With all of the fancy alphabet stats and player-quantification tools that we SABR geeks live and breathe, it is often salutary to simply drink in the joy of sheer accomplishment. After all, the goal of even the most sophicated stats is victory. Lest anyone confuse the means with the ends, we celebrate and honor the 2009 Cardinals for their NL Central title

Really, at some point, who cares what Joe Thurston’s WAR is? (It’s 0.3, by the way.) Chris Carpenter and Adam Wainwright’s xFIP (3.51 and 3.48, respectively) are subordinate. Even the club’s Pythagorean win-loss record (89-67) pales in comparison with the real deal: As their Baseball-Reference team page says, “90-66, 1st place in NL Central” — a magic number of zero. Champions.

In this age of playoff crapshoots, the Cardinals’ division championship is in some ways a more important accomplishment than winning the pennant or even the World Series. Having been borne out over the course of the long season, it is the proof — at least as far as it’s possible to prove — of their status as the best team in their division. No three-game first-round sweep at the hands of a wild-card team can take that away. Even a seven-game World Series win, as sweet as it would be, wouldn’t represent the same 162-game war from which the Cardinals emerged victorious.

So when all of the statistical analysis is written and done, what remains and matters is journeymen like Jason LaRue popping a home run to clinch the division — only his second circuit clout of the year — then popping champagne in the clubhouse, exclaiming to John Rooney, “This team is unfrickinbelievable!” For all Cardinal fans, those who have memorized the formula for the technical version of Runs Created and those who can’t even spell DIPS, enjoy the title. It’s what it’s all about.

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As we wait to see whether the idle Cardinals will pop some midnight bottles of champagne (the Cubs play in San Francisco starting at 9:15pm Central), let’s celebrate something else now: the contributing factors to their imminent division title.

This is the fourth year we’ve put together our Sabermetric MVP rankings, and, in the unending quest for improvement, we’ve tweaked the formula for ‘09. Intead of using Win Shares Above Bench (WSAB) divided by three, we’re using the superior (and more generally available) Wins Above Replacement (WAR). Thus, the formula is simpler than ever: MVP = WPA + WAR.

Albert Pujols is, of course, the perennial Sabermetric MVP candidate, but, as we intimated, the Cardinals have more than one valuable player this year. Here’s where things stand as of Sept. 24 in the NL:

As the National-League leader in both WPA and WAR, Pujols deserves to win the writers’ MVP again. The additionally exciting news for Cardinal fans is that three other Cardinals join Pujols in the top 20: their co-aces, Chris Carpenter (#6) and Adam Wainwright (#11), and Pujols’s co-slugger, Matt Holliday (#17, tied).

And for all of those American-League fans out there, here are the rankings for the Junior Circuit:

Whoa! As expected as Pujols was as the NL leader, the Royals’ Zack Greinke is a surprise at the top of the AL. Joe Mauer is the most valuable of the non-pitchers, well ahead of the Fire Joe Morgan favorite Derek Jeter. Speaking of Jeter, his Yankees hold an honor similar to the Cardinals: They have four players in the top 20 of their league. Their division-rival Red Sox, however, may not have the most wins in the division, but they have the most MVP candidates in our top 20, with five. Perhaps we’ll see them all play against each other this October.

With their magic number at two, the Cardinals can clinch the NL Central tonight at Houston (the Cubs play the Brewers). Based on their clinching history, should fans want them to wrap things up tonight?

Let’s look at the team’s playoff history since the wild canard was introduced. Is there a correlation between the games remaining when the Cardinals clinch and how they do in the playoffs?

It would appear that no such correlation exists; after all, the two times that the team played in the World Series are the most extreme cases of games remaining. The Cardinals won the series in 2006, after they clinched on the final day of the regular season. And they made it to series in 2004 (and lost to the Crimson Hosers) after coasting to the finish line with 15 games left. They’ve made it to the league championship after winning by a large margin (2000, 2005) and a small one (1996). So the playoffs continue to appear to be a crapshoot, at least insofar as clinching date is concerned.

Don’t look now, but Albert Pujols is on his way to winning the Sabermetric Triple Crown. If he finishes the season leading the league in OBP, Runs Created and Total Bases, he’ll be the first Senior Circuit player to do it since Todd Helton in 2000 and the first Cardinal since Stan Musial in 1949.

True, teams still have at least 11 games to go (and the Phillies have 14). But Pujols has opened up a comfortable lead on all his challengers:

Pujols should prevail in OBP. With an average of 4.4 plate appearances per game played, Pujols could go o-fer the rest of the season — 0 for 48 plate appearances (in 11 games) — and still have an OBP of .416. If in those 48 PAs, he reached base safely just three times, he would tie Nick Johnson’s .421 OBP.

To top Pujols in Runs Created, Prince Fielder would have to average two more runs created than Pujols each game. To put this into perspective, Fielder is averaging .9 RC per game. (he has 135 in 150 games played), so he would have to produce more than double his season per-game average just to tie if Pujols stopped playing today.

Total bases are a similar story. With Pujols’s lead of 37, Fielder would need to hit a triple (or the equivalent number of total bases) every game the rest of the way and Pujols not play another game.

It would be the 25th NL triple crown, of which an amazing 10 would be held by Cardinal players (Musial has three, Rogers Hornsby five and Crab Burkett one):

Even if TLR rests Pujols a couple of times after the Cardinals clinch, Pujols should be in good shape to win. We’ll be the first to salute him on a triply superlative season.