I like the band Green Day. Deal with it.

They have a song called “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” that I can picture another green, well actually Tyler Greene to be more specific, humming over the last few years.

I walk a lonely road
The only one that I have ever known
Don’t know where it goes
But it’s home to me and I walk alone

I walk this empty street
On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams
When the city sleeps
And I’m the only one and I walk alone

I walk alone
I walk alone
I walk alone
I walk a…

My shadow’s the only one that walks beside me
My shallow heart’s the only thing that’s beating
Sometimes I wish someone up there will find me
’til then I walk alone

Someone “up there”, aka in the big leagues, did find him and give him a chance going into the 2012 season. Many of you know Greene’s story, the 29-year old former first-round draft pick that could never quite live up to his potential. 2012 was D-Day so to speak, finally the time Greene was expected to put up or shut up. He is out of minor league options. It is now or never for him, or as I like to call it…

Greene Day.

St. Louis Cardinals GM John Mozeliak made a commitment to Tyler Greene coming out of spring training, indicating the club was committing to him as their starting second baseman. That was a strong commitment with the incumbent starter, Skip Schumaker, re-signed and solid 2011 producer Daniel Descalso also available to man the position. It showed just how highly management valued Greene’s skill set and potential. The prevailing thought was Greene could thrive under the more nurturing managerial presence of Mike Matheny than he did under the iron fist of Tony LaRussa.

Slight problem…Greene performed very poorly in spring training and to start 2012. Matheny showed from the outset he would not be Mozeliak’s puppet, and play whoever performed best, regardless of Greene being out of options. Greene started just 10 of the team’s first 27 games.

April was a very rough stretch for Greene. He earned only 35 ABs, 7 Hits, 13 K’s, 1 SB, 1 HR, and 4 RBI’s. April slugging % was a putrid .314. The Greene experiment was not working out quite as well as Mozeliak had hoped.

Then the injuries started mounting and Greene earned starts due to the fact that he was on the 40 man roster and physically able to play 9 innings. Greene has started 17 of the last 23 games through May 29th.

May numbers look a little better than April. 3 HR, 8 RBI, 5 SB, .239/.299/.507, and 6 doubles in 71 ABs. In addition, Greene has made some great defensive plays, even in key spots of close ballgames. It offers hope for a team depleted with injuries. Is Greene trending in the right direction to become an impact player, or is it just a stretch of decent following a stretch of bad?

The lineup card starts to get pretty crowded when Allen Craig, Jon Jay, Matt Carpenter, and Lance Berkman return. Schumaker is an outfielder by nature, and Descalso has been hitting very poorly, but can be a better defensive option. Kolten Wong may be just a season away from big-league ready, so the window of opportunity for Greene is now.

Greene Day.

A deeper look at Greene’s numbers provides some valuable insight.

For the season, Greene has put the ball in play 71% of the time. Over the last 31 days that jumps up to 75%, but you still want your speed guys to put it in play 85-90% of the time. He will continue to be a batting average liability due to low walk rate (8%) and high number of strikeouts (25%), but he has shown nice power when makes contact and good speed when he gets on base.

For the 2012 season, his line drive % on balls-in-play is 28%, which is very solid. He is hitting 32% fly balls and 17% of those have left the yard. Even if that normalized to near league average of 10%, he would be on pace for 16 home runs in 500 ABs. More important than Greene hitting home runs (in my opinion) is that he continues to hit line drives and get on base for the other guys in the lineup.

Baseballhq.com tracks hard hit ball %. So far this season, Greene has a 33% rate of hard-hit balls. His prior three seasons he posted rates of 16, 26, and 18% during his big league ABs.

From a defensive standpoint, FanGraphs has Greene as a -3.1 UZR (falls between “Average” 0 and “Below Average” -5), and a -3 Defensive Runs Saved this season through 218 innings at 2B this season. By comparison, Descalso has a -1.6 UZR and 1 Defensive Run Saved in 139 innings at 2B. In other words, Greene can still improve his defense and he needs to hit that much better than Descalso to stay in the lineup.

Greene is a very polarizing figure among Cardinal nation. It seems most fans either desperately want to see him succeed or are calling for his head after every mis-step.

He certainly is a key piece in the Cardinal engine for the 2012 season, particularly as the team looks to navigate through all of their injury issues. This is finally the year he either has to live up to expectations or pack his bags while the Wong Express makes its way towards St. Louis.

Greene Day.

Many in Cardinal Nation railed against the marginalization and eventual trade of Brendan Ryan. No doubt this was a personnel (personal?) move, not a baseball one. After all, no sane baseball organization would find it fundamentally sound to preach “pitch to contact” to its staff then trade away the best defensive shortstop in the league, right?

