St. Louis Cardinals

[Woy]

I love you David Freese. Time to go back to Philly for Game 5.

Carpenter vs. Doc will be an awesome match-up.

[Woy]

http://espn.go.com/mlb/playoffs/2011/story/_/id/7064527/take-fight-st-louis-cardinals

ST. LOUIS -- You just can't kill them. You just can't kill those St. Louis Cardinals.

They lost Adam Wainwright for the season before they'd played an inning. That couldn't kill them.

They were 10½ games out with 31 to play. That couldn't kill them.

Their bullpen saddled them with 13 crushing walk-off losses. And that couldn't do them in, either.

So here they are, still breathing, still playing. Of course they are. Here they are, heading for a dramatic Game 5 in Philadelphia on Friday night. Of course they are.

And here they are, after a season-saving, come-from-behind 5-3 win over the Philadelphia Phillies on Wednesday, still laughing at all the dopes from coast to coast who thought they were six feet under when, in fact, their fun was just beginning.

Asked Wednesday night, after Game 4 of this still-very-much-in-progress National League Division Series, how many times he estimated his team had been pronounced dead by the proper authorities, Cardinals left fielder Matt Holliday reacted like a man who wasn't sure he could even count that high.

"Let's see," he said. "Probably every day in August. And several in September. And yesterday.

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Jeff Curry/US Presswire
David Freese hit a two-run double in the fourth inning and a two-run blast to center in the sixth.
"Anddddddd," Holliday couldn't help but add, "today."

Yeah, couldn't possibly overlook "today," could he? Because the game they'd just finished winning was perfect fodder for those proper authorities. If the Cardinals' whole M.O. this season was to make sure nothing came easy, then Game 4 of this fabulous National League Division Series just fit right into the program.

After all, if you want to make people nervous, what better way than to fall behind by two runs -- after FIVE pitches -- in a game where losing meant sayonara? But little did the Phillies know the Cardinals clearly had them right where they wanted them.

"Hey, that's what we're here for -- entertainment purposes," laughed Lance Berkman, after the Cardinals had climbed out of the intensive-care ward one more time. "I've always said, whether you're really good or really bad, at least be entertaining, so people will talk about you one way or the other. So that's all we're trying to do here."

Well, we appreciate it. Let's make that clear -- because whoever it is who's writing this team's scripts, they've got a future working with Aaron Sorkin. So for entertainment purposes, the Cardinals had to make sure they didn't just get themselves two runs behind early to any old team or any old pitcher. No, they had to get themselves two runs behind against the official best team in baseball.

And they had to get themselves two runs behind against their longtime nemesis, Roy Oswalt -- a man with a 1.29 career postseason ERA in St. Louis, a man who had pulled the plug on their season once before (Game 6, 2005) in this very town, a man who had made 10 career postseason starts and taken a loss in none of them.

So the boos and the nervous fidgeting rattling through all 47,071 occupants of Busch Stadium was perfectly understandable. But obviously, these folks had simply forgotten the essential facts of their favorite team's 2011 life:

You just can't kill these Cardinals.

NLDS: Cardinals vs. Phillies
Complete coverage of the Cardinals-Phillies matchup. More »

So Berkman doubled in a run in the bottom of the first, and it was 2-1. And David Freese, a guy who had struck out in seven of his first 13 at-bats in this series, doubled in two more in the fourth, and it was Cardinals 3, Phillies 2.

Then Freese essentially put this thing away by whomping a 424-foot two-run homer onto the grassy knoll in center in the sixth. And as the ballpark shook and Freese circled the bases, you could glimpse a Game 5 looming -- Chris Carpenter versus Roy Halladay -- just over the horizon.

But then, of course you could. After the ride the 2011 Cardinals have taken, how could this series have possibly ended any other way?

"It's going to be great," Berkman said. "Heck, yeah, you're going to be nervous. And yeah, you're going to have butteflies. But in terms of pressure, I mean, if we win, it's great, and if we get beat, we get beat. But our attitude has been, we have a good team. We're going to go out there and play as hard as we can. And if it's good enough, great. If not, we've got nothing to hang our head about.

"I mean, I'm proud of this team," Berkman went on. "I'm proud of the way we've fought. No matter what happens on Friday night, we've got nothing to be ashamed of."

Nor should they. The two games they've won in this series just encapsulate what they are and how they got here. In Game 2, they got four runs down to Cliff Lee -- and won. In this game, they fell two runs back against Roy Oswalt -- and won.

And if you've been watching closely, by now you should have noticed something important about this team:

It's no accident they're still breathing.

This isn't the 2010 Padres. This isn't some plucky little team of overachievers that just happened to hang around for all these months because the ball kept bouncing right. This is a team with big-time players -- Holliday and Berkman, Carpenter and some guy named Albert Pujols -- that has never stopped thinking it was good enough to be here.

