We kind of thought that Holliday was, at least tonight, swinging the bat a little bit better than Albert. It was a tough call. We were going to try to leave the ball away, make him hit it on the ground someplace and hopefully we would be able to get it. We were playing with fire and we got burned.

– Jerry Manuel

As the preseason ad said, pick your poison. With Albert Pujols featuring a below-career .398 wOBA and Matt Holliday an above-career .394, Manuel didn’t even need to limit his claim to "at least tonight" — the two sluggers are basically the same player this season.

Whereas Tony La Russa was largely responsible for his team’s loss in the 20-inning game earlier this year, this time, it was Manuel’s turn to mismanage his team, though, in fairness, it was nothing even approaching La Russa’s debacle. Credit the Cardinal manager with learning from his prior mistake by not switching the pitcher spot into the cleanup spot. But even TLR didn’t get off scot-free this time: We disliked his upside-down approach to deploying his relievers, using the inferior Mike MacDougal before Ryan Franklin. If the Mets had scored in the 12th off the recently promoted MacDougal, how does TLR explain losing a game in the 12th inning with his "closer," which we assume to him means his best reliever, on the bench?

Both managers had emptied their benches and were forced to have pitchers hit in the 13th inning. The only difference was that TLR had Wainwright, a career .259
wOBA hitter, as a final bullet. Then again, Manuel’s Raul Valdes had a .564 wOBA going into his plate appearance. In 10 career plate appearances.

I pulled back, and that’s the smart play. You can look at it a different way. You can look at it like I wasn’t hustling, but you know what? Late in the game like that, if I feel good, I’m going to do everything that I can to try to break up the double play. But when you don’t have anybody in extra innings and you feel something, the last thing you want to do is hurt yourself and be the last guy and throw a pitcher out there to play your position.

– Albert Pujols

This is a perfectly reasonable explanation. It was also the reasoning that another Cardinal first baseman once gave for what appeared as less than 100% effort: Keith Hernandez. The difference, of course, is that whereas Pujols calls the tune with the current Cardinal manager, Whitey Herzog maintained uniform discipline across his roster, such that no player, not even the team captain, multiple-time All-Star and former league MVP, was above the team.

Usually in the first inning, you’re focusing on your first-inning pitching. Not hitting. But I was up there, and I’m like, ‘I’m not just going to strike out swinging at bad pitches. He’s going to have to throw me good pitches.’ It was a huge at-bat for our win today.

– Jaime Garcia

The Cardinals ran their win expectancy as high as 92.8% in the first inning. It went as high as 96.7% at the end of the seventh inning before the Mets swung the game 60.0% points their way in the eighth.

Speaking of the win-expectancy game, the bad-running Cardinals made another unnecessary out on the bases last night, this one in the 13th inning. Jon Jay tried but failed to score from third on a pitch in the dirt. Adam Wainwright was pinch-hitting with two out and the bases loaded. Was it a good attempt? Judging by the win-expectancy table below, it was:

So the potential reward was worth the risk. Sometimes, the chance is worth it.

Just to get through six, I kind of had to scratch and claw to get there. It definitely helps the bullpen out a little bit. Ryan and Skip up the middle, the last few games have been awesome. Skip has been playing his butt off. It helps, especially when you are not getting a lot of strikeouts.

– Blake Hawksworth

In pitching six full innings, Hawksworth faced a career-high 28 batters. In addition to yielding three walks, the reason he didn’t pitch deeper than six innings was his team’s inability to convert balls in play into outs, as indicated by their .583 defensive-efficiency rate (or, depending on your point of view, the Phillies’ BABIP of .417). The accolades notwithstanding, Schumaker mishandled a couple of balls that might’ve led to additional outs.

I think our defense we have stepped it up to a different level. We played great defense in the first half but I think over the last two weeks you can see our defense. We are on our toes, helping the pitchers and making some great plays.

– Albert Pujols

Team DER over last two weeks: .673.
Team DER previously: .696
To be sure, DER includes a lot of non-fielding noise, but it seems that the team’s improved defense over the last fortnight is illusory. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the team isn’t hustling or that that hustle won’t pay off in the long run.

I think there are guys in here who are motivated to have a very good second half. Part of it is getting a break to clear your mind and re-evaluate where you’re at. … I think there are a lot of guys in here who are really motivated to turn their season around. Whether it’s Craig or (Jon) Jay who you want to give some credit to, that’s fine, no doubt about it. But there’s a lot of (veterans) in here who want to turn their season around not only for themselves but because it’s going to better the team. We are such a better team than we showed in the first half.