But that is exactly what happened, and not because a better shortstop was biding his time in the minors waiting for his opportunity or because the Cards had a new defensive whiz for second base. No, the Cardinals had already acquired their new starting shortstop in Ryan Theriot, and they are keeping Skip Schumaker at second. Theriot and Schumaker are, in many ways, mirror images of each other. They both have the stats to be OK leadoff options. Theriot has a little more speed; Schumaker has a little more pop. And both are considered tough-minded, focused, hard-working gamers.

That’s where Ryan fell short. He was flaky. He talked too much. He was often tardy, whether it would be to practice in Spring Training or the now-famous incident with Chris Carpenter in the middle of a big game in Cincinnati. The Cards were able to win the NL Central in 2009 with him as their starting shortstop, so the “clubhouse cancer” branding can be thrown out the window. But by all accounts, Ryan had become persona non grata with the St. Louis Cardinals—skill set and low salary be damned. The team was simply tired of his act, so they moved him for next to nothing…which is a nicer way of saying they dumped him.

And that’s where they may be disingenuous. David Freese remains penciled in as the starting third baseman and will be given every opportunity to prove himself worthy of the role in 2011. Why does he get yet another chance, while Ryan was shipped to Seattle for a virtually unknown prospect?

Freese has a past that is easily more checkered than Ryan’s. Before the 2009 season, Freese wrecked his car on the way to a fundraiser. The accident injured Freese’s ankle, which would eventually need surgery. Initially some eyebrows were raised when Freese failed to notify the team immediately (his agent called them a couple of days later), but the front office brushed that off as a rookie mistake. Fair enough. Then in December of 2009, Freese was arrested for driving while intoxicated. Freese was given the benefit of doubt, went through counseling, and remained the heir apparent to the starting job at third for the 2010 season. But only a couple of months in, Freese injured his other ankle during a game. Injuries happen, right? And this was only a bruise, nothing serious. That is until he dropped a weight on his foot while rehabbing, which led to another surgery and ended his season.

So on one hand we have Ryan, the starting shortstop for two seasons (plus significant time in two more). He has never proven to be much with the bat, but he is near the top of the league defensively. And his personality was just too much for the team to handle, so they willingly accepted a downgrade in the field to unload him and his goofy, distracting presence.

On the other hand we have Freese, who has survived the last two seasons on potential alone. When healthy he plays well, though not well enough to survive the stellar 2009 platoon of Joe Thurston and Brian Barden. In 2010 no one stood in his way and he only managed to stay on the field for 70 games. Freese has had multiple ankle surgeries; is it too soon to attach the “injury-prone” label? What about dropping a weight on his foot; is that just bad luck or a lapse in concentration/attention? And yes, everyone makes mistakes, but the DWI is still a serious lapse in judgment…more so than being a minute or two late to take the field, one would think.

The team has done little to address depth issues like they had at third base in 2010. If Freese is unable to contribute a full season yet again and Ryan makes noise as the Seattle Mariners’ starting shortstop in 2011, the Cardinals will need to seriously reevaluate what they believe to be a detrimental presence in the clubhouse.

Chris Reed is a freelance writer from Belleville, IL who also writes about the Cardinals for InsideSTL on Mondays and Bird Brained whenever he wants. Follow him on Twitter @birdbrained.