"I mean, we won 90 games," Skip Schumaker said. "And 90 games is a lot of games to win in the big leagues. And that's with hit after hit that we took since spring training. So I think for us to be here, we felt like we deserved it. Of course, some things had to happen in September, but we really felt like this was where we should have been, from Day 1 in spring training."

Oh, they've gotten a few breaks. They've needed a few breaks. But now that they find themselves here, in a Hearns-Leonard/Ali-Frazier slug-out with the National League's heavyweight champs, the Cardinals have forced this Game 5 for one very basic reason:

Starting with the third inning of Game 2, they've been the best team on the field.

They may not have the biggest names or the most celebrated pitching staff. But if you've been paying attention to the quality of each team's at-bats, for instance, is there any question which lineup has applied the most pressure to which pitching staff? It's that Cardinals lineup, in a unanimous decision.

"One thing I've seen about these guys," Phillies reliever Brad Lidge said Wednesday, "is that they're putting a lot of good at-bats on us, they're seeing a lot of pitches and not missing mistakes. You've got to tip your hat to these guys right now. They're playing really good, and they're giving us a really good battle. It shows signs of a veteran team, a scrappy team, but also a good team. They don't give up, and they're very talented."

This is also a tough, tough group. Three months ago, Pujols fractured his wrist -- and was back in the lineup two weeks later. And just last weekend, Holliday was pretty sure he was done for the year. Then there he was in the five-hole, playing left field on Wednesday, in part because the pain in his throbbing tendon was only exceeded by the potential pain of watching his team play a win-or-else game without him.

Asked after this game if he was in a lot of pain, Holliday replied: "It depends on what you think 'a lot' is. I'm not going to say no. I'll just say it's good enough [to play]. And if I feel like it's good enough to go out there and play at a level where I feel like I could help this team, then I'm going to play."

So out there he went. And reached base twice. And scored twice -- in a game his team won by two runs.

But the loudest roars from the second-largest crowd in Busch Stadium history Wednesday weren't showered on Matt Holliday, happy as these people may have been to see him. This was a night when the biggest lovefest rained down on Sir Albert Pujols.

In the beginning, that was just because these people weren't sure if they were ever going to see this man again, hitting third in their town, wearing their uniform, reminding them of what a unique privilege they've had to watch him do his thing these past 11 years.

But by the sixth inning of this game, the Albert cheers had a whole different meaning -- because if this really was the last time they would ever watch him play baseball in this ballpark as a Cardinal, he would leave them with a memory of what a special player he really is.

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AP Photo/Charlie Riedel
Chase Utley never saw it coming. Albert Pujols made Utley look foolish in the sixth inning.
He did that by making a play just about no one else in baseball would make -- or even think of making. And he would make it not with his bat, but with his right arm, the one that supposedly needed Tommy John surgery not so long ago, if you'll recall.

It was the top of the sixth inning. One-run lead. Chase Utley on first. No outs. And a full count on Hunter Pence. So Utley was running on the pitch as Pence bounced what looked like a routine ground ball to short. But this would soon become a play that was anything but routine.

Utley rounded second, watched Rafael Furcal bazooka the throw to first and kept right on sprinting toward third base. If anyone else on earth had been playing first, he would have made it, too.

But this was Albert Pujols playing first. So he stepped off the bag … and into the throw … and fired the baseball across the diamond … and shot down a shocked Chase Utley, for an inning-changing, potentially game-altering out at third base.

To Sir Albert, this was no big deal, apparently. It was "easy," he said, "because I have the play in front of me. So it was easy for me to see him going and take off."

But "easy" wouldn't have been the word his teammates used to describe this play. "Genius" was more like it.

"It takes such guts to do that," Schumaker said. "I mean, [most] first basemen don't do that. Let's be honest."

And if that play doesn't work -- if Pujols is slow to react or doesn't fire a strike across the infield -- "then it's first and third, no outs, and Ryan Howard coming up," Schumaker said. "And it changes the whole game. Remember, we're only up by one run.

"So that's a huge play in the game. That play could have been a huge momentum-turner for us, or for the other side. So I wouldn't have done it. I know that. And that's why he's a cut above normal.

"Look, there are a lot of very good first basemen out there," Skip Schumaker would go on. "Adrian Gonzalez, Mark Teixeira. Those guys are great. But I don't know if anyone else makes that play. Now I don't know them. I've never played with them. I'm not taking anything away from anybody else. But for a guy to come off the bag and make that play, it's just unbelievable."

But then, "unbelievable" is pretty much the perfect word to describe this whole team, and this whole season. Now isn't it? This is a group that should have been done weeks ago. But you just can't kill them.

