Cardinal shortstop Ryan Theriot, heretofore a .285 hitter in his career, extended his hitting streak to 20 games Tuesday night in Houston, a fine accomplishment. How likely was it to occur this year?

Based on the calculations of SABR member Bob Harris, who built on the heady work of Michael Frieman, we decided to figure out the chances of Theriot, as well as his Cardinal teammates, pulling off the feat. We used each player’s career hits per plate appearance and current season plate appearances per game to aid in the calculations. We even threw in Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio for reference. Odds of players getting a 20-game hitting streak at some point in a 162-game season:

So would you have guessed that, with Lance Berkman and David Freese on the team, Theriot would be the third most-likely player to have a 20-game streak, at 1-in-16 odds?

Since the streak is still alive, let’s look ahead to see the odds of Theriot et al accomplishing Dimaggio’s 1941 feat of 56 games. We gave the Yankee Clipper a modern season of 162 to put him on a level playing field.

All right, so it gets a little — make that a lot — tougher for Theriot the rest of the way. Not that that should stop him from celebrating. As for Tyler Greene, well, anything can happen, but we’re not betting on him just yet.

The Cardinals’ home attendance is down more than eight percent this season from this point in 2010. The Cardinals are doing better on the field than they were last year at this time — currently in first place, whereas they were in second place last year.

So what’s the problem? One explanation is that attendance across the major leagues is down. But it’s down only by a little more than one percent, whereas the Cardinals are down almost seven percent by per-game average. Could it be Albert Pujols’s subpar performance has something to do with it? Maybe it has some effect on attendance — his on-base percentage is relatively strongly correlative with per-game attendance, with a correlation of .55. That’s more than three times higher than the correlation of the current-year finish of the team as well as the previous-year finish of the team. Correlation doesn’t necessarily imply cause, of course. But could it be that fans are more interested in whether Albert simply reaches base than his batting average or home runs or even the team’s success?