2011 World Series: Cardinals Complete Improbable Story, Win In Seven

Oddly, nobody ever seems to talk about managers’ postseason records. Shoot, I couldn’t even find them anywhere. Not even at Baseball-Reference.com (granted, sometimes I just can’t find stuff because there’s so much there). So I compiled the records myself, punching in every postseason series managed by every manager who managed in at least six postseason series.

See, you have to draw the line somewhere. But it’s worth mentioning that Dick Williams managed in only five postseasons, Bill McKechnie and Billy Southworth in only four, and Leo Durocher and Bucky Harris in only three; all five of those men are in the Hall of Fame as manager.

But the Cardinals advanced, and though they were again the underdog against the Rangers, they battled, they beat some more odds, and Friday night, they won 6-2 to wrap up the 11th title in franchise history.

So let’s do this. Come with me as I trace the path from Game 1 through Game 7. It is a path unlike any other that I’ve ever followed.

He was a former star, but at that price, teams weren’t going to trip over themselves to offer a top prospect. It was going to be fliers-and-lottery-tickets for the Cardinals if they wanted to get rid of an expensive and declining player. The Cardinals picked up $2 million in the deal, but they still weren’t going to get a prospect of note.

They got this guy:

It’s hard to win a World Series without a little luck.

It’s practically impossible to win a seven-game World Series without a lot of luck.

We had Joe Buck. Much of the rest of the world had Gary Thorne. Gary Thorne’s pretty good.

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For years after -- and still to this day, to some extent -- the Giants would play the home run in promos and ads. Snow did a mini-Fisk, willing the ball fair with his left arm. Every time I saw it, I wanted to grab my TV by the lapels and shake it. They lost that game, you idiots. They lost!

I still feel that way. It was a great moment in Giants history, but it wasn’t a great three hours and 41 minutes in Giants history. There are better things to celebrate. But in my haste to dismiss that moment, I made the mistake of dismissing one of the greatest moments in World Series history. Ever since the 2000 NLDS, I tarred the Carlton Fisk home run with the same brush of sticky-loser tar. They lost that World Series, you idiots. They lost! How was that something to celebrate for decades and decades?

There were two points in Game 6 at which I seriously questioned Ron Washington’s judgment.

Still, when a team loses like the Rangers lost ... actually, nobody’s ever lost a World Series game like the Rangers lost Game 6. Still, it’s appropriate to review the events because ... well, because that’s what we do. Our National Game has many charms, and one of them is questioning a manager’s judgement after a close loss, whether it’s a small game in May or a massive game in October.

I’m thinking of one of those big spinning wheels like you see in TV game shows. One of those big spinning wheels with pegs on them, and a bunch of different, I don’t know, wedges that say different things. You know the things I’m talking about. I don’t know what they’re called, and I refuse to look it up because I’m in a lazy and stubborn mood, but I’m going to go with “pegwheel”. I’m thinking of a pegwheel.

Thursday night’s World Series Game 6 was basically a spinning pegwheel. There was no telling where it was going to stop, and just when you thought it was finished, it moved a little more. The thing went past the next peg. This is the third time I’ve used the word “thing” in two paragraphs.

How do you write about Game 6 of the 2011 World Series? There are all sorts of angles to take. So many angles. They’re all squiggly tailed ideas, poking around an unfertilized egg of understanding. The egg was also the best baseball game most of us will ever see. The ideas are bobbing and weaving, trying to get in. There will be a writer somewhere who gets it right. The resulting article will be a star-child, floating in the heavens like the baby at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. And after we read it, we still won’t have any idea what in the hell just happened, just like in 2001. This is bigger than all of us.

Every baseball game has what-ifs. Every single World Series game that’s ever been played was festooned with what-ifs. Should Manager Q have gone with Player Y? Should he have pinch-hit there, bunted there, brought in this reliever, that reliever, left in the starter too long, not long enough?

