Because the Cardinals belong to St. Louis, we have a strong tendency to view them through a personal lens, especially during the happy times, selectively ascribing the virtues of resilience, perseverance, unity, competitive character, etc. The boys are portrayed as baseball heroes. And that is all well and good. The love of baseball does this to us. It’s part of the tradition.
That said, I’m pretty sure that in all of the other baseball towns where worthy teams reside — especially the teams that ride a lightning bolt into the postseason — these same attributes are woven into the standard narrative. In the places where successful teams exist, you will find descriptions of warriors who battle through adversity, scratch and claw, fight like banshees, refuse to give up, etc. And all of that is all well and good. The romance of baseball is a powerful lure.
I bring this up for a reason.
Wednesday night at Dodger Stadium, we’ll see two teams go at it in the NL wild-card game. And while the Cardinals have been assigned the role of underdog in this one-off against the mighty 106-win Dodgers, let’s sober up a bit and try to understand a couple of things about the two ballclubs.
The Cardinals are a very good team that barged their way into the postseason because the front office added two relievers and two starters as ballast for a raggedy pitching staff. Without those low-key but surprisingly effective moves, we wouldn’t be talking about this team’s giant heart and will to succeed.
The Cardinals didn’t make it to 90 wins and overcome bleak odds because of valor. Don’t get me wrong; this team deserves lots of credit for hanging in there, being professional and playing hard with the hope that certain trends would reverse. One of their true issues was terrible batted-ball luck. That tends to change and normalize during the course of the season, and that’s a big part of the Cards’ upturn on offense during the late-summer days and nights.
I never questioned their effort along the way. There was no reason for that. Their problems had nothing to do with attitude or desire. Their problems were pretty simple: the pitching staff was wobbly; the lineup was dozy. And when the hitters went into a simultaneous frenzy, attacking pitchers with confidence and the skill that was there (if dormant) all along — well, this isn’t exactly mystifying.
You fix the pitching, you ramp up at the plate. Your batted balls begin to find landing spots instead of the opponent’s gloves. You stop walking opposing hitters and let baseball’s best defense strengthen the run prevention.
You do a more effective job of hitting on two-strike counts. You power up and launch juicy pitches into the bleachers for a robust home-run count that was lower than it should have been for much of the season. Your performance with runners in scoring position takes a positive turn. A highly capable lineup found its dynamite, and fireworks ensued.
Your team baserunning — an asset, like the defense, that had been there for you all season long — adds runs to the scoreboard. And just as important as anything, you get healthy. As healthy as you’ve been all year. Especially in the outfield. This talented but more complete and healthier team had a much better chance of taking flight. And it did.
“We have really been able to make positive additions to our club, and if we get healthy and able to play together, that’s one of the big reasons we made the push we made,” manager Mike Shildt said during Tuesday’s media conference.
This is how you go from the .500 morass to winning 17 games in a row and 19 out of 20. It’s mostly about performance. Definitely about performance. The intangible goodies can be included in the script, and we can pretend that this was mostly about heart and soul. But if you pretend that this was all about heart and soul, well, I don’t know how to break it to you: you are also implying, without realizing it, that the Cardinals lacked heart and soul over the first four or five months of the season.
Because if this is mostly about heart and soul, then why didn’t the Cards get rolling earlier than they did? Easy answer: this was about the roster reinforcement, the belated boom-time summoned from the considerable talent within — and then after that it came down to performance. And the better you perform, your confidence and belief will increase. And in September these Redbirds performed as well as any Cardinal team in franchise history.
The Cardinals had the talent to become a really good baseball team. It took them a while to get there, but here we are. And they should be recognized as a really good baseball team. They’ve earned that much. The Cardinals’ pitching talent was supplemented, and their hitting potential belatedly clicked in, and Tyler O’Neill and Harrison Bader stayed in the lineup. Then it was time to kick out the jams.
If the Cardinals fail to receive accurate and proper credit for their turnaround, the Dodgers probably know a little something about mischaracterizations too.
The Dodgers have the $250 million payroll, the galaxy of stars, the muscle to make blockbuster trades, and pretty much can get any player that they want to. The Dodgers are deeper than the Cardinals and have more options to lean on.
Yeah, and the Dodgers are also tough as hell. So if we insist on pushing the battle-through-adversity resilience narrative, it also applies to the Dodgers. This is a team that had to chase the 107-win Giants down the stretch in a desperate race for first place in the NL West.
The Dodgers fell a game short — but not because of their own failings. They won 18 of their final 21 games including the last seven on the schedule. The
Dodgers also won their final 12 home games and are 24-3 at Dodger Stadium since Aug. 7.
According to Baseball Prospectus, the Dodgers had a combined 1,954 missed by injured or illness-stricken players. That’s 518 more days lost to injury-illness than the Cardinals’ total for the regular season. And in terms of the roster value lost to injury-illness, the Dodgers lost 12.78 Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP) compared to 7.8 WARP lost by the Cardinals.
None of this tracking includes the Dodgers’ loss of idiotic starting pitcher Trevor Bauer to legal troubles. And as these teams get set for their wild-card scrap at Chavez Ravine, the Dodgers will be missing their best and most valuable hitter, Max Muncy, who suffered a wrist injury in the final regular-season game.
The Dodgers are an enormously wealthy franchise with immense resources. But they’re also competitively hardwired — and absolutely resolute in their pursuit of success. Their determination level is, as Tony La Russa would say, tied for first.
“You look over the past kind of week, ten days of how we’ve been playing, we’ve been playing really good baseball,” said St. Louisan Max Scherzer, the obvious choice to start the wild-card game against the Cardinals. “With all that said, you can kind of throw all that out the window because the Cardinals were doing the same thing as well.”
I’m really looking forward to this game.
Adam Wainwright vs. Scherzer in a one-night-only engagement in a hallowed setting.
This game features a team, the Cardinals, that doesn’t receive enough credit for being as talented as they are.
They’ll duel it out against the Dodgers, a team that doesn’t receive enough credit for being as tough-minded as they are.
Thanks for reading …and I’ll be back in this space in a couple of hours with a piece on a few keys to a St. Louis victory.
–Bernie
Bernie invites you to listen to his opinionated sports-talk show on 590-AM The Fan, KFNS. It airs Monday through Thursday from 3-6 p.m. and Friday from 4-6 p.m. You can listen by streaming online or by downloading the “Bernie Show” podcast at 590thefan.com — the 590 app works great and is available in your preferred app store.
The weekly “Seeing Red” podcast with Bernie and Will Leitch is available at 590thefan.com
Follow Bernie on Twitter @miklasz
* All stats used here are sourced from FanGraphs, Baseball Reference, Stathead, Bill James Online, Fielding Bible, Baseball Savant and Brooks Baseball Net unless otherwise noted.
For the last 36 years Bernie Miklasz has entertained, enlightened, and connected with generations of St. Louis sports fans.
While best known for his voice as the lead sports columnist at the Post-Dispatch for 26 years, Bernie has also written for The Athletic, Dallas Morning News and Baltimore News American. A 2023 inductee into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame, Bernie has hosted radio shows in St. Louis, Dallas, Baltimore and Washington D.C.
Bernie, his wife Kirsten and their cats reside in the Skinker-DeBaliviere neighborhood of St. Louis.
