He’s so strong between the ears that nothing fazes him. He’s got a good head, good heart, good guts.

– TLR on Chris Carpenter

Go one pitch at a time. All that stuff around you that’s going on doesn’t get in your head, so you’re not even thinking about it.

– Carpenter

Carpenter went one pitch at a time, all right: To the Tigers’ chagrin, when they took Carp’s first pitch, it was a strike, and when they swung at his first pitch, it was an out. Combined with Iron Cap’s Game 1 performance, the Cardinals have featured two of their most efficiently pitched games of the season during the World Series (min. eight innings pitched), by pitches per plate appearance:

Moreover, Carpenter’s splendidly-spun outing was the second-best of any Cardinal performance in the team’s World Series history with the Tigers:

Gibson, Dean, Carpenter… it’s beginning to sound right.

They think I might have just bruised it in there or something like that. We’ll deal with it tonight, but I think it will be fine.

– Carpenter on his thumb

Hopefully, the Cardinals will wrap the series up in the next three games and the question of Carpenter’s health will be moot.

We faced him before and hit him pretty good, but tonight he pitched great. He’s a Cy Young winner.

– Carlos Guillen

Indeed, all of the Tiger starting lineup (excepting Robertson) had faced Carpenter before, and with good results. But Carpenter, proving the folly of small sample sizes (yes, that’s egg on our face), can’t be held down for long. We’re sure that the Tigers would gladly have traded all of their regular-season success for a few runs off Carp in Game 3.

It’s almost like what Kenny did in Game 2, Chris Carpenter did tonight. He was pretty much lights out.

– Sean Casey

Please, Mayor, don’t insult him. Not even considering that Rogers accomplished his 80- point game score under dubious circumstances, Carpenter’s Game 3 gem wasn’t simply comparable to Rogers’s outing, it was the standard by which all other pitching performances in this series will be measured (not the other way ’round). His Game Score of 82 doesn’t even begin to tell the story: He pitched more efficiently (3.15 PPA to Rogers’s 3.5), surrendered fewer walks (0-3), struck out more (6-5) and had a much better FIP ERA (1.72-3.16). We suspect Casey wouldn’t have qualified “lights out” if Carp’s thumb hadn’t cramped up after the fourth inning.

He’s got that quality where the bigger the moment, the more likely he’s going to concentrate, not get distracted, and produce. He’s done that ever since he’s been here. He really is a prime-time guy.

– TLR on Edmonds

You wouldn’t tell it by Edmonds’s WPA this season — a substandard -0.25 — but the previous two seasons, he’s been the Cardinals’ secondary prime-time guy behind only Albert Pujols, with WPA of 2.70 and 5.21.

JEd’s big moment in the bottom of the 4th inning of Game 3 was about as tone-setting as Carpenter’s breezy 1-2-3 innings. With one out and the bases loaded — and the game still scoreless — we have to admit that we were more than a little concerned about the possibility of a double play. Long known as a player who seldom hits into a double, JEd was actually second-worst on the team this year in NETDP, which measures double plays generated above average, behind only YaMo (conversely, he was second-best in the majors in 2004 with -9.6 and 16th in 2005 with -6.54). Indeed, JEd hit it on the ground, though it was hard-hit. So much for his struggles vs. lefties.

I’d be lying if I said no. But you really try not to think about it. You sit there and you think, ‘Well, we’re two games away. Two more games, which doesn’t sound like much, but against a team like Detroit, it’s a lot.

– Braden Looper

The last time the Cardinals were this close to winning a World Series was entering Game 5 of the 1987 World Series against the Twins. We’d be lying, too, if we said we weren’t thinking about and excited by the possibility of, as Gene Wojciechowski puts it, “a championship parade here as early as this weekend.”

I don’t think it … even came across the locker room or anybody’s ever said a word about it. We’re just excited to be here and we’re just trying to focus on winning games.

– “Jacket” Jim Edmonds on pre-Series predictions favoring the Tigers

As we’ve noted before, this team seems to be playing and thinking as pressure-free as ever — compared to the previous expectation-filled seasons — and it’s yielding results. It’s ironic, of course, that the division-winning Cardinals are/have been the underdog, while the Wild Canard Tigers are/have been the favorite. Instead of juggling his lineup, Jim Leyland perhaps needs to simply exhort his team to think like the losers that they are!

This entry was posted by Pip on Wednesday, October 25th, 2006 at 3:41 pm and is filed under quotebook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.