top 20 5 times (his best showing was 12th in 1941). Much like the infielders, I chose to create a second Utility OF slot because of the number of good candidates.

• Left Field. Lou Brock. Finished in the MVP top ten 5 times, and was runner up in 1974 to Steve Garvey. During that particular season he broke Maury Wills’ major league stolen base record, which stood until 1990. Brock still holds the NL record for steals in a season. He was a 6-time All-Star who led the league in steals 8 times (he also led the league in being caught stealing 7 times). Brock led the NL in doubles and triples in 1968.
• Center Field. Jim Edmonds. Rumor has it Edmonds will retire before the start of this season. He is either a borderline or actual Hall of Fame candidate, depending on who you talk to. What cannot be argued is his place in Cardinal history. Edmonds is the best offensive CF this club has employed to date, better than both Moore and Flood, and he had an above average glove to go with it. He finished in the MVP top 5 twice (2000, 2004), was a 3-time All-Star and won 6 Gold Gloves.
• Right Field. Stan Musial. Need any more be said?
• Utility OF (2). I went with Ken Williams and Curt Flood. Williams is pretty clearly the best hitting OF of the 4 remaining men I considered. Flood and Moore are almost identical statistically, so that’s really a coin flip for me. I decided the NL of the 1960s was a tougher league than the NL of the 30s and 40s, which gave the edge to Flood.

Catcher. Hank Severeid played for the Browns in the 1910s and 1920s, and finished 6th in the 1924 AL MVP race. That was the year the Browns finished second in the AL to Walter Johnson’s Senators, their second highest finish ever. Bob O’Farrell did three stints with the Cardinals (1925-28, 1933, 1935). He was the 1926 NL MVP on the first World Champion Cardinal team. However, since 1935 there have been two other men to play the position better than these two men did. They are Yadier Molina and Ted Simmons. Molina is the best defensive catcher in the league today, one of the best of all time, a 3-time Gold Glove winner and 2-time All Star. Simmons is the best offensive catcher ever to wear a Cardinal uniform (by OPS+). He finished in the MVP top ten 3 times as a Cardinal and was a 6-time All-Star.

Pitchers. Based on the way the game has changed since 1958, I broke the pitcher category up into starters and relievers.

Starters. Dean, Haines, and Alexander are all in the Hall of Fame. Really no argument there. Shocker was an excellent pitcher with the Browns, but made his reputation with the Yankees, and given the excellent pitching St Louis has seen since 1958 it’s easy for me to leave him off the list. Let’s fill out the 5-man rotation by adding the only two Cardinals to win a Cy Young, Bob Gibson and Chris Carpenter. Gibson was the 1968 NL MVP and Cy Young award winner, and the 1970 Cy Young winner. His 1.12 season ERA in 1968 is still the major league record for a starting pitcher. Carpenter won his Cy Young in 2005. He is 84-33 as a Cardinal over 7 seasons with the club. The 5 full seasons he’s been healthy he has won at least 15 games each year.

Relievers. Sticking just to closers narrows down the list but there are still lots of good candidates. Al Hrabowsky, Todd Worrell, Jason Isringhausen, and Ryan Franklin have capably held down the closers role for the team over the past 40 years. They did not make this cut. For the all-time list, I went with Bruce Sutter and Lee Smith. Of all these men Sutter is the only one in the HOF and the only one to win a Cy Young (granted he did that with the Cubs). Sutter finished in the MVP top ten 3 times as a Cardinal, and in the Cy Young top five 3 times as well. Smith holds the team record for saves in a career (160), and shares the season record (47) with Isringhausen. How good was Smith? The two full seasons he pitched in St Louis he finished second and fourth in the Cy Young voting. How Smith is not in the HOF is beyond me.

So that’s my team. Let the argument begin.

During the offseason we have been taking a look at the past, giving readers a timeline of St. Louis baseball throughout history. Last time we talked about Branch Rickey building the minor leagues and how Rogers Hornsby and Jim Bottomley started building the Cardinals into a powerhouse. However, Hornsby was running his mouth and Cardinals owner Sam Breadon demanded Rickey trade the superstar manager. What would Rickey do now?

As easy as it would have been to trade Hornsby, Branch Rickey knew that it was in the best interests of the team to keep the superstar around and continue to build the team around him. While he hoped that the anger that Breadon felt towards Hornsby would dissipate over the winter, it never really went away, Rickey just ignored it.

