Is seven games insurmountable? Surely not, as several teams have overcome worse. But for a Tony La Russa Cardinal team? Let’s review the club in what we’ll call “comeback conditions” — seasons in which the team trailed by fewer than 10 games — entering September:

Though the team’s history of September swoons was well-documented by Derrick Goold, the more pertinent figures to focus on are the seasons in which September has mattered — and in those scenarios, the club has had a 50% success rate. They came back by playing outstanding late-season baseball in both 1996 and 2001, overcoming a six-game disadvantage, but failed as spectacularly in 1997, when they trailed by seven, and 2007.

Curiously, that 2001 season bears some similarities to 2010. The team didn’t go big at the trade deadline, opting instead to ship a productive and popular outfielder (Ray Lankford) to San Diego for a reliable starting pitcher (Woody Williams), then shoring up its defense (Miguel Cairo). The Cardinals played .714 ball from September 1 on, while the rival Astros, who led by 5.5 games as late as Sept. 24, played only .500. The two finished in a dead heat, with both teams earning playoff berths (the Cardinals even dropped the last series of the season to Houston).

So contrary to Joe Strauss’s attempts to inflame the Cardinal street with hyperbole — “To squander that edge [the Reds' seven-game lead] would require a choke of epic proportions” — it’s obviously possible. Indeed, it will take some luck o’ the Irish to come back, but it has been done before — even by Tony La Russa’s Cardinals.

La Runcan scraps Lohse and goes to a four-man rotation
The difference is simply too great between Lohse’s starts — in which he offers a 5.19 xFIP — and those of the other four starters — 3.21, 2.57, 3.75 and 3.82. With a four-game deficit to the Reds, the team can’t afford to handicap itself every fifth game the rest of the way with a Lohse start. With only two more off days, it’ll mean one rotation in which the other four pitchers go on four-days’ rest, but if the team wants to win this year, it’s better than the alternative.

Offense plays aggressively
The overthinking, namby-pamby bunt-in-the-first inning tactics need to go by the wayside. When the Cardinals broke out against Tim Lincecum and the Giants back on August 21, it was a Randy Winn home run in the fourth — not small-ball bunting by Jon Jay in the second — that sparked the win. That also means that La Russa needs to put a sock in in it and let Colby Rasmus play his game. The fact is that Rasmus is third on the team (min. 300 PAs) with a .364 wOBA, and it doesn’t matter if he achieves it with bunt singles or pulled home runs.

Pujols apologizes then leads
The ugly elephant in the room this season is the team’s lack of leadership, and more specifically the lack of team-orientation from its best player, Albert Pujols. Pujols has disrespected coach Jose Oquendo on multiple occasions, and he often goes his own way, whether in the field or on the bases. Pujols needs to address the issue by apologizing to his teammates and coaches, which, once it’s out of the way, can lead to a true kind of team spirit that a superficial act of group head shaving cannot.

Mozeliak makes another move
It’s not too late to add an impact player, as recent castoffs Manny Ramirez and Brad Hawpe attest. Pedro Feliz was the kind of addition that a team makes as a security blanket, not a pennant-race difference maker. John Mozeliak and company need to keep sniffing the waiver wire, even if it means replacing a regular. The team can easily upgrade in several places, if at least in their pinch hitters, where Aaron Miles and Randy Winn are their top threats.

Fans set the tone
Listen, fans: Stop freaking out over one bad inning, one loss or even a lost series. It’s baseball, and no team is “consistent,” not by Cardinal fans’ and media’s spongy definition. Even the worst teams win 40% of the time. Sometimes bad luck — such as the team’s .192 BABIP over the last two games — makes things look worse than they are. Undoubtedly, the team is playing tight and aimlessly — but fans can do their part to loosen them up and point them toward the goal. After the current road trip ends in Houston, the Cardinals will play 17 of their final 30 games at Busch Stadium. Over the years, the home crowd has taken on the tense personality of Tony La Russa’s clubs, clamming up at the first signs of demise and ganging up on their own players to jeer when they fail then mock them when they recover. For the stretch drive, the hometowners need to throw off that spirit and simply “go crazy, folks, go crazy.”

So did the Cardinals get a bit lucky? Perhaps. Consider that in addition to the hits advantage, the Nationals also enjoyed six walks, two doubles, a triple and a home run — and still managed only two runs. In terms of an opponent’s ineptitude at converting runs — which one could measure by the difference between runs created and runs scored — the Cardinals witnessed a season-worst. Here are the "top" 10 on the year:

It’s not even close. With their 19 total bases (the Cardinals hit two home runs yet had only 13 TBs), the Nationals created eight runs but scored only two, a difference of six runs that disappeared into the ether. The reason? Strikeouts (nine), a double play, a caught stealing and other unproductive outs. The Cardinals, on the other hand, created only 3.1 runs but scored four, aided by errors.

