Don’t look now, but when the season ends, someone other than Albert Pujols may lead the Cardinals in wins above replacement for the first time since 2004. As of this morning, here’s how the team’s WAR leaders stacked up (according to Fangraphs):

Holliday has been one of the most valuable players in the league this year, which takes nothing away from Pujols, who is also having another monster season. But for Cardinal fans, who’ve grown accustomed to Pujols as their perennial most valuable, the possibility of Holliday may seem strange. Pujols, after all, has led the team in WAR the last five years, and six of the last seven:

With both sluggers producing, it’s obviously not a bad thing. Back in the propitious days of 2004, fans and teammates were quite happy to have Pujols finish third on the team in WAR, since they had Scott Rolen and Jim Edmonds each topping 8.0 that year. So perhaps it’s doubly odd have another big producer in the consideration in the first place. Pujols has been "unchallenged" as the team’s on-field leader for the last five years, having been in a class of his own.

So are Holliday’s and, similarly, Adam Wainwright’s ascents, coupled with Pujols’s relative decline, a harbinger of the future? Perhaps. While it looks likely that Pujols will finish with his lowest WAR since 2002, he’s still one of, if not the top hitter in the league. That Holliday and Wainwright are joining him at the elite level of the league evokes memories of the team’s M-V-3 years. How many years the new triumvirate has together will likely be decided this winter.

Although the Cardinals have been all but mathematically eliminated, they still have, in the words on the Iron Horse, an awful lot to live for, such as individual awards. And now with their Memphis callups, sporting spring-training numbers on their uniforms, they also have an opportunity to set a new season-high: the sum of their starting lineup’s uniform numbers.

The acquisition of Pedro Feliz may have failed offensively, but it gave the Cardinals a tremendous difference between the third basemen on their roster. No, we’re not talking about defensive skill — we mean between their jersey numbers. With Feliz sporting his typical #77, and sometime third sacker Felipe Lopez wearing #3, the Cardinals have the widest uniform-number gap — 74 — between fellow players of the same position since 2007, when #99 So Taguchi and another #3, Preston Wilson, both started at various times in right field for a difference of 96, a record that can only be tied but never broken (the Cardinals have retired numbers 1 and 2).

Feliz has figured in nine of the top 10 uniform-number lineups this season:

Fellow double-numbers Randy Winn (#44) and Skip Schumaker (#55) joined Feliz in several combinations. Conversely, Lopez was in nine of the lowest-sum lineups:

Aaron Miles returned to the club and his old jersey number returned to him to make possible some low combinations. So it appears that three of the team’s midyear acquisitions — Feliz, Winn and Miles — were beneficial in one way, anyway (sorry, couldn’t resist).

Of all the players who started this season, here’s the maximum possible lineup Tony La Russa could’ve tried (but, amazingly, given his 142 different batting orders, didn’t):

And the lowest:

Curiously, the mid-range-numbered Joe Mather appears on both lists — now that’s versatility!

Speaking of numbers, here’s hoping that when the team’s e-number finally zeroes out, Tony La Russa trots out his maximum-possible lineup, which, including the newbs, would be:

See, like we said, they’ve got an awful lot to play for. Well, perhaps not an awful lot. But we’d like to see the Reds come up with a higher-number lineup than that. What you got, Brandon Phillips?

During last Sunday’s Baseball Tonight Live chat on ESPN, a commenter posed the following question:

Matt obviously a tough question but whats [sic] one thing that kept the Cards from being up by 6.5 games instead of down? Seems to me all year they either hit well or pitched well but never at the same time and sometimes neither.

It’s a question that many Cardinal fans have been asking, to which we replied:

It’s baseball, and teams are going to win some and lose some and appear "inconsistent." For the Cardinals, it’s fairly simple, I think: Injuries. Not many teams can lose a productive third baseman, 40% of their starting rotation for most or all of the year and still win a division.

Moments later, the chat board lit up with fans from across the country taking issue with our excuse, like:

But the Phillies lost their entire starting infield, and have had a lot of pitching depth problems behind their top starters and could easily win their division.

and:

You really can’t use the inury excuse for the Cardinals. Look at the Twins. They lose a stud closer for the season. They lose one of the best all- around players in the game in Morneau for two months and counting. And thier rotation is even more suspect than the cardinals. And thier challenging the yanks and tb for the best record in the game.

and:

injuries can’t be an excuse, I can’t imagine any team has lost more games to injury this year than the rockies, and as we know they are right in it.

So did we write too quickly? Given that the Twins, Rockies, Phillies and Braves — and perhaps others — have overcome similar setbacks, are injuries a legit reason that the Cardinals have failed?

