After playing eight consecutive nail-biters, the Cardinals finished their regular season with a laugher and laughed best as they clinched the wild card Wednesday night. And Chris Carpenter saved his best game for last, striking out 11 and walking only one for a fielding-independent game score of 76. It was his best game of the season and the fifth-best of his illustrious career:

Granted, the Astros barely qualify as a major-league team, but then again, they have still beaten someone 56 times this season, and Carp did what he was supposed to do.

In a week of high, late-inning drama, the finale was a fait accompli early on, with the only suspense being the Braves’ game. The late-season run of high-tension games will prepare the team well for the Philies, against whom they can expect more of the same grinding, late-resolution “hard nine” type — and less of the blowout variety that they used to punctuate their regular season Wednesday.

Whether they win, lose or tie for the wild card today, the Cardinals certainly have played some exciting games down the stretch. The old football team in St. Louis used to be known as the Cardiac Cardinals. The 2011 baseball team, with their last eight games having been decided in the seventh inning or later, has just as much claim to the moniker.

As you can see below, the month of September has featured many nail-biters, both for the Cardinals and the Braves. But whereas the Braves have been on a streak of less-tense games — that is, games whose biggest play (by change in win probability) happened earlier than the seventh inning — the Cardinals are playing tight games as they near the finish line:

A lot of people are writing about NL MVP candidates these days, and the trendy favorite seems to be Matt Kemp, though of course the locals are talking up Albert Pujols. Both are top-rail players, but what do the numbers say?

The Cardinals have two top-10 candidates in Pujols and Berkman (and three in the top 20), whose candidacy deserves as much backing as Pujols’s. But with four games left in the campaign, it appears that Kemp is equal to the hype. Allow us to add our voice to the KEMvP cheers.

After Tony La Russa perhaps unintentionally showed confidence in his offense by not pinch hitting for his pitcher down by a run in the sixth inning, David Freese bailed out his manager with a momentous three-run home run to swing an imminent loss into a key win. It was the biggest hit of Freese’s burgeoning career, and the third-biggest of the team’s season:

On the strength of his first-inning run-scoring triple and game-changing home run, Freese added a whopping .702 win-probability to the game (per Baseball-Reference; .685 by Fangraphs), the second-highest single-game WPA by a batter on the Cardinals’ season:

We love that he struck out twice, too (if only he had hit into a double play). In addition to surpassing last year’s WAR of 1.5 with more than 2.0 this season, he has supplied that production during more key moments this year, improving from negative WPA (-0.66) to well into the positive (0.91). He is one of the team’s most valuable players this season (even if TLR occasionally still treats him like a rookie) — yesterday we unveiled the sabermetric MVP leaders in the AL; today let’s look at the Cardinals. First, the batters:

We confess a bit of schadenfreude seeing the departed Colby Rasmus ahead of TLR-loved regulars Skip Schumaker and Ryan Theriot (speaking of departed, Brendan Ryan has an MVP score of 1.69, more than Schumaker, Theriot and Rafael Furcal combined). Anyway, the pitchers:

And overall:

Jason Motte, another of last-night’s heros, has climbed the list to #8. And of course Albert Pujols, the team’s perennial MVP, has again risen to the top, even in an off year.

It’s close enough to the end of the season for us to feel comfortable unveiling a leaderboard for our so-called sabermetric MVP rankings. Since a few people are talking about the possibility of a pitcher — namely Justin Verlander — winning the MVP, let’s check in on the junior circuit first.

Verlander is indeed competitive, but according to our formula, he’s not even the most valuable on his own team, which, by the way, has three players in our top 20. That’s not saying much, of course, since Miguel Cabrera is having another blockbuster campaign. But Jose Bautista is far and away the most valuable in the AL right now, regardless of position.