The Cards Rock

Thank you Linda and Chuck for opening up your home to us Card's fans so we could watch the game last night. What great fun. I felt bad for your loss, but I'm confident you'll be seeing the Tigers in the World Series again soon.

Now, for a little sports commentary from Rob:

Wow, what an incredible ride by the Cardinals! How sweet it is to have beaten the Tigers! As improbable a World Series victory as any in history. In fact, the Cards won with the worst regular season record of any team in history. One can say it only shows the parity or mediocrity in baseball now, but it certainly shows how the revised playoff format allows a good team that suffered an inordinate number of regular season injuries a chance to heal in time for the big games. And that the Cardinals did, getting solid performances from Eckstein, Rolen and Edmonds, all of whom had serious injury problems fairly late in the season. But the biggest surprises of them all were (1) how a very young, mostly rookie bullpen rose to the occasion, especially Adam Wainwright who was still rotating through the minors as of July and didn't become the closer until September when Isringhausen's arthritic hip took him out, and (2) Yadier Molina's spectacular hitting, given he batted .216 in the regular season and had only 6 homers. IMHO Yadier deserved the MVP in both the NLCS and the World Series. He's just a totally unpretentious kid with loads of talent, who better to have won the MVP? His game seven, top of the ninth, two-run tie-breaking homer against the Mets stands out as the best memory of the playoffs for the Cardinals, followed of course by Adam Wainwright's game seven, bottom-of-the-ninth, two-outs, bases-loaded no-swing strikeout of Cardinals' killer Carlos Beltran. It doesn't get any better than the Cardinals-Mets 7-game NLCS series, especially that game 7.

Oh well, it goes without saying that the Cards benefitted inordinately in the World Series from shoddy defensive play by the Tigers, but the biggest key for the team was all the post-season experience it has piled up in the last 4-5 years, especially the memory of the 4-0 thumping by the Red Sox in 2004, that really left this team with a maturity level in the World Series far above what Detroit had. Understandable given that Detroit hadn't been in the playoffs in 19 years and was just 3 years removed from a 119-loss season.

In the end, St. Louis can only revel in its 10th World Series, second only to the Yankees. A great baseball tradition continues to be written!