At the end of 2011, the St. Louis Cardinals won a dramatic World Series anchored by Albert Pujols, the best player on the planet; Lance Berkman and his .959 OPS (league average, .720); Matt Holliday (.912 OPS); backstop exraordinaire Yadier Molina; starters Chris Carpenter, Kyle Lohse, and Jaime Garcia, a combined 38-24, 3.46; and closer Jason Motte. Hall of Famer Tony LaRussa skippered the over-achievers in his Major League swan song.
Then Pujols skipped town for a pot of gold, LaRussa retired, Berkman moved on, Motte fell apart, Carpenter ordered a new ulnar collateral ligament and Lohse cashed in on a career year. They're all gone. Jaime Garcia has pitched 177 innings in the intervening two years. Only Holliday and Molina stayed put and kept producing.
The Cardinals did not dip heavily into free agent waters to replace all that talent. They brought in Carlos Beltran and some spare parts. So as you can imagine, the franchise has declined...to pause in its pursuit of another title. They won the toughest division in baseball, achieved the best record in the National League and now pose a World Series return threat.
If you're tired of the Redbirds, join the club. But don't fail to appreciate this unbelievable franchise, the best in the game at producing winning teams without spending significant fractions of a billion dollars. In two years, they have developed an MVP-candidate second baseman (Matt Carpenter), a post-season hero third baseman (David Freese), an RBI-machine first baseman (Allen Craig), a solid center fielder (Jon Jay), and possibly the best of them all, a slugging first baseman with 17 home runs in half a rookie season (Matt Adams).
And that's less than half the story. After welcoming back Adam Wainwright following TJ surgery, St. Louis turned into a pitcher nursery this season, with six hurlers under 26 throwing 50 innings or more impressively. That doesn't count 23-year-old lefty Kevin Siegrist, who only accumulated 40 frames, during which he allowed two runs on 17 hits and fanned 50. Just 22, rookie Shelby Miller bollixed NL batters to the tune of 15-9, 3.06 in the role of #2 starter.
It's impossible from this perch to determine whether GM John Mozeliak is a brilliant drafter or whether the franchise, in the shadow of Branch Rickey, excels at developing talent. Likely a combination. Either way, the Cards were the NL's second-best hitting and fifth-best pitching squad in the NL this year, en route to 97 wins.
It's funny to think about the money-greased Dodgers as upstarts against the child care center representing St. Louis, but with three World Series and two League Championship appearances in the last decade, the Cardinals present an aura of steady accomplishment. Just remember they're doing it not with Benjamins but with brains.
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