The Cubs basically kept the Cardinals from the postseason by themselves

The Cubs mathematically ended any chance of the Cardinals reaching the postseason with a win on Thursday night, and it was a win meant to hurt St. Louis. The Cardinals, down to their final out, nearly had a game-tying homer in the bottom of the 11th inning...but then Leonys Martin reached over the wall to snag it, securing the Cubs’ win and the Cardinals’ demise.

That play and game were merely the exclamation points on what the Cubs have done to the Cardinals and their playoff hopes this year, though. That loss was the Cardinals’ 14th of the year against the Cubs: They won just five of the 19 matchups the two had in 2017.

The Cardinals, entering the final series of the year, are 82-77, in third place in the NL Central and eight games back of Chicago. They’re also just four games back of the second wild card, so it’s not like they, in the end, were going to need eight more wins and eight more Cubs losses to reach the postseason. St. Louis nearly made it to the final weekend of the season with its postseason eligibility intact, and if the Cards had played just a little better against the Cubs, they would still have it.

Instead, St. Louis has gone 77-63 against the rest of the league and has the opportunity to finish in second ahead of the Brewers with a sweep this weekend. They have scored 684 runs against 604 runs allowed against non-Cubs teams, for a run differential of +80, but they were outscored 88 to 64 (-24) by Chicago. Their .516 win percentage for the season translates to 84 wins over a full season, whereas their record against teams that weren’t the Cubs would result in 89 wins over 162 games.

The Cardinals might not have needed 89 wins to get a wild card, either: The Rockies hold the second wild card and have 86 victories now, so they need to sweep the Dodgers in the season’s final weekend to get to 89.

Going around .500 against the Cubs would have made all the difference in the world: Four more wins, giving St. Louis a 9-10 record against Chicago in 2017, would have the Cardinals tied with the Rockies for a wild card and two games up on the Brewers with three games to play, with the opportunity to eliminate the Brewers and catch the Rockies right in front of them.

Instead, the Cubs wrecked them in the standings without even severely outplaying them: 24 runs sounds like a huge difference, but over the course of 19 games, it’s 1.3 runs per game. That’s good, but it’s not a series of blowouts where the Cubs asserted their clear superiority, either. The Cardinals blew out the Cubs once, the Cubs got them back later, but otherwise, these were all close wins and losses.

All you need is a difference of one run to win, though, and the Cubs did that almost three times as often as the Cards this summer in head-to-head matchups. The Cubs are where they are because they beat on the Cardinals all year. The Cardinals are where they are because they were on the receiving end of those beatings. You have to imagine that’s as depressing for Cardinals fans as it is pleasing to Cubs fans.