For the past month or so, I have been working on a summary of the top 20 players on each NL Central team, according to ZiPS DC, Fangraphs Depth Charts, The Bat X, and OOPSY projections. I made a consensus WAR projection for each statistically important player and each team in the NL Central. This was a fun process, even after discovering how the Cardinals will probably finish in last place (if the projection systems are mostly right).
If you are looking for hope or have been gaining some tenacity from watching the spring training games so far, I would like you to read this excellent article from Saturday if you missed it, by John Latham. It surmises that there are multiple paths for the Cardinals to overperform their projections, and I agree with the possibilities. And perhaps most importantly, we are in uncharted waters with these Cardinals. They’re one of the youngest teams in MLB and are difficult to quantify and qualify. We don’t have any idea who the team will be by the end of the season, who will be settling in as the probable starters in the next baseball season (shortened or not). I really liked the methodology John used in his article to show that historically the St Louis Cardinals have outperformed what is expected, often enough to give us some hope that they could have a successful year. I also agree with John that a mid 70 wins team should be expected most. I do not agree with the Vegas odds and Pecota, but what does it matter, who knows what could happen this year. If they overperform, they will likely be more of a .500 team.
So far the Cardinals spring training games have been exciting at the least. So many random players we are not used to, and the team seems a little bit tenacious, which is encouraging. It’s still absolutely meaningless baseball, but fun to talk about regardless. The Cardinals are projected to finish in last place, but what about the consenus of these four projection systems? Here is what it looks like for the NL Central:
With the Cubs in the mid 80s in win total, the NL Central seems maybe just ok. Not like last season with 3 postseason teams, I don’t think. I think the Pirates will hover around .500, maybe do what the Reds did last year and sneak into the playoffs because of Skenes, and who knows with Konor Griffin on the team. The Cubs might have a problem. Y’all were right to not scoff at the Pirates, in this division. Moving on, I don’t know how to say this, but the Brewers might not even be .500, same with the Reds and Cardinals.
To my surprise, the Brewers are not projected for first or 2nd place, but in 3rd place! It could easily be that #2-4 would finish in any order there. But the Brewers have certainly fallen off, it would appear. Even if they overperform like they did last year, I think that still just makes them a fringe wild card team, unless they have some tricks up their sleeve. Which they probably do. We must regain the devil magic from them.
The Reds appear to be a just under or around .500 team too, which is not too much different than last season.
The Cardinals? It’s been said earlier, but probably a mid-70s win team.
Here’s the spreadsheet with every team totally updated including the Cardinals with Urias… sheets are sorted by players with the highest average projection:
View Link
The Brewers best player is William Contreras, no contest. Jackson Chourio, Bryce Turang, and Joey Ortiz are also really good players. The Brewers have plenty of pretty good outfielders! Too bad they’re in our division…. maybe a trade could still be made.
Outside of their 4 best position players, the team Milwaukee has fielded is sort of “meh”. I am sure they will prove me wrong. But yeah. Brandon Woodruff, Jacob Misioroswki, and Quinn Priester could make up a really good core of a rotation if things break right for Milwaukee, but could also be a big disappointment.
Comparisons and Observations
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the Brewers and Cardinals main position players equate out to about the same
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the Reds and Pirates are about the same too, but not as good, position-wise
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the Cubs are several wins or more ahead of everyone in the position players category
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Milwaukee’s bullpen could be their strength, and some good defense… they won’t blow many tight games
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the Brewers rotation is about equal to the Cubs rotation, but with whatever upside Misiorowski has
All that being said, I think the Cardinals have a good chance of winning more than 75 games. Furthermore, I think they would have to shoot themselves in the foot to win under 70 games. I think St Louis is the obvious underdog here, and that could bode well for overperforming the numbers. I’ll talk about that more next week!
Thus concludes howling good baseball talk, now onto music!
1979
Hitting 50 years old is surreal, and to go back and pore over every year of life is absurd. But I am now finishing up the 1970s, I would’ve turned 5 years old just before the 1980s. Here’s some of what went down in the last year of the 1970s…
The Guardian Angels formed in NYC as an unarmed organization of young crime fighters. They would wear red jackets emblazoned with patches and logo, along with specific hats. I used to see them on the CTA when I lived in Chicago during the late 1990s. They had chapters in different cities, mainly the big cities but some of the mid sized cities too. Those were much different times back then.