So the next time the Cardinals lose a game they seemingly should’ve won, it’s helpful to remember that they’re occasionally the beneficiaries of fortune, too.

Well, who knew that El Gato has the second-most WAR, outside of St. Louis, anyway? We agree with Aaron Schafer, who writes "what I don’t understand is why Garcia isn’t even in the conversation." Schafer goes on to hypothesize that it’s because of Garcia’s low win count, which is a partial explanation, though as we’ve noted, voters have been trending away from emphasis on wins, at least for Cy Young. It’s probably as simple as the media’s knack for self-perpetuating hype.

Garcia takes the mound tonight in Washington, where the Cardinals hope to recover from their wincing extra-inning loss Thursday. It’s too early to start playing for individual trophies, of course, but if the Cardinals do fade, Garcia could be the next Bake McBride, whose Rookie-of-the-Year award was a Pyrrhic victory for a 1974 club that came in second by one and a half games to the Pirates.

First, let’s reconstruct the play: Down by one run with runners on first and second with one out in the ninth, the visiting Cardinals had the heart of their lineup coming to bat. Albert Pujols grounded sharply toward third, where Pirate third baseman Pedro Alvarez dove and slowed down the ball, which rolled into shallow left field. Winn came racing from second looking to score, but, seeing Oquendo’s stop sign, put on the brakes as shortstop Ronny Cedeno retrieved the ball, giving the Cardinals bases loaded, one out and Matt Holliday stepping to the dish.

So now, some facts:

• Holliday hit a home run to give the team the lead earlier in the game.
• Holliday is the Cardinals’ second-best hitter after Pujols.
• Holliday runs well and doesn’t ground into many double plays.
• Winn runs well and is a good bet to score on a fly ball.
• Jon Jay, on second, runs well and is a decent bet to score on a single.
• The Cardinals’ win expectancy at that point was 46.3%.
• The Cardinals have been among the league’s worst baserunning teams, running into many unnecessary outs, for which Oquendo was often responsible.

Assuming that Winn had even odds of being thrown out or scoring– admittedly a big assumption — here are the win-expectancy numbers that Oquendo was dealing with, if unwittingly:

Given those numbers, the risk far outweighed the reward:

Not to mention, the team’s second-best hitter was coming to the plate. The replay seemed to show that Winn had a reasonable chance of scoring, but even so, the decision to preserve the tying run at third base was completely defensible. And that’s making a split-second call without the aid of Tango’s win-expectancy tables.

Pujols’s frustration was understandable but ultimately uninformed and yet another public insult to his coach. Oquendo has made some mistakes in judgment this year, but this wasn’t one of them.

We thought it was curious when we looked up at the Busch Stadium scoreboard during Feliz’s second plate appearance of Sunday’s game to see his batting average listed at .556. We know it’s customary for players to have their stats reset when they change leagues, but for intraleague changes? Guess that posting a batting average of .229 would unfairly bias the fans against the newbie.

So is Feliz for real? Besides the 21 at-bats being a small sample size, let’s look at how Feliz has gotten on base:

Of his 22 plate appearances, Feliz has put the ball in play 19 times. Of those 19 times, he has, as Wee Willie Keeler supposedly said, "where they ain’t" eight times — a batting average on balls in play of .421. To put it mildly, he can’t keep that up — his career BABIP is .267, and the highest he has ever sustained over a qualified season was .292. But perhaps he’s actually hitting the ball well, and his BABIP isn’t telling the whole story, or at least could be discrediting him. Let’s look at the trajectories of his balls in play:

That breaks down as follows:

Since Feliz isn’t very fleet afoot, the fact that he’s getting a lot of hits on grounders almost certainly means that he’s finding holes — and/or that he’s hitting the ball hard, just on the ground. But when Feliz was in his prime– from 2003-2007, when he slugged .437 — he hit more ball in the air, averaging around 40%, which allowed him to hit more home runs. Being at Busch, a neutral-to-pitcher-friendly space, and slowing down physically, he needs to hit more line drives (easier said than done, of course). Or, given that power is likely no longer his offensive forte, he can at least improve his on-base percentage by walking more. He showed as recently as 2008 that he can draw walks — at a modest 7.1% compared with league average of around 8.7%. For now, however, despite his exciting start, it doesn’t appear that he’ll recover that skill, having walked just once in those 22 appearances.

The good news is that, though his batting should regress to the mean, so will his defense — which is to say that he should continue to play as well as he has with the leather. It’s why the Cardinals traded for him, after all. If he can occasionally contribute with the bat, as he has in these first five games, it’s icing on the cake, even if it is of the day-old variety.

