• That great Mahatma whose baseball legacy connects both the Dodgers and the Cardinals, Branch Rickey, said that you make your own luck. The Dodgers did just that, winning games with both skill — they out-hit the Cardinals .273 to .239 in GPA — and in luck, in addition to the Holliday mishandle, especially in Game 3, in which their batting average on balls in play was nearly double that of the Cards. Final BABIP for Game 3: Cardinals .222, Dodgers .393. For the series, it was more equitable: Dodgers .329, Cardinals .306.
• Colby Rasmus was the team’s surprise best player of the series, creating 3.8 runs with a .545 OBP and .778 SLG. On the other hand, the batters the Cardinals most needed to bring their A game, Albert Pujols and Matt Holliday, created only 1.4 and 0.8, respectively.
• Unsurprisingly, TLR carried 12 pitchers on the NLDS roster (Joe Torre, 11). He used only 11 (Kyle Lohse was the odd-man out). This sub-optimal roster composition — he was forced to use Jason LaRue as a pinch hitter in Game 3 — was one of several questionable NLDS moves by the Cardinals’ skipper, mostly decisions erring on loyalty to his veteran "go-to" guys (to wit: Carpenter, Glaus and Franklin).
• Vicente Padilla pitched a 68.0 FIGS game; Carpenter a 45.5. No one would take Padilla over Carpenter for any one game, let alone an entire season, of course. But flukes like that (and we mean that with no disrespect to Padilla) happen in a short series. Padilla is a hot pitcher, clearly on the Jeff Weaver plan for career rehabilitation.
• Speaking of, Jeff Weaver (+.163) and Ronnie Belliard (+.340) combined for +.503 WPA in the short series. The ghosts of the 2006 championship team live on to haunt the Cardinals.
• John Smoltz’s impressive cleanup work in Game 3 was a painful reminder of what might’ve been had TLR turned to the bat-missing ex-Brave rather than to Franklin earlier. After Holliday’s now-infamous miscue, Franklin was damaged, if not physically at least mentally and emotionally. TLR should’ve turned to Smoltz, a calmer presence without the baggage of the game, and someone who could’ve gotten a strikeout when it was most needed.
• TLR’s choice of sending Rick Ankiel up to conclude the game with a pinch-strikeout was a fitting end to the series. Ankiel, who if the Cardinals are wise, won’t be with the team next year, likely finished his Cardinal career with an odd but symetrically lovely stat: He had the same number of strikeouts as a batter as he did a pitcher. It’s not quite as grand as Stan Musial’s even split of hits on the road and home (1815 each place, if you didn’t remember), but it should make for a curious bit of trivia. For a player who both cheated and then further disrespected fans by lying about it, his legacy could be a lot worse.
• As the Cardinals enter what will surely be a consequential offseason, they’ll need to resist temptation to overreact to the playoff loss. Their team was good enough to make the playoffs, which is all anyone can ask for, and it wasn’t by luck (at least not much: their pythagorean record was the same as their actual). The fan and media cries will be shrill at times, but the team will need to avoid the trap that they succumbed to after their disappoiting loss in 2004, after which they traded Daric Barton, Kiko Calero and Danny Haren to the Athletics for the putative playoff answer, Mark Mulder. We trust that John Mozeliak and company are smart enough to know that the playoffs are a crapshoot, and that any decisions need to be based on what the team needs for the 2010 regular season. It’s going to be interesting.
• By any rational estimation, the Cardinals had a magnificent season. As we wrote earlier, no first-round playoff loss can take that away. Here’s hoping that the team’s newest additions, Holliday and Smoltz — players in no small part responsible for the second-half surge — decide to stick around to finish the good work that started in 2009.

This entry was posted by Pip on Sunday, October 11th, 2009 at 9:59 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.