Financially, Pujols is a winner. I think he’s lost something special, the chance to retire as the second-greatest Cardinal of all time, just behind Stan Musial and slightly ahead of Bob Gibson. That’s all gone now. And maybe that’s the way it should be. Now that Pujols has gone to Cali, Musial will permanently own all of the important franchise records. Pujols can’t touch them now.

Pujols willingly gave up his spot as one of history’s inner-circle Cardinals and will be viewed as just another athlete.

Edit: The link was initially to the Los Angeles Times; however, the author of this article is St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Bernie Miklasz. My bad – Bernie deserves the credit, not the byline-less L.A. Times.

Major League Baseball told Houston businessman Jim Crane it would not approve his purchase of the Astros unless he agreed to move the team to the American League, The Associated Press has learned.

Crane was forced to agree to move the sale along, a person familiar with the negotiations said Wednesday on condition of anonymity because no official announcement has been made by MLB or the Astros. Approval of the sale could be announced as early as Thursday at a meeting of baseball executives in Milwaukee.

The only thing Bud Selig has done right is create the MLB Advanced Media wing of the operation. They create the best mobile experience of any app I’ve ever used, and the video compression they’ve championed delivers extremely high quality over 3G networks.

(I’d rather die than root for the Steelers should I spawn a boy.)

Coming up with the idea in San Francisco, when Skip Schumaker wore a mock turtleneck, Lance Berkman and a few other players had an idea to make the entire team wear turtlenecks when they leave for St Louis.

“I don’t necessarily want to take credit for it, but I was involved in the conversation,” Berkman said. “When you have some success, it makes it easier to goof around. It is not too easy to find one though.”

Despite posting just a 13-12 record, Hernandez finished well ahead of the Rays’ David Price and Yankees 21-game winner CC Sabathia in the voting results released Thursday by the BBWAA.

Hernandez apparently impressed voters who looked deeper into his dominant season for a 61-101 Mariners club that scored the fewest runs per game of any Major League team since the designated hitter was introduced to the AL in 1973.