	Shelby Miller Starting Pitcher A-Quad Cities 19-years-old Bats: Right Throws: Right Height: 6’3″ Weight: 195 lbs Drafted by the Cardinals in the 1st round (19th pick) of the 2009 MLB June Amateur Draft
Just like every Saturday here on i70baseball, the Cardinal Farm Report spotlights one of the prized Cardinal minor leaguers. This week, it is Shelby Miller, the best prospect pitcher the Cardinals have had since Rick Ankiel. I was trying to hold this one off as long as possible, but I can only do prospect profiles for so long until I spotlight this guy. To put it very simply, Shelby Miller is the top prospect in the Cardinals farm system, and one of the best pitching prospects the organization has ever had. Miller was the 19th overall player to be selected in the 2009 MLB Draft and was considered by some to be the best prep arm in the draft. At the very least, his fastball was certainly the best. While he usually has it around 93-94 mph, his MLB-ready fastball tops out at 98 and reaches 97 consistently. Not only does it light up the radar gun, it also has amazing, late, natural sink to it that makes it virtually unhittable to minor league batters. The rest of his repertoire includes a good, biting slider, a plus curve with natural 12-6 movement on it, and a decent changeup. His slider may be his best secondary pitch at the moment, but from what I have heard, Miller’s curveball could be brutal to hitters if he can control it. It comes in at 77-80 mph and, if pollished, could be fooling hitters for the next several years. Like most first round pitchers that are drafted out of high school, Miller is a very raw talent but has all the talent anybody could ask for. The Cardinals organization believes he’s the first potential ace selected under Jeff Luhnow. The kid has the upside to become a 5 WAR starting pitcher (staff ace), his skill-set just needs to be refined. Drafting any player, especially a pitcher, out of high school is extremely risky. Because of that, the Cardinals are going to be VERY careful with him. Miller has pitched all season for the mid-level Single-A Quad Cities River Bandits, and I would expect him to stay there for the remaining month. Depending on how things go, I think we could see Miller finish up the season with Double-A Springfield. The earliest Cardinal Nation would see him take the mound in St. Louis will likely be 2013. I would expect him to make his debut then, if everything goes to plan. Come 2014 however, Miller very well could be a regular in the Cardinals rotation. Quad Cities has Miller on a very strict pitching schedule this season, and a very unique one at that. Basically, the team wants Miller to work on his secondary pitches during games. Which means Miller’s 6-5 record, 3.84 ERA, 11.7 SO/9 is being acheived without him using his best pitch, the already MLB-caliber fastball. That is pretty impressive. That’s not the extent of it though. The club actually has Miller limited to a 70-80 pitch count (roughly five innings) so he can pitch more in-between starts to keep his dominating fastball where it has been. Not throwing his fastball during starts and relying on his breaking pitches is the main reason his ERA has been a little higher than what fans want to see (if you can call a 3.84 ERA “high”). The Cardinals have been hit-and-miss with prospects in the past, but I can assure you that Shelby Miller is the real deal. He’s the classic big, strong, tough-minded, competitive Texas athlete that everybody falls in love with. The big thing he needed to work on this season was his command, and his 4.23 SO/BB ratio proves that he has improved on that.
MiLB WEEKLY ROUNDUP
AAA-Memphis Redbirds
Record to date: 65-55, second place in the PCL American North, 3 games behind Iowa. This past week: 3-3, highlighted by a fantastic rehab start by Kyle Lohse. Transactions: Kyle Lohse was promoted to Memphis from Springfield (1-4, 5.89 ERA, 25 SO, 47 1/3 IP in MLB) Coming up: The Redbirds will finish off their series against Colorado Springs on Monday before hosting Salt Lake Tuesday through Friday.
AA-Springfield Cardinals
Record to date: 25-22 in the second half (63-54 overall), third place in the TEX North, 5 games behind NW Arkansas. This past week: 4-2, won the Tulsa series 3-1 and won the Corpus Christi series 2-1. Transactions: Nick Derba was promoted to Springfield from Palm Beach (.202, 13 R, 11 RBI, 104 AB in A+), Steven Hill was promoted to St. Louis from Springfield (.280, 22 HR, 86 RBI, 361 AB in AA), Tony Cruz was placed on the 7-day DL (.295, 25 R, 20 RBI, 166 AB in AA), Charles Cutler was promoted to Springfield from Palm Beach (.292, .368 OBP, 23 R, 154 AB in A+) Coming up: The Cardinals will host San Antonio for a three-game set before traveling to Corpus Christi for another three-game series that will run through Friday.
A-Palm Beach
Record to date: 27-19 in the second half (66-50 overall), first place in the FSL South. This past week: 7-0, eight game win streak… ’nuff said. Transactions: Tyler Greene assigned to Palm Beach for a rehab stint (.265, .360 OBP, 10 R, 68 AB in MLB), Nick Derba was promoted to Springfield from Palm Beach (.202, 13 R, 11 RBI, 104 AB in A+), Luis De La Cruz was promoted to Palm Beach from Batavia (.231, .464 SLG, 6 R, 26 AB in A-), Kevin Moscatel was promoted to Palm Beach from GCL (.277, .359 OBP, 18 RBI, 83 AB in RK), Charles Cutler was promoted to Springfield from Palm Beach (.292, .368 OBP, 23 R, 154 AB in A+) Coming up: The Baby Birds will finish up a three-game series with St. Lucie before heading to Bradenton for four games for a fight for first place.
POSITION PLAYER OF THE WEEK
Matt Carpenter, 3B, Springfield
.412 AVG (7-for-17), .615 OBP, 5 runs, 1 home run, 4 RBI, 9 walks, 1 stolen base
Yes, you read that right. In six games, Carpenter was walked nine times. That may be why his on-base percentage is through the roof. On the season, Matt is hitting .324/.437/.494 with 82 runs, 27 doubles, three triples, 12 home runs, 60 RBI, and ten stolen bases in 407 at bats.
PITCHER OF THE WEEK
Kyle Lohse, SP, Memphis
W, 7 innings pitched, 3 hits, 1 run, 2 walks, 9 strikeouts
This may be cheating. Is it? Either way, this was by far the most dominating pitching performance of the week. Well done, sir. In nine starts in the Majors this season, Lohse is 1-4 with a 5.89 ERA and 25 SO in 47 1/3 innings.

Justin Hulsey covers the Cardinals for i70baseball.com and his blog, Cardinals Front Office, that is also dedicated to Cardinal baseball.You may follow him on Twitter @JayHulsey by clicking here.