The Chris Moeller Archives

World Series Notebook 2013

It’s funny how one game can change your outlook. Game 1 of this year’s Fall Classic was a disaster for the Cardinals and their fans-- a comedy of defensive errors, a potentially-devastating injury to Carlos Beltran, an embarrassing blow-out defeat (8-1) at Fenway Park that not only extended Boston’s World Series winning streak to nine games (dating back to Game 7 of the ’86 Series), but made it five in a row in October against the Cardinals. And the Cards never led in any of those five games.

For all the Cardinals’ success since 2000 and before, another showing against the Red Sox like the one in 2004 that still haunts us all, would not only allow the Red Sox to even up their all-time WS record against the Birds, but give them their third championship of the new century, one more than St. Louis. After Wednesday night’s game, I felt like I had been stabbed by Jerry Remy’s son.

But then the Cardinals got a Game 2 standout performance each from pitchers Michael Wacha, Carlos Martinez, and Trevor Rosenthal, whose combined ages, Will Leitch points out, are less than Arnold Schwarzenegger’s. They got hero at-bats in the 7th inning from David Freese, Jon Jay, and Daniel Descalso in a manner that recalled a 2011 season that will never be topped. Even if the Cardinals fail to win another game this season, 2013 will be memorable, of course for the National League pennant, and also for being the year that the Cardinals were thrust into the role of national villain. They first punched out the media mascot Pirates and then the media favorite Dodgers. The website Deadspin declared war on the Cardinals, and in particular, Cardinals fans. To trolling Deadspin editors, Cardinals fans are arrogant not just about their team but about themselves. The website mocks the Cardinals’ “Best Fans in Baseball” label and claims we invented it for ourselves, rather than simply wearing humbly the label that has been given us by the media at large and by the players.

Frankly, I don’t understand the hate. If Cardinals fans tend to puff out our chests, it’s because the team has never in its history been given attention from the national sports media that it didn’t have to earn. If the Cardinals were the Cleveland Indians, an ancient franchise that rarely wins, instead of an ancient franchise that frequently wins, they would be as far off the media radar as the Indians are. To me, the much more annoying fans are not the ones that claim to be the “best,” but the ones, like those of the Dodgers, that lay claim instead to being the “coolest” fans. "Those Cardinals fans are so annoying with their polite cheering of the other team, their rhythmic clapping as horsies run on the field before the game, and those goofy Midwestern grins. Don't you know you need to carry a cool detachment from the game, embrace the snarky new social media, and high-five without flaw? How can Cardinals fans be so self-congratulatory while lacking hyper-self-awareness?

The Cardinals, for your information, do not lay exclusive claim to a team method of playing baseball (i.e. the brutally-mocked, so-called “Cardinal Way”). Their version goes back as far as any of them, but as a child, I distinctly recall hearing, for example, about the Oriole Way, an organizational philosophy of teaching baseball fundamentals that led to three World Championships and six American League pennants for Baltimore's team between 1966 and 1983, and seemed to end with the managerial firing of organization-lifer Cal Ripken Sr. 

At 700 Clark Street in St. Louis, there are specific organizational philosophies, physical and mental, that govern the team. Physically, the hitters approach to all fields and keep their strikeouts to a minimum. If there’s a roster need for a veteran power hitter to come off the bench, they’re not going to fill the slot by signing a strikeout machine like Mark Reynolds, even if the package comes with prodigious power. Cardinal pitching philosophy is even more defined, at least in the shadow of the legendary pitching coach Dave Duncan, and it’s in complete opposition to the pitching elements of “Moneyball” featured at a theater near you. Generally speaking, “sabremetrics” promotes strikeout pitching. There’s a newfangled statistic called fielding-independent pitching (FIP), whose proponents believe that pitchers should be measured only by what they can “control.” That is, home runs, strikeouts, and walks. Anything else is considered an unreliable measure as it relies upon defensive performance in back of the hurler. This is a silly calibrator. If I’m building a pitching staff, I want ground-ball pitchers. Fewer pitches, more innings pitched, more double-play rally killers, a more-alert defense behind my horse. The best pitching in baseball has never been the pitching that’s done most powerfully, it’s the pitching that’s done most efficiently. That’s why Justin Verlander has been worthless against National League opposition in the World Series and even in the All-Star Game. Against the best clubs and the best sluggers in the biggest games, you’re not going to get the large strikeout totals. The approach of the hitters has changed.