Garcia entered the game averaging about 3.9 pitches per batter. In hurling only 89 to 28 batters Sunday, he used only 3.2 per batter, allowing him to cruise through the Giants’ lineup. He relied heavily on the left side of his infield, now the team’s strong suit: new addition Pedro Feliz had four assists, and Brendan Ryan had six. Garcia also enjoyed some good fortune, as the Giants had a BABIP of only .136. Another key was Garcia’s ability to stay low in the zone, which produced 14 ground balls. He came into the game with a 55.1% groundball rate, and Sunday registered a 63.4 rate.

How else to explain the Cardinals’ Thursday trade for offensively-challenged Pedro Feliz, whose name translates to "out happy"?

The 35-year-old, who by our reading should’ve been third on the Astros’ depth chart at third base, ostensibly closes the hole at third base for the Cardinals, where Felipe Lopez has been leaking like the Deepwater Horizon oil well. But like the attempts to cap the well, the Cardinals’ acquisition will only serve to create pressure elsewhere, namely on offense, where, given Feliz’s lifetime .289 OBP, they’ll continue to leak outs.

Considering that the Cardinals’ struggles lately have been more related to offense than defense — even with Lopez’s two errors Tuesday night, the team yielded only three runs — the more pressing need is improving offense, not defense.

Though it’s true that Feliz has provided objectively and subjectively above-average defense in the past, he gives aways any benefit in the field with a feckless bat. In 304 plate appearances this year — enough to base some judgments on, considered in context of his career work — Feliz has a .243 OBP (.241 wOBA). That’s not batting average, that’s the rate at which he gets on base overall.

If you’re looking for a glimmer of hope in an unlucky BABIP, you’re not going to find it. True, it’s down a bit this year at .232, but that’s not really not far from his career of .267. This harsh fact should remind us that, while Feliz may have once at least offered power, he is too slow and hits too few line drives to even give himself much chance of reaching base these days. This clearly is a player whose offensive tools have rusted and are only getting more useless.

Even if the Cardinals had traded the proverbial bucket of balls, this trade fails to improve their team. But in sending away David Carpenter, they surrendered a prospect who, if still a few years from the show, is improving.

Just two days ago, we offered what seemed to be a simple solution in moving Allen Craig to third base and Felipe Lopez to second, where he’ll cause considerably less damage. That would’ve left the reliable veteran Skip Schumaker and the unpredictable but promising Jon Jay for right field. But the Cardinals appear to have overcompensated for Lopez’s bad play at the hot corner and overvalued defense. Come October, we’ll hope that our calculation is wrong and that Pedro Feliz saves them more outs with the glove than he costs them with the lumber.

The turning point — McGehee’s smash off Garcia’s backside — unsettled both Garcia and his defense. After the trainer check at the mound, Garcia took a couple of wild practice throws. Then it was Lopez’s turn to throw wildly, though he composed himself and appeared to be in solid position to make the play. El Gato ultimately escaped unscathed, but Lopez’s second error led to another confrontation with McGehee that the Cardinal lefty lost again. It was a case in which the three runs that Garcia allowed did seem to warrant their unearned classification, partly because of the errors, one of which led to an intentional walk, but also because home-plate ump Tony Randazzo pinched him on low strikes, something that Garcia needs to survive but that Randazzo called few of. The first two pitches to McGehee were borderline balls, and when Garcia brought the ball up to comply with Randazzo’s high zone, McGehee smacked it out of the park.

The two blunders overshadowed some otherwise plucky defense. Even in Lopez’s case, the errors weren’t for lack of trying. Brendan Ryan, in particular, made what will likely be one of the team’s top 10 defensive plays of the year when he laid out for a ball up the middle then glove-flipped to second to start a 6-4-3 double play. Ryan also teamed with rightfielder Allen Craig to execute a textbook cutoff: With the speedy Rickie Weeks running from first, Craig charged a groundball and came up throwing to third, where Ryan cut and relayed to second a split-second too late to get Weeks, who thought better of going first to third. Craig hustled all over the place, even going hard toward the stands for a foul well beyond his reach. Which raises a reasonable question: Would the team be better off with Lopez playing second base, Skip Schumaker playing right field and Craig playing third base? As the club’s fifth-best-hitting starter (in OBP and wOBA), Lopez is clearly too good of a hitter not to start. One other option would be to flip Flip and Skip at third and second. However, while Schumaker may fit a third-base mold — less range but strong arm — a mid-season tutorial at yet another position he’s never played would likely be disastrous. Assuming that the personnel doesn’t change, we like Schumaker back in the outfield and Lopez back at a position he can handle.