The total solar eclipse prior to 2017 was in 1979, so there was an eclipse drought for 38 years! That’s why I was sure to check out the last one earlier this decade, I was by the St Louis Arch when I was taking photos of it! A very cool and surreal experience, and the lighting made everything almost otherworldly.
Mardi Gras was canceled in 1979 due to a police dept strike in NOLA. Philips shows the compact disc (CD) publicly for the first time. C-SPAN was launched as a public tv channel focusing on government and public affairs. The Unabomber hits Northwestern University again. The deadliest aviation accident in US history occurred at O’Hare international airport in Chicago, killing all 271 passengers on board and 2 people on the ground.
McDonalds debuted the Happy Meal, Missouri was the test market in February, before it was introduced to the whole country during the summer. July 12th, 1979 was the infamous Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in Chicago. The only baseball game to end in a riot, and the only game to feature exploding piles of disco records!
I suppose Disco Demolition Night is the best indicator of any that Punk Rock had officially arrived nationwide as a concept understood by the average American. 1979 was an incredible year for punk rock! Just on the tail of the punk revolution, rap was becoming a thing with Sugarhill Gang releasing “Rapper’s Delight”, the first rap single to hit the Billboard Top 40. Rap was just entering its first phase, blossoming in the 1980s…
1979 was all about absolutely amazing jazz albums, avant prog rock masterpieces, and the genres of punk and post-punk pushing their way further into new forms of music. More on that later.
The St Louis Cardinals finished 3rd in the NL East division, ten games over .500. You could have a pretty good team and easily not make the postseason back then. The Pirates and Orioles were the two best teams in baseball, with the O’s the only team winning over 100 games at 102. The two teams would end up facing off in the World Series, with the Pirates winning the whole thing!
Willie Stargell and Keith Hernandez were both given the NL MVP! This was the ONLY instance of a co-MVP in baseball history. How odd. Don Baylor won the MVP in the AL. Hernandez also won a gold glove.
On May 17, 1979 at Wrigley Field, the Phillies beat the Cubs 23-22! What. 11 total home runs between both teams including a Billy Buckner grand slam 7 RBI performance for the Cubs. But the Phillies had Mike Schmidt on their side. 50 hits in total. Can anyone name a game that has had more total hits? Insane!
In an absurd other universe, oh wait, that’s this one, the KC Royals drafted Dan Marino and John Elway. They would ignore baseball and go on to become two of the best quarterbacks ever. On July 12th, 1979, the White Sox were forced to forfeit the second game of a doubleheader because of Disco Demolition Night. The fans tore up the field! Mayhem ensued throughout the stadium. August 2nd began Tony Larussa’s legendary managerial career.
The National League won it’s 8th straight All-Star Game. St Louis Cardinal Lou Brock hit his 3,000th hit vs the Cubs, winning the game in St Louis at Busch Stadium on August 13th! On September 12th, Carl Yastrzemski also reached the 3,000 hit plateau. On September 17th, George Brett hit his 20th triple, becoming a member of the the 20–20–20 club. Pete Rose reached 200 hits for the 10th season in a row, breaking Ty Cobb’s record.
Gary Templeton of the Cardinals became the first player ever to collect 100 hits from both sides of the plate before the 1979 season ended. He did this by batting exclusively from the right side to catch up with his hits form the left side. How crazy is that?
For this year I am upgrading from a Top 10 Albums list to a Top 20! 1o79 is absolutely stacked with good albums. Aside from a funky disco-pop album, an Afrobeat album, and an album of proto-industrial noise, there are 4 avant-prog albums, 3 amazing jazz albums, and 10 albums of punk rock splitting off in different directions and creating new sounds.
