The Chris Moeller Archives

Wake up call

Is it the last week of September already?!

It is. That means it's crunchtime in baseball and I damn near missed it. OK, I'm exaggerating. I watched the Cardinals games most nights during the summer, and each day I was tuned to the size of their lead in the National League Central Division, but I wasn't investing myself emotionally, you see. Gone this year was old Busch Stadium. Gone were the team's broadcasts on KMOX Radio. Gone were four favorites (and vital clogs on the field)-- Matt Morris, Reggie Sanders, Larry Walker, and Ray King. And gone was the Benton County connection-- Cal Eldred.

The team owners fleeced taxpayers for a significant chunk of a new ballpark that didn't improve on its predecessor. They auctioned everything from the old yard down to the urinal in the home clubhouse, and then neglected to increase the payroll. (Their best free agent acquisition in the offseason was a broadcaster-- John Rooney.) Mark Mulder came up limp in June, followed by Jim Edmonds, David Eckstein, and Jason Isringhausen. The projected everyday secondbaseman, Junior Spivey, never came up at all. The starting rotation imploded, save for Chris Carpenter and half a season of Jeff Suppan, and the mid-season pickups raised more eyebrows than post-season expectations.

Above all, the season's outcome seemed predetermined: skate past an uninspired collection of division contenders, and then get embarassed on national television by the backend of your pitching rotation en route to a hasty playoff exit. Predetermined that is, until last Thursday, when the Astros' Lance Berkman launched a game-winning home run off Carpenter in Houston, launching a four game sweep and highlighting a seven-day period in which the long-moribund Astros cut the Cards' division lead from 8 1/2 to 1 1/2 games.

And that's where it sits tonight just after 10:30pm central time. The Cards- losers of seven in a row-- are attempting to avoid their third eight-game losing streak of the season and save their Alka-Seltzer season. The Astros haven't lost in a week and possess the starting rotation that all playoff-bound teams still fear. They lurk two games behind in the loss column with five to play-- and the Reds, hoping to mimick the '64 Cardinals, reside just a game behind them.

Cards fans no longer think first of Albert Pujols when they hear spoken of the number five, they think of the magic number their team's been stuck on since September 20th. If you presumed, like I did, that the team was planning to wait until October to embarrass itself, you just may be in for a big surprise. They've got my attention.

posted by CM @ 8:32 PM