The mental approach to the game is even more controversial because the Cardinals make an overt claim to searching for “character” players. This is with the continued theme of organizational efficiency. The Dodgers' Yasiel Puig is an extraordinarily-talented player, and his outward emotion is healthy, but nobody has taught the man how to play the game. When he embarrasses himself on the biggest stage of the sport, as he did repeatedly and increasingly earlier this month, Cardinals players and fans shake their heads not because he’s showing emotion, or because they feel somehow that he’s not allowed to show emotion or celebrate, but because he’s pounding his chest one half-inning after playing a single into a double in the outfield, and then later throwing to the wrong base and allowing three runners to move up 90 feet. The wide gulf between energy and maturity is what gives other teams (not only the Cardinals) the naked perception that Puig, when celebrating, is celebrating himself and not his contribution to the team goal. His immature behavior in NLCS Games 1 through 5, towards his opponents, teammates, and umpires, would have never been tolerated by the Cardinals or allowed to then spin completely off the charts to the team’s final and lasting detriment in the decisive Game 6 of the series, and we can be sure it wouldn’t be the manager that would have to police this behavior either, it would be the pitcher, the catcher, the right fielder, and others.

You’re quite right that the Cardinals do not consider baseball to be a “kids game.” It hasn’t been a kids’ game since it went pro in Cincinnati four summers after the death of President Lincoln. Maybe your baseball is a kids’ game, but my Cardinals baseball is a man’s game, played by professionals, with that word “professional” considered an adjective of tremendous compliment.

The Cardinal Way is for real, yet I understand why most baseball fans that have never heard of George Kissell doubt its existence. Baseball fans are nurtured to believe that baseball is entirely unlike football, in this particular way: On the gridiron, coaches are all-important. They develop the “system,” the offensive and defensive schemes that will often supersede even the talent level of the player roster. But in baseball, if it’s not the pure talent of the players that determines success, it’s considered to be the ability of the support staff to sign or draft great players. When the Cardinals “steal” a Michael Wacha with the 19th pick in the draft, or pull an Albert Pujols or Matt Carpenter out of the 13th round, or an Allen Craig in the 8th round, or a Trevor Rosenthal in the 21st, or a Matt Adams in the 23rd, they’re supposedly getting “lucky.” Because, after all, if they really knew Albert Pujols would turn out to be that good, why did they draft twelve other players ahead of him?

The Cardinals of late clearly have had a special eye for potential, but the primary factor in the Cardinals’ success-- as their typical season rarely rewards a series of high draft picks-- is that they teach the game of baseball better than other teams. Baseball coaches, it turns out, do matter. Second baseman Matt Carpenter, who led the NL this year in hits, doubles, and runs, had already turned 24 years old before he was drafted, and he came up through the system playing a different position than the one he played all this year, his second full season in the bigs. St. Louisan David Freese, acquired from San Diego when he was a minor-leaguer, had given up on baseball during college and was still playing at Double A when he turned 25. By 28, he had become arguably one of the top five World Series stars of all-time. Slugger Allen Craig didn’t debut in the how until he was 25, and didn’t stick until he was 26. And that’s another element of the Cardinal Way that contradicts sabremetrics—the idea that players might actually still possess tremendous potential even after their early “metrics’ have painted the picture of a low “ceiling.” Maybe the Cardinals didn’t luck out so much in the draft last year with Michael Wacha as Michael Wacha lucked out to be drafted by a team with great teachers of pitching.