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This Heat – self titled I will recognize that this is not for everyone and will not be many people’s #1 1979 album, but from the first time I heard this in Sound class in college as an example of how many ways you could make a rock album go away from its roots it has blown my mind. The main track we talked about was the song Horizontal Hold, which is track 2 on the album (track 1 is more of the intro to the album, so HH is almost like the first song). The band is held together by the fluid, high energy drumming of Charles Heyward who is still making music to this day. I bought the vinyl reissue of this album right after it was released! I rarely ever do that. I would ultimately call this a punk album but it could also be in the avant prog category I suppose. It probably doesn’t even sound like music to a lot of people, lol. You could just call them an experimental rock band existing at the same time as the British punk movement. But to me, they were pretty punk in their own way! Way ahead of their time, and extremely influential.
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Henry Cow – ‘Western Culture’ in 1978 Henry Cow split up but also recorded this album. The new band Art Bears was formed, but there was the non-Art Bears material still sitting around, the final Henry Cow album. And their best one. While it is certainly avant prog, it also sounds a bit like jazz and classical music. 7 songs clocking in at under 40 minutes keeps this an epic listen from start to finish. This is RIO (rock in opposition) movement material, too heady for most record labels. They paved their own path.
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Univers Zero – ‘Heresie’ I was not familiar with this album (somewhat familiar with the band) before writing this, but I had to listen to this whole lengthy beast of an album. It drew me into its dark world of sound. This band is another RIO band, similar to Henry Cow and Art Bears. Univers Zero are Belgians very much into 20th century chamber music, but also prog rock. This is one of the heaviest sounding prog rock albums you’ll ever hear, but they do it in such a way different than the increasingly heavy heavy metal movement. This is as dark a listen as you’ll find, they just do heavy differently. With a bassoon. For fans of dark classical music as well as avant prog.
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Frank Zappa – ‘Sleep Dirt’ is Zappa in his more jazzy and avant prog rock persona. There are some rather amazing guitar solos on this album! Zappa really taps into some new territory here, some of his deepest darkest sounds, and perhaps him at his most psychedelic. An epic experience. During this era Terry Bozzio was behind the drumkit, and his drumming is legendary! If you are interested in the fusion of rock and jazz but not necessarily the whole jazz fusion genre, this one is for you!
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Crass – ‘Stations of the Crass’ it doesn’t really get any more punk rock than this album… in a year stacked with different forms of punk, I gotta say this is one of the most punk things ever. Very British! Another band waaaaayyyy ahead of their time. Much of the sentiments on this album are perfectly relevant today.
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Sun Ra – ‘God Is More Than Love Can Ever Be’ one of the best captures of Sun Ra’s music, the production is crystal clear and mixed very effectively to make you feel like they’re performing in the room. It is Sun Ra at his most focused, with a bassist and drummer meant for the trio format. This is free jazz stream of consciousness at its most controlled and refined, showing both complexity and restraint, with an attention to dynamics and movement. The whole thing flows together as if some weird and intense dream. This is Sun Ra in his most absolute brilliance. This is the only complete bass, drums, & piano studio recording in his vast catalog of releases! The drummer is called Samarai Celestial.
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Motorhead – ‘Bomber’ this is where you might go, shouldn’t the album ‘Overkill’ by Motorhead go here? Nope! I uncovered this hidden gem! The album art isn’t as cool, but I like the scuzzy, grimey sound of Bomber, the more midtempo barnburners on this album make me more happy: “Dead Men Tell No Tales”, “Poison”, “Stone Dead Forever”, “Bomber”, and “Lawman”. As much as Motorhead gets affiliated with metal, I think they’re ultimately a part of the punk movement. Or you could say they are the original crossover punk/metal band. It also feels like stoner rock moreso than other Motorhead releases, which would mean they predated that genre by quite a long time. Lemmy’s bass sounds extra crunchy on this one, which puts it over the top for me. Btw, Lemmy shares the same birthday as me! I play crunchy bass too.
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Sun Ra – ‘Sleeping Beauty’ this is another side of Sun Ra that is him at his most relaxed. A downtempo 30 minute daydream of a song, Sleeping Beauty is closer to the 1978 album Lanquidity in sound, except that it is not as dark and mysterious. This is a far more lighthearted Myth Science Arkestra at play here. If you’re looking for an intro album into the world of Sun Ra, this is one of the better options. Why did I put it so high on my list? I can’t quite put my finger on it other than it’s beautiful music.