– Skip Schumaker

Amid a handful of well-established stars, the team clearly has some players who are still hungry. As we wrote in our Trade Deadline Primer, Schumaker and Yadier Molina are two such players poised to regress to their normal selves. Schumaker’s BABIP has increased from unseemly low levels, due in large measure to his team-leading line-drive rate. Molina, whose BABIP is still a low .248 (career: .278) and who has a better LD% than Pujols, should follow. And Brendan Ryan is at a critical point in his career, on both sides of the ball.

But even in the case of the stars, players have significant motivators: Holliday, who lacks no job security, wants to prove worthy of his fat contract. Pujols himself, by dragging his feet on a contract extension, is gambling that his skills won’t markedly degrade and, perhaps ironically, needs to prove that he’s still the best player in baseball. And Chris Carpenter, whether because he is "a competitor" or simply proud, appears dissatisfied with his performance. Perhaps all of these factors will coelesce into a firy team dynamic throughout the second "half" of the season.

Wasn’t my best. This win is all about the guys. The lineup. The defense. It was a lot of fun to see those guys swing it.

– Hawksworth

Kudos to Hawksworth for his endurance on the field as wisdom off it. Whereas lately he had exhibited more power pitching, his performance Monday was more typical of what we might expect from him as a starter: A lot of ground balls in play (54%) and unimpressive K/BB and K/9 rates (0.33 and 1.50, respectively).

Would that Hawksworth’s view on winning were shared by others. If you’re scoring at home, or at least checking Fangraphs, you’ll note that Hawksworth — "the winning pitcher" — contributed a net negative WPA of -.170. Of course, that’s not exclusively his responsibility, but it certainly puts the idea of attributing "wins" to pitchers into perspective, doesn’t it? For the record, Albert Pujols led all players with a +.282 WPA, followed closely by Jon Jay at +.237.

When he was working out, he dropped a (weight) plate on his toe. They’re saying it may not be any longer than his ankle. I don’t really know except now he has that to deal with as well.

– Tony La Russa on David Freese’s latest injury

Let’s hope that Freese, who has a history of making bad decisions, didn’t simply forget to use a safety clamp on the end of his weight bar. At any rate, his eventual return will only benefit the team, whose September may look a little like that in 2006, when several key players returned from injury to buoy the team’s playoff roster.

Winning is the big cure-all

– Randy Winn

A veteran of 13 seasons and 1661 games, Winn should know, but not necessarily through personal experience: His teams’ won-loss record over the years is 752-909, a miserable .453 winning percentage. Here’s hoping the club’s fourth outfielder enjoys the salutary experience of a division title this year.

I threw a lot of pitches early in the game, I threw a lot of pitches to get out of innings and things like that.

– Jeff Suppan

Ah, "things like that." Perhaps Suppan is referring to the high number of balls that he allowed the Diamondbacks to put into play, many of which fell for base hits. When your strategy is akin to that of slow-pitch softball pitchers — let batters hit the ball — some of those are going to find holes. Sad to say: Suppan’s — and the Cardinals’ — strategy is not working. Suppan’s expected FIP is now an untenable 5.08, and given that his xFIP has been rising steadily over the last four years, it’s not going to get any better. It’s time to pull the plug.

Gutierrez came on in as tough a situation as you can put him in with Pujols and the bases loaded. That’s what everybody pays to come see in this ballpark.

- A.J. Hinch

The pace of the game was not entertaining.

– Tony La Russa

Indeed, give Hinch and Gutierrez credit. In addition to Albert Pujols’s rally-killer, the pace explains why we saw so many fans on the Metrolink before the game ended. We sympathize with fans who figure three hours — not to mention nearly four — is enough time to determine a winner. But we’ll never understand those who, barring medical emergencies or family needs, leave a perfect-weather afternoon game early.

Yeah, we had some chances. We definitely didn’t create as many chances as we should have. We should have had more opportunities than we had. And the ones we had, we could have done more with those. I am not going to get into explanations.

