I was enjoying a beer at our favorite local pub when ESPN let me in on Tony LaRussa’s latest crazy-go-nuts idea: if the Cards are in the playoff hunt in 2010, they’ll add their new hitting coach, Mark McGwire, to the roster so that he’ll be available to pinch hit.

And presumably backup first. Boy, I’d love to see the look on Pujols’ face.

He went on to say that Big Mac will not be the leaning-on-the-fence-chatting kind of hitting coach, but will be “working his butt off” in the cages along with the guys half his age.

And…

wait for it…

he’ll be at spring training.

It’s the most I’ve ever wanted to see the Cardinals in the post-season hunt. What a friggin’ spectacle that would be. But they could still do one better: they know that Barry Bonds never retired, right?

In all honesty, I think we all would have been kind of surprised if Barry Larkin had been voted into the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. Would have been nice to have been surprised.

Even so, Larkin was no slouch. He pulled in 51.6% of the ballots, nowhere close to the 75% that he needed, but an indication of great things to come. From the MLB.com story:

Larkin’s chances for the Hall look even better compared to other great shortstops who have been snubbed by voters. His contemporary, former Tigers shortstop Alan Trammell, received only 22.7 percent of the vote on his seventh attempt.

The one guy who was elected in, Andre Dawson, had a similar percentage his first year on the ballot, and he lingered around 50% of the vote for four years. Then, he spent two years around 65% till finally pulling in 78% of the vote this year. It’s nice to see that nice guys like Andre can benefit from inflation.