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Cardinals closing crazy season by pulling even with Braves
By the end of the game, the only folks remaining in the stands of Minute Maid Park were the few thousand, fiercely loyal members of Cardinal Nation on hand to see if this wild and crazy baseball season would draw to a fitting conclusion.
The Redbird mob was on its feet savoring every moment of the biggest game of this desperate season (at least until Wednesday night’s huge, ginormous, really, really big game). But mostly they were doing what the rest of us have been doing for the past month or so. Trying to figure out if this is real, some hokey fantasy or some wickedly cruel joke that will end sometime late Wednesday night with a sickening crash to earth.
But for the time being, allow the unlikely miracle to settle in for a few more delirious hours.
All even. One game to play.
"This is a blast," said Ryan Theriot late Tuesday night after a 13-6 victory over the Houston Astros that drew the Cardinals into an absolute deadlock with the Atlanta Braves for the National League’s wild-card playoff berth with one game remaining in the regular season. "We’re having a blast. This is why you play the game."
If it doesn’t make sense to you anymore how or why the Cardinals are thisclose to the postseason, join the crowded line of bewildered members of Cardinal Nation who had given this baseball team up for dead more than a month ago when it fell 10 { games behind the Braves in the wild-card race. If you were among that doubting flock then (and who wasn’t), then you were probably revisiting those same emotions early Tuesday night when things were a bit more tense. Knowing that the Braves were well on their way to another embarrassing implosion at home (a 7-1 loss to the Philadelphia Phillies), the Cardinals quickly fell behind against the Astros 5-0 after three innings.
As we’ve seen repeatedly over the last month &ndash heck, over the entire confounding season – the Cardinals never make it easy. Drama. Frustration. Excitement. Redemption. Stir. Repeat. That’s become the Cardinal Way these days.
"But the game won’t let it be easy," said right fielder Lance Berkman, who had three hits and scored three runs. "Baseball is a tough sport. That’s why it’s maddening at times. But when you get on a roll like we’ve been on, the dramatic things tend to fall your way like it has for us."
Well who’s complaining now?
One game to play. Tied for the wild-card lead.
Atlanta, which has now lost four straight and seven of its last 10, is heading into Wednesday night against the Phillies, as Chipper Jones said Tuesday night, "like we’re living out a bad dream."
The Cardinals, who have won three of their last four and 10 of their last 14, are entering Wednesday night with former Cy Young winner Chris Carpenter on the mound and a sense of inevitability on their side.
I don’t know about believing in miracles, but how can you not like the Cardinals’ chances now after all that they’ve fought through to get to this exciting conclusion to their season?
"It just felt like we were going to do it," Berkman said as he explained how he and his teammates have made this incredible and improbable turnaround. "I’ve been on three teams that have made unbelievable runs, so I know what it feels like. You show up and try to do the best you can. The bottom line is we have a good team, a talented team and generally along the course of 162 games that talent will rise to the top and it has. I compare this team to the ’04 Astro team where all year we were saying, ’OK, where is the winning streak?’"
Those Astros were as talented as this Cardinals team, and started off even more inconsistently before catching fire to win the wild-card berth in the final days of the season. "This team is very similar," said Berkman. "Everyone in here always believed we had a better team than the way we were playing. It’s just taken a while to show up."
For 161 crazy, mixed-up games, the Cardinals have taken us on an anguishing six-month joy ride through this wildly unpredictable baseball season.
There could be no more fitting conclusion to this season than this gasping, wheezing, woozy, frustrating then suddenly miraculous stumble to the finish. One more game to decide their playoff fate, even if you can barely stand to look. One more desperate stab to salvage a 162-game season that has been marred and mangled by so many injuries and missed opportunities. But as always, just when it looked as if the season was about to slip away, the Cards received a splendid, desperate, do-or-die rally by a steady stream of bench players named Ryan Theriot, Nick Punto and Allen Craig that allows all of Cardinal Nation to cling to the wild idea that the season might have a happy ending after all.
This is why you have to love this fascinating group that Tony La Russa rolls out every night to scratch and claw their way back into this improbable playoff dream. The Cardinals are not the most perfect team in the world to watch, but they are beyond a doubt one of the most entertaining, for all the right and wrong reasons. Tuesday night when it seemed like they were on the verge of blowing their final chance to draw even with Atlanta after the Braves were blown out, the Cardinals climbed out of a 5-0 third-inning hole and turned a 6-5 deficit into a stunning 9-6 lead in the seventh inning on big RBI hits by Craig, Theriot and Punto.
With one game to play, the Cardinals are still clinging to the dream. Through all the injuries, all the slumps, all the maddening errors and finally a string of inspiring and improbable victories, they have used all 161 games on the schedule so far.
Dead even with a game to go.
It would be a shame to let it all slip away now.
Post je objavljen 28.09.2011. u 14:48 sati.