– La Russa

There’s no need to try to explain. As we’ve noted before, runners left on base are an indication of offensive potency, rather than of ineptitude. Given some randomness in a single game, occasionally a team get what the Cardinals did Wednesday: A lot of runners on base without many runs to show for it. If we understand that scoring runs is not a function of some mythical, exceptional clutch-hitting skill but of sustained ability to avoid outs, this makes sense, inasmuch as sometimes those hits or walks come at the beginning of the inning rather than with a runner on third. But for the most part, runners on base translate to runs, and fans and writers shouldn’t get too bent out of shape over it. Leaving runners on base certainly beats the alternative of getting few runners on base.

We had a chance today to sweep, and it seemed like in any situation we could get a big hit today, we didn’t come up with it. Why, for whatever reason? I don’t know. Hopefully, when we get in this situation again, we can turn this streak around.

– Jason LaRue

According to RB Fallstrom, St. Louis has won the first two games and lost the finale of a three-game series the last four chances at home, and eight times overall. That may be a case, like getting hits with runners in scoring position, simply of randomness. That is, if a team wins two-thirds of its games, sometimes those two wins will come at the beginning of a series. The more important statistic, like aggregate hitting ability in the batting with RISP argument, is that the team is winning two-thirds of its games. It also might be a sign of the team lacking a killer instinct. We’ll see if it continues in the second half.

I’ve always said I’d like to play here again.

– Dan Haren

And we would like you to, Dan. We dare say that a Haren-Wainwright-Carpenter trio for October would be pretty dominant. So, Josh Byrnes, what do you want?

If so inclined, the SABR guys could make a case for Holliday. Though I doubt that any of my SABR friends would do that.

— Bernie Miklasz

Why would Bernie doubt that? He makes a strong case for the Cardinal leftfielder himself, picking up on what we thought was the strongest argument that we used in our ESPN piece: Matt Holliday leads all NL outfielders in WAR. How would anyone make a case against him?

What I did today is what I try to do every time. Throw at least seven, keep the ball down and not have as many walks. It was a good start.

– Jaime Garcia

El Gato is too modest. Wednesday’s gem was actually the best start of his major-league career by Fielding-Independent Game Score:

It was the third time that Garcia reached his goal of pitching seven innings, but it was the fifth time this season in which he faced at least 27 batters, which seems to be a less-variable measurement of endurance than innings pitched. And contrary to the Post-Dispatch game story, which held that "Seattle lefty Jason Vargas just did Garcia one better," Garcia actually outpitched his Mariner counterpart, who, outstanding as he was, scored only a 63 FIGS. Rather than attribute the "one better" to Vargas, it is more accurate to say that Seattle’s "luck" and defense were better. Indeed, Seattle’s defensive efficiency (the rate at which a defense coverts balls in play into outs) behind Vargas was .792, whereas the Cardinals’ behind Garcia was .722.
(Cardinal batters’ lack of execution undoubtedly contributed, too.) A case in point was the fourth inning: Jose Lopez reached on a meek groundball, and the forceout on which Milton Bradley scored might’ve been a double play. In neither play could or should Garcia be debited.

Garcia pitched perfect. But we didn’t give enough run support for him to win the game.

– Albert Pujols

How about changing the thinking to "for us to win the game"?

I give credit to Vargas, I am not sure why, but we were under the ball. If you are under the ball, that is tough to be productive. If we stay under the ball, we will be not productive the next time we play. For whatever reason. That is where you have to leave it.

– Tony La Russa

The Cardinals hit fly balls on 13 of their 26 balls in play. The run value for ground balls is slightly higher than for fly balls. Better still, of course, is the value of line drives.

When I hit that ball, I thought it definitely was going to go a long way. When I was on second, I was talking to Chone Figgins, and he said, ‘Man, when you hit that ball, I thought it was going to go a long way, but it didn’t.’ He made a great catch and pulled it back. Obviously, the ball was on the other side of the wall. But I was happy I got a double out of it. It could have been worse. He could have grabbed that ball and it wouldn’t have given Ludwick a chance to drive me in.

– Pujols

Credit Pujols for his glass-half-full interpretation of the event. We’re still not sure why plays like this need to be reviewed; we fear that, as with so many instances of technocracy, they review simply because they can, without any regard to whether they should — or, as is often the case, whether a simpler, non-technical solution (the horror!) might actually be better. In this case, ballparks can be designed in a way in which it is abundantly clear whether a ball is a home run. What’s the problem? It’s not that hard, people.

Well I think that is just basic baseball. You are down a run … we got five or six hits the whole game. What are our chances?