Let’s review some of the successful teams who’ve dealt with injuries, including the Cardinals. Following are players who were projected for or actually had (whichever was higher) at least 1.5 WAR and spent time on the DL this year — we prorated the amount of WAR that each player missed, which we call PAIN (Production Abbreviated by Injury Number):

Which makes the team totals:

So although the Cardinals have certainly experienced more than their share of PAIN, losing at least 4.0 wins above replacement to injuries, it’s true that other teams, especially the Phillies, have persevered and, either through trades or internal replacement, addressed their injuries and overcome.

Another team besides the Cardinals who wasn’t able to stem their injury losses was the Boston Red Sox. But check out their PAIN, which makes the Cardinals look like a bunch of Cal Ripkens:

Given the multiple DL stints by multiple key players and a couple of season-ending injuries to the top starts, it’s a wonder that the Bosox are even .500.

As we noted in the chat, it’s more to the overachieving teams’ credit than it is to the Cardinals’ shame that they’ve succeeded despite their misfortune. In the Cardinals’ case, with the execption of Penny, whom they had to know was a huge risk, and possibly Ludwick, who had a checkered injury history, they couldn’t have figured on Lohse and Freese losing as much time as they did. Perhaps the team will be more risk-averse as they plan for 2011, but most teams have to deal with some level of risk and uncertainty, especially small-market teams. Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose. And sometimes you overcome.

With Jake Westbrook having taken down Ryan Ludwick’s San Diego Padres in the first game of their series, and many fans and writers pointing to the trade of the two players as the impetus for the Cardinal demise, let’s review reality to see if that’s the case.

To listen to and read the laments about the team’s offense post-Ludwick, one would think that the Cardinals traded away Keith Hernandez in his prime and not a corner outfielder with a .329 OBP. It’s true that the Cardinal offense went from a .335 OBP and .412 SLG with Ludwick to a .317 OBP and .392 SLG without him. And while it’s also true that Ludwick himself has tailed off since the trade, even if he had remained and continued to produce at his previous clip, the Cardinals would still have flopped offensively. Why?

How quickly people forget that since Ludwick’s departure, hitting-machine David Freese — .361/.404 –hasn’t played a single game. In his place, Pedro Feliz has produced stunningly less — .227 OBP and .255. Combined with Felipe Lopez’s .241/.198 line, which was much worse than his pre-trade line of .335/.388, that’s more than enough to account for the precipitous fall in offense. If the Cardinals had found a third baseman who got on base at even a .310 OBP rate, they could’ve compensated for Freese’s loss, because most of the lineup — Yadier Molina, Skip Schumaker, Matt Holliday, Albert Pujols and even Brendan Ryan — have actually put up better numbers since Ludwick left.

For his part since the trade, Ludwick has been miserable, putting out only a .314/.346 line with the Padres. One can make a hypothetical case that Ludwick woud not necessarily have been that bad with the Cardinals, but there’s no reason to think he would’ve been that much better, certainly not beyond his career norms. And whatever "clubhouse effect" the trade had, it hasn’t manifested itself on the field, given that most of the lineup has actually been better.

Meanwhile, Westbrook has been the club’s second-best pitcher, behind only ace Adam Wainwright with a 3.26 ERA and third with 6.52 K/9 and 58 innings pitched. In just nine games, he has been worth nearly a full win above replacement — already a pretty good return. He has stabilized a rotation that was relying on a combination of Jeff Suppan and Blake Hawksworth, who respectively posted ERAs of 4.47 and 5.83 as starters. That’s one-to-two runs fewer per game.

So when the tale is told of the enigmatic 2010 Cardinals, one clear and unequivocal bright spot will be the Ludwick for Westbrook trade. Whatever emotional pain it caused Cardinal Nation, it has only helped on the field.

During Thursday’s win over the Padres, we tweeted the following:

Uncanny symmetry to #stlcards 1st two times thru order. Every player basically repeated what he did in 1st plate appearance.

Here’s what our scorecard, in which we use MLB.com scoring syntax (a.k.a. Project Scoresheet/Retrosheet style), looked like after five innings:

Surely throughout the season, this kind of thing happens. We just haven’t noticed it with the Cardinals this year, and we’d be interested to know if anyone else has. The thing we liked was the likeness in details, all the way down to Jake Westbrook’s instant-replay of his soft grounder to third. But the similarities didn’t stop there. Check out the latter two times through the order, which, although not quite as matching as the first two, were intriguingly similar — as Yogi Berra said, it was like deja vu all over again:

Not only that, but the Cardinals finished exactly four times through the lineup, 36 total plate appearances. And they wound up with a "W," which is of course a much more symmetrical letter than the alternative.