Coronavirus got you down? Let’s talk about my 5 least favorite St. Louis Cardinals

Everybody on social media seems to be entertaining themselves these days by talking about their favorite ballplayers either with the St. Louis Cardinals or other teams.

That’s been done to death, so here is my list of my five least favorite Cardinals players of all-time.

5) Todd Ziele was a guy who put together some pretty good career numbers. But I just can’t be convinced he really cared about the game. Part of the disappointment with Zeile isn’t his fault. The Cardinals let veteran backstop Tony Pena go because Zeile was supposed to be the next great St. Louis catcher in the mold of Pena, Ted Simmons, Walker Cooper and Tim McCarver. But the scouting reports were apparently terrible because Zeile was so bad behind the plate that the Cardinals immediately tried to turn him into a third baseman with mixed results. But the rest is on the player. Zeile didn’t exactly have the eye of the Tiger and the Cardinals thought so little of him that they eventually traded him to their arch rivals, the Chicago Cubs. I have a theory that great players rarely get traded because they’re too valuable to lose. Zeile played for 11 different teams over the course of his career. Apparently, I’m not the only person who was disappointed in what he brought to the table.

4) Bob Horner is another guy who was at least partially despised because of things beyond his control. When the Cardinals let go of star slugger Jack Clark because they didn’t want to meet his free agent demands, the former Braves first baseman Horner was brought in to be his replacement. Horner hit 27 homers in each of his two previous seasons with Atlanta before spending a year playing in Japan. But, appearing to be out of shape and over the hill when he returned to the United States to play for the Cardinals in 1988, he managed only three long balls in the center of the St. Louis batting order before the Cardinals cut him loose after only 60 games and 247 plate appearances. My hangup with Horner is that he became emblematic of a terrible period in Cardinals history when Anheuser-Busch became disinterested in owning the team and cut the budget accordingly. From 1988 until A-B sold the team seven years later, the Cardinals were never serious contenders again.

3) Juan Agosto doesn’t have anyone to blame for his reputation, except maybe Father Time. Arriving in St. Louis at age 33, Agosto pitched 117 2/3 innings with a 5.40 ERA. In that span, he allowed more than one-and-a-half base runners per inning of work, quite the feat for a lefty specialist. There’s nothing that kills the will to win of a baseball team like a relief pitcher who is constantly either coughing up leads or burying a team’s chances of catching up in the late innings. Amazingly, after he left St. Louis, Agosto pitched half a season with the Seattle Mariners in 1992 and then signed with the Houston Astros during the offseason. He didn’t fare much better in the Astrodome, however, lasting only six games before he was cut loose and his career came to a long-overdue end.

2) Danny Jackson was a free agent splurge as the Cardinals went from the last dark days of the brewery’s reign to the current ownership group. Instead of getting the veteran performer and leader the team sought, they got a broken down, injury prone pitcher with an attitude problem. Jackson was a monumentally terrible 4-15 with a 5.78 ERA in three seasons with the Cardinals. The Cardinals made it back to the playoffs for the first time since 1987 and Jackson contributed three innings of work in the postseason, giving up three earned runs on seven hits. As if his on the field performance wasn’t enough, Jackson was a grouch and naysayer off of it. A cancer survivor, Jackson went out of his way to pour water on the recovery efforts of catcher Eli Marerro when he learned he had the disease during spring training. It seemed like a really crummy way to kick the kid when he was down instead of being the leader by example the young player needed.

1) Colby Rasmus tops my list because he was super talented... but he cared not one bit about realizing his potential. And that’s not my opinion, those are words straight out of the mouth of Rasmus himself. He repeatedly whined about the pressure involved in trying to improve from being good to being great, he complained that former St. Louis skipper Tony LaRussa insisted that he actually did some work and didn’t just let him have fun and, ultimately, he quit the game because he didn’t want to bother trying to play anymore. Millions of American boys grow up dreaming of being a Major League Baseball superstar — not to mention making millions of dollars doing it. They’d kill for the chance to play in a World Series.

As it turns out, the only real value Rasmus ended up having for the Cardinals was serving as trade bait. In a deal that seemed insane at the time, St. Louis gave up the kid — and his meddlesome father — in return for a handful of players who were on the verge of being free agents including starting pitcher Edwin Jackson, reliever Octavio Dotel and outfielder Corey Patterson. As it turned out, that group, plus the only controllable player in the swap, lefty reliever Marc Rzepczynski ended up turning around an underachieving club that rallied to win the 2011 World Series. I don’t think it was any coincidence that when Rasmus left, the club’s under-achieving ways went with him.

Scott Wuerz

Belleville News-Democrat

Scott Wuerz has written “Cheap Seats,” a St. Louis Cardinals fan blog for the Belleville News-Democrat, since 2007. He is a former BND reporter who covered breaking news and education.