In one of the Cardinals’ few scoring opportunities, Yadier Molina grounded into another double play. If Tony La Russa doesn’t take us up on our idea to bat YaMo last, he at least needs to deploy the hit-and-run, just about every time Molina hits with a runner on first. Yamo leads team and is fourth in the league in contact rate on pitches outside the strike zone (79.2%) and leads the team in overall contact rate (87.1%). In the worst-case scenario, the opponent pitches out and nabs the runner. In terms of run-expectancy, one out with none on isn’t much different from none out with a runner on first but a highly susceptible double-play candidate batting.

Other notes:

• On an evening when farm director Jeff Luhnow spoke to the media about the team’s draft-pick signings, it was encouraging to see Zack Cox’s name listed in the 40-man roster drop-down in our scoring software.
• Hitting in the #2 hole ahead of Pujols, Jon Jay showed a lot of patience — perhaps too much. With runners on the corners with two outs in the third, Jay drew a 3-0 count, then watched three strikes. Then in the eighth, with runners on, he struck out looking again. In fairness, he fell victim to Randazzo’s somewhat erratic strike zone. Hitting second ahead of the best player in the game is a plum job, but even that requires some learning. We appreciate Jay’s willingness to take pitches and give the big man a chance, but he’ll soon pick up on the fact that pitchers would rather face him than the Human Rake.
• On the other hand, Matt Holliday seemed a bit jumpy at the dish. In his plate appearances, he saw only two, three, four and three pitches each, bouncing out reaching for a 2-0 pitch in the eighth with runners on first and second. Milwaukee reliever John Axford had just intentionally walked Pujols, and it seemed he wasn’t uncomfortable walking Holliday, too. It made sense to pitch around him, since the same logic that applied to walking Pujols would have to apply to Holliday even moreso, with rookie Allen Craig on deck.
• Curiously, Ken Macha turned to his closer Axford in the eighth inning when the occasion — Jay batting with runners on the corners — called for a LOOGy. Macha went old school, realizing that sometimes, a platoon advantange doesn’t outweigh a talent advantage.
• Dave Bush showed why he was once a promising pitcher. Before the game, we wondered just how many more years in the majors he had ahead of him: Two, maybe? It’s a fun game to play — of the starters last night, we’d bet that the player with the shortest remaining career is still Bush, and the longest is Colby Rasmus.
• Molina has always been a fan favorite, but we’ve noticed even more love from the local rooters in the wake of his facing down Brandon Phillips. It’s fun to see the fans picking up on the rivalry.

Tradition dictates that the Cardinals’ natural rival is the Cubs, as much for geographical reasons as competitive. In the last decade, their more worthy adversary has been the Astros. But the Reds? Have the Cardinals ever really considered the Reds as such? Why are the two teams with so much in common — including, this year, several former players and upper management (even ownership ties) — so seldom linked?

The St. Louis and Cincinnati franchises are among the oldest in baseball, dating to their origins in the 19th century, when they competed in the American Association as the Browns and Red Stockings, respectively. Both teams changed names and leagues as the 20th century rolled around and comprised a quarter of the National League, playing around 22 games against each other every year. But though they supplied many Hall of Famers along the way, the Reds — how to put this delicately — have for the most part stunk. It took them 29 years after joining the NL just to finish above third place. When they finally did win the World Series, it was only because their opponent laid down for gamblers. The two teams simply didn’t come down to the wire with each other much.

For a long time, of course, the stalwart midwestern river cities played in different divisions: Starting in 1969, the Cardinals went head-to-head against the Mets, Expos, Cubs and Phillies, while Cincinnati — located about 350 miles east of St. Louis — inexplicably toiled in the NL West against the Dodgers, Giants and Padres. Oddly enough, during that era of Astroturf and afros, both teams experienced concurrent success, with the Big Red Machine dominating the early ’70s, while the Cardinals placed second in both 1973 and 1974. Both teams finished "first" by having top overall division records in the strike-shortened 1981 but fell victim to MLB’s scheme to split the season in two and reward first- and second-"half" division leaders, leaving the Cardinals and Reds on the outside looking in.

So it wasn’t until 2000 — seven years after reuniting in the same division — that the two teams played "meaningful" baseball against each other, finishing 1-2 in the NL Central. But in those rare instances when the two clubs have contended against each other for a title, the Cardinals have usually ended up on top: In the seven seasons in which the teams have gone 1-2 in the standings, the Cardinals have been the "1" six times.

So thank goodness for Brandon Phillips. His recent lighter-fluid comments have ignited a dormant Cardinals-Reds rivalry into a bona fide bonfire. The Cubs and Astros rivalries may be in ashes, but with the Reds, we can enjoy a real division race. May the better team win.