Coming into spring training of 1926, Hornsby, who was not one for meetings, actually had one. He pulled everyone into the clubhouse and informed them that if they did not think that the Cardinals were going to win the pennant that year, they should grab their paychecks and head on home. No one moved. Everyone was ready to go, and they were in for an uphill battle.

The Cincinnati Reds were fighting the Cardinals every step of the way throughout the entirety of the season. In June, John McGraw made possibly the worst trade of his entire career when he offered Rickey and Hornsby right fielder Billy Southworth in exchange for center fielder Heinie Mueller. Southworth was in the late stages of his career while Mueller was in the middle of an eleven year career. Mueller wound up toiling in three different cities over the next few years while Southworth had found a home, first in the second spot in the batting order, then as the manager a few years later.

The second move Rickey made was to bring in stellar pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander, then nearing the twilight of a Hall of Fame career. All it took from the Cardinals was a $4,000 flyer and a waiver claim to pluck him off of the Cubs, who had tired of his antics. Despite his age (“Old Pete” was 39 when he arrived to the team) Alexander still had a lot left in the tank. However, a long and strange series of events had left him dealing with both epilepsy and alcoholism, a dangerous combination. Whereas Hornsby caused problems with his abominable vocabulary and course manner, Old Pete wore out his welcome by drinking himself under the table, showing up to the park hungover and acting disagreeable towards managers, teammates and anyone else that even looked at him funny.

Grover Cleveland Alexander

At the time of the trade the Cardinals were in fourth place and needing a boost. Alexander and Southworth provided it, Alexander going 16-7 with a 2.91 ERA in the last two-thirds of the season and Southworth slapping out a .317/.364/.488 line while driving in 69 over the same time frame. Southworth also hit the home run that clinched the pennant for the Cardinals. He took extra pleasure in the fact that the game was against McGraw’s Giants – the very manager and team that traded him away earlier in the year.

Yes, the Cardinals had clinched their first pennant since their inception in 1899. Their reward for a long season of hard work? Facing the dreaded New York Yankees and their self-proclaimed “Murderer’s Row” of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and company. After somehow managing a split of the first two games in New York, the Cardinals came home to a ticker-tape parade. They spent most of the end of the season on the road, and had not been home in almost four weeks. The city of St. Louis was bursting at the seams to welcome them home with open arms to celebrate winning the pennant, and after all the pomp and circumstance, the team still had to figure out how to take three more games against those dreaded Yankees.

After getting victimized by some mammoth Babe Ruth home runs in game five, the Cardinals headed back to New York down 3-2, and everyone thought the Series was all but over. “Old Pete” took the ball for game six, but he did not have to work very hard to pull out the win, as the rest of the starting nine put up a ten spot against manager Miller Huggins and the rest of the vaunted New York lineup.

Game seven brought about one of the most peculiar endings of a series in baseball’s history. Jesse Haines, who was a stalwart of the rotation for many years, had started the game and pitched well into the seventh inning, but he was running out of gas. The knuckleballer had worn his fingers to the bone, and when his knuckles started bleeding and Haines could only throw meatball fastballs, Hornsby had no choice but to remove his pitcher and look to the bullpen to save the day.

Who did he call for? None other than Old Pete Alexander, who had pitched the previous day and then went out and got rip roaring drunk after the game to celebrate his victory. He was in the bullpen sleeping off his hangover when teammates had to rouse him and inform him that he was going into the game right away, no time for warming up or even stretching. Hornsby could care less, stating that watching Alexander pitch drunk or hungover was better than watching any other pitcher pitch completely sober.

Old Pete struck out Tony Lazzeri to end the bottom of the seventh, then whipped through the eighth inning, only to find himself facing the top of the order in the ninth. After shutting down the first two batters, Alexander came face-to-face with none other than Babe Ruth himself. The Bambino ran the count full, then took a pitch that by all accounts could have gone either way, depending on which team you were pulling for. Old Pete howled at the umpire who dared to call ball four against him, and Ruth trotted down to first base.

Then, the unbelievable happened: Ruth tried to steal second. Now, don’t get me wrong, Babe Ruth had stolen bases all throughout his career. Not a lot of them, but enough. In 1926 alone he stole 11 bases, and he was determined to pick up one more in this deciding game. The Babe said he wanted to get into scoring position in the off-chance that Bob Muesel was actually able to sneak a hit out of the infield. The plan backfired as catcher Bob O’Farrell shot a bullet of a throw to Hornsby down at second, who stood on the bag with the ball waiting for Ruth to arrive so he could lay down the tag. When Ruth arrived and the final out was recorded, the Cardinals had their first World Series championship and the team mobbed Old Pete, who could only smile and shrug his shoulders, almost as if to say, “No big deal, just doing my job.”

