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.

This entry was posted by Pip on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 at 4:30 pm and is filed under analysis. 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.