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Exactly Dave, Mike Hampton didn't turn into a bum overnight either. Colorado starters don't get decisions - they play in a gravity-absent bandbox with one of the worst defensive teams in baseball history. His 2 years there were a flat tire. Darryl Kile would be the top starter on 1/2 of the teams in the majors, a number 2 on another 1/3, and number 3 on Arizona, Boston, Atlanta, Minnesota and the Yankees. Roughly. His style would have served him well for another 5-6 years. You'd want him in a crucial late season pennant race game, and he'd have been the opening game Cards pitcher in the Playoffs or WS if they started on the road. That's your experienced weapon. It's a terrible loss from a human standpoint, and a crushing blow to the Cards. And ... I can feel sad about it and compassionate for his family, friends, teammates throughout the league and the St. Louis community. Dammit! ;^)

You'd want him in a crucial late season pennant race game, and he'd have been the opening game Cards pitcher in the Playoffs or WS if they started on the road. That's your experienced weapon.

Experience isn't as critical in picking Darryl Kile to start a postseason game if a series begins on the road as is the point that Kile had been better on the road than at home, whereas Matt Morris is better at Busch than on the road, customarily. (Morris has a better ERA at Busch than on the road; Kile a better ERA on the road on than at Busch.) Otherwise, if you define "crucial" as a game in which the Cardinals are going against the team they most need to beat to stay in the race, take the division, or win the pennant, I'm not all that convinced you would have gone with Kile as the go-to guy.

He has a very impressive looking record in the heat of a pennant race (August-October) overall, but without having at hand a breakdown as to whether he was meeting and beating the other guys' numbers 1 or 2 pitchers in those months; whether he was mostly facing the opponents' second-line pitchers; or, how he pitched explicitly against the team his team most need to beat, and against which pitchers, to stay in the race or win the division, I don't have a way to gauge his actual pennant race value.

The only information I do have at hand is his postseason performances. The only postseason series in which Kile got the opening game's start when the series began on the road was the 1997 National League Division Series against the Braves. Kile faced and lost to Greg Maddux; it was a low-scoring game but the Braves pried a run out of Kile in the first and another run in the second. Interestingly, Kile gave up only two hits compared to Maddux surrendering seven. It was the beginning of a three-game sweep that brought the Braves, a fateful date with the Fire-Sale-In-Waiting Florida Marlins, but there's no question but what Kile pitched exactly as his image seems to suggest - a hell of a road pitcher and the go-to-guy.

In 2000, in a division series, the Cardinals faced the Braves again to play the winner of the New York Mets-San Francisco Giants series for the pennant. Against the Braves, Kile started the second game against Tom Glavine at Busch Stadium; he left the game with an unusually fat 9-2 lead in a game the Redbirds won in due course 10-4, en route a St. Louis sweep (Kile had a 7-2 lead to work with after three innings; you'd better be pitching decently with that kind of jack to work with).

In the League Championship Series, against the Mets, Kile got two starts. He started the first game in Busch against Mike Hampton (who hadn't yet gone to his own Colorado purgatory) and left in the eighth inning behind 3-0; the Mets won the game 6-3. Kile then started the fourth game at Shea Stadium, against Glendon Rusch (their number four pitcher behind Hampton, Al Leiter, and the surprising Bobby J. Jones, whose one-hitter in the LDS bumped him up a few notches for the postseason run) - which should have been manna for Kile given his better road performances overall. But he was gone by the fourth with the Cardinals in the hole, 7-2.

In 2001, the Cardinals met the Arizona Diamondbacks in the division series. Kile started the third game against Miguel Batista, then the Diamondbacks' number three pitcher - at Busch, again. Kile actually pitched just well enough to win the game; when he left in after the sixth inning, he had a 2-1 lead; the Snakes jumped the Redbirds for four seventh-inning runs off two relief pitchers and won the game 5-3 (Byung-Hyun Kim saved it after Brian Anderson and Mike Morgan held it for him).

I'd surmise Darryl Kile's preference as a ballplayer would be to be recalled as a pitcher with heart who never refused the ball, did his best with what he had, and cared about his teammates. I say again: He'll not make the Hall of Fame by any stretch, and he may have been less pitcher than we wish he might have been given his repertoire and his heart (I wouldn't want to think about hitting that snappish curve ball of his when it was working right), but he'll never be remembered as anything less than big league - as a ballplayer, and even more so as a man.