The Cardinals returned to St. Louis as world champions, and spirits were high. However, things were about to come crashing down in a big way. Sam Breadon could not resolve his differences with Rogers Hornsby, so just two months after bringing home the first championship for the city of St. Louis since Charlie Comisky and the Browns back in 1888, the superstar second baseman/manager was sent packing to the New York Giants in exchange for second baseman Frankie Frisch and pitcher Jimmy Ring.

The city was horrified, the team was stunned, and Rickey was vilified. Everyone assumed that Rickey was to blame for the trade, when in reality he felt sick about the trade to the point where he forced Breadon to do it if he was so intent upon trading Hornsby. It looked like a horrible swap – Frisch appeared to be a so-so infielder and Ring had only managed to win eleven games the previous year for the Giants. The trade actually caused Hornsby’s career began to take a sharp turn south. He had a good first year with the Giants, then jumped to the Boston Braves for a season before heading to the Chicago Cubs and winning an MVP there his first year in town (1929). A bone spur slowed down his playing career after that point, but that was the least of his troubles. Gambling kept him broke despite the fact that he was one of the highest paid players in the game. Although he hung around in the majors for another eleven seasons, by his last season he was a broken and humbled man, despite his steadfast anger towards Sam Breadon.

Frankie Frisch

The Cardinals were still a strong team in 1927, despite feeling rather stony in the beginning towards their new second baseman Frisch. Frisch thought St. Louis was great after the cold atmosphere created by the aging and unwavering John McGraw, who had been merciless in his constant ridicule with Frisch. He liked playing for a team that liked playing baseball instead of just going through the motions, miserable because of the manager they were playing for.

“The Fordham Flash” fit in well in St. Louis, doing all the little things that would endear him with the fans, whether it was flashing the leather in the field and setting assist records that still stand to this day, racing around the bases picking up steals, or slapping hits all over the diamond. He could never replace the power of Hornsby, but what he lacked in brawn he made up for in literally every other category. By the end of the 1927 season, the Cardinals found themselves just a game or two out of first in the National League, but they had won over the fans again after what could have been a disastrous break-up when Hornsby left.

Unfortunately the manager position became somewhat of a revolving door after Hornsby left. Catcher Bob O’Farrell got the spot by default for 1927, but he passed it off to Bill McKechnie in 1928, who lost the spot one third of the way through 1929 to Billy Southworth and then Gabby Street, who finally stepped up and took the reins until midway through 1933.

1928 put the Cardinals back on top in the National League. Led by Rickey’s pride and joy of the farm system in Jim Bottomley and Chick Hafey and anchored on the infield by Frisch, the team wrapped up the pennant on the second to last day of the season, and found themselves face to face with nearly the same Yankees team that they had miraculously beat out two years previous.

This year the Series went in favor of the Bronx Bombers, as Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig put on a two man show, with Ruth playing the lead as he hit .625 and blasted 3 home runs to Gehrig’s .545 with 4 such shots. Breadon was furious at the dreadful four game beating the Cardinals were handed, and demoted manager McKechnie to the minors, bringing up Rochester manager Billy Southworth. The team was pleased with the idea of Southworth being the player/manager, as he had always been a strong clubhouse presence before agreeing to playing and managing in Rochester during the 1928 season.

Southworth knew how Breadon worked. He wanted a winner, and Billy thought he knew just how to do that – by making sure that the team was in line and under his thumb constantly. He became known as ‘Billy the Heel,’ and the players all knew he was trying way too hard to be the boss, when all he needed to do was keep things on an even keel and treat them like the adults that they were. After stumbling into July with a 43-45 record, Breadon realized his mistake and dropped Southworth back down to the minors, replacing him with the man who had just been ousted in McKechnie. It did not matter. The team finished at 78-74, well off the pace.

Thankfully, help was on the way, and his name was Gabby Street. Who is he? Check in next week!

Angela Weinhold covers the Cardinals for i70baseball.com and writes at Cardinal Diamond Diaries. You may follow her on Twitter here or follow Cardinal Diamond Diaries here.