On this topic of Cardinals minor leaguers, I love the notion that Red Sox pitcher Jon Lester was caught on television Wednesday night with a potentially-illegal and somehow lime green substance on the inside of his glove, and the first person to tweet the photo of the “slimed” glove was an obscure Cardinals minor leaguer watching the game at home on TV. Left-handed pitcher Tyler Melling spent the 2013 season at Palm Beach in the Florida State League, compiling a record of three wins and four losses.

There IS a “system.” There has to be one. The success is not due to any one player or a couple players. If the Cardinals wind up with three or four championships in this “era,” and they’re knocking on the door of their third, there won’t have been a “nucleus” of players like the one the Yankees had from 1996 to 2009 with Jeter, Rivera, Posada, and Pettitte. On this year’s World Series roster, only Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright have rings dating back to the Cards’ ’06 Series championship (and Wainwright missed the entire 2011 championship season due to injury). And the ’06 championship came on the heels of a six-year period (2000-2005) in which the Cardinals averaged 96 regular-season wins per year. The manager position changed out in 2012, the pitching coach in 2011, the general manager in 2008. Only the tenure of club owner Bill DeWitt Jr. traverses this entire modern era of success. With a group of partners, he purchased the Cardinals from Anheuser Busch, Inc. in 1995.

Having an effective system we call the Cardinal Way doesn’t mean the team is fundamentally perfect. This pennant-winning club makes plenty of mistakes-- for all to see this very week. The defense can be especially poor, the hitters subject to long standing naps, but having a system in place that is equal-parts mental focus, discipline, and character means a better handling of mistakes when they inevitably pop up.

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ESPN Boston seems to be getting nervous about the Red Sox’ chances. ESPN St. Louis had no comment about Games 1 and 2 because it doesn’t exist.

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I enjoy Tim McCarver and Joe Buck and their excellent work on FOX. Tim will be missed next year even though he’s starting to run out of things to tell us that he hasn’t already. He did have one of his all-time great moments last night (right up there with the time he predicted Luis Gonzalez’s sawed-off, opposite-field, game-winning single off Mariano Rivera in Game 7 of the 2001 World Series) when he set up David Ortiz’s at-bat in the eighth inning. He pointed out that Ortiz didn't move a muscle in the on-deck circle when everybody on the planet, including Ortiz, thought that the left-hander Randy Choate would be brought in to face him. That made it especially dramatic when Cards’ manager Mike Matheny decided to stick with the uber-confident 22-year-old right-hander Carlos Martinez. C-Mart had been so sick with his stuff on the mound for the previous 1 2/3 innings that I was guessing after the fact that Ortiz possibly didn’t move a muscle because he was hoping Matheny would opt for Choate. Ortiz ended up grounding a single into the deep infield shift, but Martinez was still on-hand one batter later to force an inning-ending pop-up and to write his name for the first time into World Series history. It was a beautiful verbal set-up to that entire sequence by both Buck and McCarver, a pair of great “professionals” if ever there were any. I’ll look forward to re-living the moment forever on DVD if the Cardinals wind up winning this thing. If they lose, I’ll probably never watch any of the games.

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I have no clue who might replace McCarver in the FOX booth next year. Troy Aikman?

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Unless you’re betting on it in some form or another, I don’t understand how in the world one can actually believe tackle football to be more exciting than the championship baseball action we see every October. Less excruciating, perhaps. Very little sticks in my craw like somebody telling me they think baseball is “boring.” What I’m hearing when they tell me this: “I don’t understand baseball,” and also, usually, “I’m legitimately sad that I had nobody to teach the game to me.”

Fifty years from now, when I am quite old, baseball will still be the masterpiece of performance art that it is today. There may be another fad sport that has surpassed it again in popularity, but baseball will be the thing that it is today. That other sport won’t be football, I’m sure of that. The patriarchy is dying so the concept is fated. More importantly, what playing baseball does to right and left arms, playing football does to brains, and that’s simply not sustainable. In 50 years, high schools and colleges will be out of the football business for medical and legal reasons, and football will be more of what boxing is today.

If anything has the ability to kill baseball, though, it's the length of Red Sox games. Holy Christ, get in the box already.

posted by CM @ 11:41 PM