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XTC – ‘Drums and Wires’ it was really tough trying to figure out who should get the last top 10 spot between XTC, Gang of Four, and Talking Heads, but ultimately I just thought the production quality of this one put it over the top, that and the super fun songs! Plus in the 1990s Primus covered XTC, and I’m a big nerd. This album is another one that is rather inventive and ahead of its time! This laid the blueprint on how to make rock music without using blues scales and other traditional rock templates.
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Gang of Four – ‘Entertainment’ super tight crunchy clear punk rock playing it on a most advanced level! Fun, exciting, and very danceable! Another really good recording for 1979. I really started to notice things getting more hi-fi this year. And this is why we need more than a top 10. The guitar sounds like it could cut through anything.
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Talking Heads – ‘Fear of Music’ it’s not easy ranking this at 12 but I’ll be honest here… I like them, but I don’t listen to them a lot. What I found most interesting was that there is a song that I thought was by Living Colour, a band I liked in high school, on this album! Showing my age here. “These Memories Can’t Wait”. That said, ‘Fear of Music’ is a really great album but I found the production to be a little lackluster compared to some of the sounds of 1979.
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Fela Kuti – ‘Unknown Soldier’ afrobeat masterpiece best described by AllMusic: “An epic 31-minute tribute to his fallen mother, Unknown Soldier is one of the most ambitious recordings of Kuti’s career, which describes in frightening detail the events that transpired on the eve of the Kalakuta raid…. Kuti gives a tortured, powerful performance of some of his most vivid and incendiary music – music that was in many ways the ideological equal of the physical torture that Kuti and his company had endured”.
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Chet Baker – ‘Broken Wing’ I don’t listen to a lot of straight up old school jazz albums, but here is one I like, Broken Wing by Chet Baker. Baker is my other favorite trumpet player besides fusion era Miles Davis. Yes, for straight up jazz, I would prefer hearing Chet Baker, nothing again Miles there. As usual, his voice, sparingly used, is nearly as important as his emotive, subdued trumpet playing… It also doesn’t feel fair ranking this masterpiece this low, but hey, there’s a lot of music out there, and there’s no accounting for taste. Some day I will be put to the task of breaking down all these albums by categories and rating them on a more advanced level. But for now, you’re just getting my gut instinct rankings in February, 2026.
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The Germs – ‘GI’ here we get into one of the more straight up punk rock classics! I like the more off kilter punk bands, but you cannot deny the immediacy of the Germs and the production by Joan Jett on this album! As a trivia aside, Pat Smear was in The Germs, Nirvana, and Foo Fighters… he must be an emotionally resilient musician!
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Throbbing Gristle – ‘20 Jazz Funk Greats’ essential experimental proto-industrial bordering on noise and music! not many people on the planet were doing stuff like this and if they were it probably never saw distribution and is lost on some tapes in someone’s storage or in a landfill, sadly enough. This “music” will take you to a whole new place.
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Frank Zappa – ‘Sheik Yerbuti’ this is a hybrid live and studio album that you would never know it was one or the other. This is Frank and his band at the height of their powers. This one has a lot of his comedic side, but it also rocks out sometimes at levels not seen often in his discography, but the compositions are just as complex as ever with all kinds of twists and turns, transitions, and complicated arrangements that also sound naturally executed. Frank was probably not the nicest band leader, but he still got the job done. And in case you didn’t know, he was mostly sober: his vices were too many cigarettes and a LOT of coffee.
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Michael Jackson – ‘Off The Wall’ this whole album is a disco-pop masterpiece but the songs “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough” and “Rock With You” are one of the best one-two album openers ever and two of the best songs in history. You have to put Off The Wall in a top 20 albums of 1979, however you rank it.
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Wire – ‘154’ on Wire’s third studio recording, they make a lateral move and expand their sound into intrepid new territory. ‘Pink Flag’ busted the doors wide open for punk rock, while ‘154’ showed a more introspective side.
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The Damned – ‘Machine Gun Etiquette’ and to round out my top 20, another exemplary punk rock album! A total ripper start to finish.
1979 Playlist
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