You have to understand my situation, here. I started writing this recap when the Cardinals were trailing the Rangers 7-4 in the seventh inning, and it looked like the Rangers were going to win their first-ever World Series. Even when the Cardinals threatened in the eighth, I kept on working through, because what were the odds that the Rangers would give it away? What were the odds that Neftali Feliz would blow a two-run save?

A lot of words were written, and, completely unregrettably, a lot of words were erased. The Rangers may well win their first-ever World Series in Friday night’s Game 7, but they did not get the job done on Thursday, as they lost what was easily one of the most absolutely amazing baseball games ever played. The last day of the regular season was memorable because it brought three games and a pair of historic collapses together at once. This night was memorable because it condensed all that into one game, and that game was Game 6 of the World Series.

As for “Moneyball,” La Russa said he went once already and walked out on it.

“It’s our tribute to all the scouts and baseball people that were dissed by ‘Moneyball,’” he said. “That’s why I walked out of ‘Moneyball.’“Apparently, he stayed for the whole thing Wednesday night; here’s one representative quote that was tweeted by a number of reporters:

So even after his performance in Game 5, we might not have seen the last of Chris Carpenter. But then, one has to wonder: what’s going on with his elbow? The health of Carpenter’s elbow was a subject of conversation just last week, and the following nugget jumped out at me from the bottom of a Gil LeBreton article:

Skipping warmup pitches? That sounds like a guy who might be hurting. But then, I tracked down the following from October 3:

It’s hard to evaluate GMs as an outside observer. That seems like a painfully obvious statement, and it is, but it’s worth unpacking just a bit. General managers who say the right things, and who clearly evaluate and acquire players based on sabermetric principles, will get a lot of internet love. But general managers also need to cajole, browbeat, and persuade. They need to do Don Draper things while working too hard to enjoy the other Don Draper things. They need to lead and convince. Evaluating a GM isn’t just a matter of tallying up trades and free agents.

And the whole time, he had Albert Pujols.

There have been other recent postponements due to rain; in fact, St. Louis was also the site of the most recent Series rainout before this one: Game 4 of the 2006 World Series. Before that, the decisive Game 7 of the 1986 World Series in New York was pushed back a day, and the famous Carlton Fisk home run in Game 6 in 1975 took place only after that game had been delayed three days by rain in Boston.

No sweat, right? There was one small problem. Unlike the ballparks of today, most stadiums in those days didn’t have full-field tarps; those didn’t come into common use until the 1920s. Usually, only the pitcher’s mound and home plate areas were covered. If you’ve seen photos of ballparks from 100 years ago, they weren’t the groomed greenswards of today; often, bare spots were everywhere and trash littered the fields.

So there you have it. If there’s a Game 7, Harrison should start over Holland. The statistics prove this.

...

For a week or two there, Tony La Russa couldn’t really do anything wrong.

Then the World Series comes along, and suddenly a few things started going wrong. At which point La Russa’s predilection for micro-managing suddenly seemed an affliction rather than a gift. And suddenly it was easy for the second-guessers and the naysayers and the nattering nabobs to engage their reflexive negativity and skepticism.

That’s impressive enough on its own, but when you consider that Kinsler can hit a lot and that Andrus can hit a little, it isn’t a big leap to say that the Rangers have baseball’s best middle infield. It isn’t inarguable - they’re doing pretty well in Boston and Anaheim - but it’s probably true. I don’t know how you could argue convincingly that anyone has it better than Texas.

Of course, things in baseball don’t follow easily predictable paths. The Rangers couldn’t have known years ago that they’d have baseball’s best middle infield come 2011. How did this all fall in place just so? Let’s explore, together. (Together, we can achieve anything!)

This is being considered a minor win for St. Louis. Why? Because Chris Carpenter started Monday night’s Game 5, and the postponement gives the Cardinals the option of starting Carpenter again in a potential Game 7 on three days rest. Carpenter is the staff ace, and he’s allowed just four runs in 13 World Series innings.