– TLR of his decision to bunt with a runner on second and none out in the eighth

Perhaps it’s time for La Russa to rethink the basics. Nowadays, we can figure out pretty close to what those chances are, and so what he considers "basic baseball" may not be true. Brendan Ryan may not be the best hitter on the team — he hits eighth or ninth for a reason — but he still has a .290 OBP. If the pitcher is batting, a bunt makes sense. But, according to Second Guesser, Ryan bunting there is a bad idea, given that the net win expectancy hitting away is 7.50, whereas sac bunting is only 6.46 (the breakeven OBP is around .246).

Anytime you win your division, I believe it’s to be considered a tremendous accomplishment. I’m fairly certain that most analysts didn’t see us winning it at the start of the season. But we did. It’s something I believe everyone connected to the team should be proud of.

– Bill DeWitt

Indeed, the entire organization should be proud, not the least of whom should be DeWitt himself, who spent the season (as usual) as an undeserved target of class-warmongering. Only after the Holliday trade did the “DeWitt is cheap” catcalls subside, though we fully expect it to return in a few weeks (this for an owner with a payroll consistently in the top third of MLB despite being in the 24th adjusted-size market). When many teams are happy to merely have a winning season half the time, the Cardinals during the DeWitt-La Russa era have won a division championship seven times in 14 seasons.

Every spring you go into the season with the goal of winning your division and playing postseason baseball. When you have that opportunity, you do whatever you can to do it. It doesn’t mean every year you’re going to reach the postseason, but the better your opportunity, the better your chance of winning a world championship. Winning a division title is a tremendous accomplishment by itself.

– DeWitt

Spoken as someone who "gets it" about the nature of how championships are won (basically, just get into the playoffs and see how far your luck takes you) and how success should be measured in the Bud Selig era of baseball.

I think there’s plenty of reason to feel good about the situation going forward. I think we all understand our needs and our capacity to address them.

– DeWitt

True, some fat comes off the payroll and, despite the reality that the team may be left with nothing from their Brett Wallace trade, several young players wait in the wings and can add to the club in 2010.

It’s a high priority to sign Albert to make him a lifetime Cardinal.

– DeWitt

Cue the record-needle scratch sound effect. We were with Mr. DeWitt all the way, until now. The expression "lifetime Cardinal" sounds impressive, but when we hear "lifetime," we think of Bruce Sutter and the Braves. The expiration date of Pujols’s current contract — assuming none of his appendages has fallen off, the team will pick up his 2011 option — sets up an awkward conclusion. At the end of the 2011 season, Phat will turn 32, not quite Jim Edmonds-contract-extension terroritory, but almost certainly beyond Pujols’ peak years. A "lifetime" contract would have to mean extending another seven (or more) years, which undoubtedly would require overpayment. Would the overpayment in the latter years be offset by the surplus value in the earlier ones? It all depends on whether Pujols will be true to his word that he merely wants to play for a winner. The Cardinals continue to make good on their end of the bargain. Will Pujols?

I don’t think [the team] was flat as much as it wasn’t executing. ‘Flat’ to me means guys aren’t into it, aren’t trying or don’t care. I never got that. It just didn’t work. You played your best baseball in August and you played your worst in October. It’s not great. It’s not fair. But it is what it is.”

– John Mozeliak

Aside from the lame throwaway phrase at the end, Mozeliak’s comments make sense. As we’ve noted, it’s important not to read too much into a three-game losing streak at the end of the season.

Fairly or not though, it just seemed like he [Holliday] was just the most obvious [goat of the NLDS].

– Brian Burwell

"Fairly or not," that’s not going to stop Burwell from enumerating the reasons. Then again, Burwell isn’t exactly known for fair treatment of his subjects. We’ve come to expect populist screed and ideologically-induced downright sloppy journalism (he and his P-D editors failed to go beyond a single, obscure source to support his Rush Limbaugh hatcheting) from the race-baiting Burwell, but it’s possible to write about Holliday’s unfinished business more compellingly. We’re not excited by the prospect of Holliday leaving, either, but we’re not going to demand that Hollliday stay because he cost the Cardinals dearly in trade. While we tend to agree that Holliday should strongly consider the "unfinished business" in his contract decision, we’re not going to envy a man his right to make money, as it appears Burwell does.

As of right now. I plan to.

– John Smoltz on playing in 2010

Here’s hoping that Smoltz will return as a Cardinal, in whatever capacity. If nothing else, it sounds like the team’s veterans could learn from his example of sticking around to face the music.