But just because La Russa hasn’t told us what they will do doesn’t mean we can’t talk about what they should do. Let’s say the Cardinals beat the Rangers Thursday night. Let’s say they beat them in a conventional game, rather than a game that goes like 18 or 20 innings. Who should they have take the mound in the biggest and last game of the season?

To win a World Series, every team has to experience a lot of good fortune. Teams will go through hardship and adversity and still come out the other side as champions, but on every championship team in the history of baseball, there are a handful of players that make you say, “Wow. Didn’t count on that.”

For the rest of the year, though, he hit .237/.289/.362 -- even for a utility infielder in Rangers Ballpark, that’s a perfectly abominable slash line. He wasn’t getting on base. He wasn’t hitting for power. In 304 at-bats after May, he walked 21 times and had 63 strikeouts. And in the playoffs, he’s been even worse, though things are looking up. He hit .100 in the ALDS, .111 in the ALCS, and he’s hit .125 so far in the World Series. By the time the 37th round of the playoffs gets here, he’ll be Rod Carew.

Just in August, things looked bleak for the Cardinals. And I’m not just writing about how they were over ten games out of a playoff spot at one point. They were down in the standings, yes, but they weren’t just looking at a wait-‘til-next-year bump in the road. This was a team built for 2011. Considering how many contractual loose ends they had, anything beyond that was dicey. To put it in terms of Lost, they had the polar bears in the jungle and spooky French transmissions, but the future could bring some crap about being dead without knowing it. That, and losing a bunch of games to the Pirates.

Things turned around with the standings, and the team tied up a couple of those loose ends, re-signing Lance Berkman and Chris Carpenter. But there’s still a win-now urgency to the Cardinals, almost exclusively because of the Albert Pujols situation. The Cards’ reversal of fortune and NL pennant have made this season an unqualified success, regardless of what happens in the remaining game(s), but without Pujols, this might be as close as the Cardinals get to a championship for a long, long time.

I was going to summarize some reaction to what La Russa said about this incident in his postgame press conference -- in which he tried to put all the blame on himself -- but Jeff Gordon has helpfully already done that for me. (No, not the NASCAR driver -- this Jeff Gordon is a writer for stltoday.com.)

So, with your indulgence, here’s some highlights from the summaries. Hey, it’s Wednesday morning and we might have Game 6 rained out tonight, so why not delve deeper into something that could wind up costing the Cardinals the World Series?

“It’s been the same for me the last two months basically, and I’m still going to try to do the same thing,” Garcia said. “Don’t change anything, don’t try to do too much because this is the World Series. That’s kind of how I feel.”

“Well, you definitely think when you’re in a kid, you want to be in this position, be on this stage,” Lewis said. “I think just being in the situation that we were last year throughout the playoffs gives you more of an edge, more relaxation. That’s for sure.”

While more than a few have chosen to talk about why Dotel shouldn’t have walked Cruz, though, nobody’s chosen to talk about how Dotel walked Cruz. I don’t mean that Dotel intentionally walked him. I mean the way Dotel intentionally walked him.

They were all like that. All four intentional balls. Just kind of softly flung in the general direction of the opposite batter’s box as if Dotel were clearing fallen apples from his yard. The intentional walk itself was completed, but the process was conspicuously sloppy and unconventional.

The lineups aren’t out for Game 6 yet, but Tony La Russa has confirmed one thing:

Berkman will hit cleanup in Game 6If you’ve read The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball, or shared a straw with someone who has, you’ll know that lineups aren’t especially important over the long haul. Switching a really good hitter and a wretched hitter between the #4 and #8 slots might add a win or two over a full season.

The problem is the chant.

Very, very, very plain. That’s the chant the crowd does to inspire the protagonist of an ABC After School Special. It’s great for helping kids with feathered hair finish first in a BMX race, but it’s lousy for giving the proper respect to a power hitter. A good chant should create an foreboding feeling for the opposing team and annoy the crap out of the other fans. NA-PO-LI sure gets the second part down, but it’s too generic to come close to the first.