So here they are, still chugging, with an epic Game 5 approaching. And those St. Louis Cardinals just can't wait.

"I've been dreaming about the World Series, not the Division Series," David Freese said. "So we've just gotta keep winning."

[SethMode]

Man, rooting for the Phils to beat the Braves and knock them out of the playoffs in favor of the Cardinals is something I'm regretting at this point to an extreme degree. They are the anti-Phillies right now: never give up and always playing with fire. The Phils of this series get a few runs and then just decide "fuck it, even if we lose we'll win the next game" which seemed to be the same mentality that had them sitting at home watching the Giants win the World Series last year.

[Woy]

Man, rooting for the Phils to beat the Braves and knock them out of the playoffs in favor of the Cardinals is something I'm regretting at this point to an extreme degree. They are the anti-Phillies right now: never give up and always playing with fire. The Phils of this series get a few runs and then just decide "fuck it, even if we lose we'll win the next game" which seemed to be the same mentality that had them sitting at home watching the Giants win the World Series last year.

This is the exact reasoning of why one of my friends out here didn't want St. Louis in the playoffs and was rooting hardcore against his team against the Braves.

[Blade]

Man, rooting for the Phils to beat the Braves and knock them out of the playoffs in favor of the Cardinals is something I'm regretting at this point to an extreme degree. They are the anti-Phillies right now: never give up and always playing with fire. The Phils of this series get a few runs and then just decide "fuck it, even if we lose we'll win the next game" which seemed to be the same mentality that had them sitting at home watching the Giants win the World Series last year.

YEEEEEEEEEAP.........I laughed at all my friends rooting for the Braves to lose.

We need to hit the ball with RISP. This is shades of Giants Series all over again. 3 Fucking runs against EDWIN FUCKING JACKSON!!?!?!?

Atleast I had some first base action to look forward to with this girl I was hangin out at the bar with after the game ;)

[strahanfan92]

I'm going up to the park tomorrow night and gonna try to see if I can get lucky and get a scalped ticket <$50. Strategy will be to hopefully find a scalper right before or after first pitch that has an extra ticket he'll give away for cheap. Worked for the Giants got 2 tix for $40, but that wasn't playoffs let along game 5.


Let's fucking go Carp.

[SethMode]

Well, I can't say that I was rooting against the Braves because I WANTED to Cardinals, I just meant I was rooting against the Braves because I hate the Braves.

Either way, there wasn't a team I was remotely frightened of going into the postseason as a fan, because I expected the Phillies to play like they actually give a fuck.

[Woy]

I LOVE THIS GODDAMN TEAM

[Woy]

Two horse race in the central now.

You did mean the Cards and Brewers, right?

[Primetime]

Congrats Cardinals fans. Glad you pulled out the series victory. Good luck in the NLCS. This will be a lot of fun.

[Colonel Angus]

This series is going to be JACKED UP

[wingsfan77]

I think it's hilarious how Phillies fans are surprised that they lost...this is the THIRD year in a row that their offense has collapsed in big games...sign all of the pitchers you want, doesn't mean squat when your line-up falls face down in the play-offs AGAIN!

[mcstl25]

Got my game 3 tickets today. Going to be in Milwaukee for games 5 and 6 (scheduled trip to GB for Rams/Packers game). This series is going to be awesome.

[Woy]

[Woy]

http://espn.go.com/mlb/playoffs/2011/story/_/id/7073827/chris-carpenter-leads-st-louis-cardinals-nlcs

PHILADELPHIA -- These are the baseball games that take that special journey through history, a ride only the October classics get to take.

They don't come along often. Maybe every 10 years. Or every 20. Or every 50. So when you see them, you want to freeze them and savor the feeling, hang onto the memory -- because they won't come around again for a long, long time.

When Chris Carpenter and Roy Halladay took the mound on a pressure-packed -- not to mention squirrel-free -- Friday night in Philadelphia, it was easy to imagine they might just conspire to do something great and everlasting. But could you have imagined this?

Could you have imagined an unforgettable 1-0 instant classic, baked in the hearth of a sudden-death, Game 5 NLDS pressure cooker?

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Howard Smith/US Presswire
Chris Carpenter allowed just three hits over nine innings. He did not walk a batter.
Could you have imagined the first 1-0 baseball game in a Game 5 or Game 7 win-or-else postseason setting since the legendary Jack Morris-John Smoltz epic, two decades deep in the rearview mirror -- and just the third such game in history?

Could you have imagined two longtime pals, hooking up for the duel of their lifetimes -- in a game that would send one man's team home and dunk the other in a tank of Ariel Brut Cuvee?

And could you have imagined that, when 11:06 p.m. arrived in the Eastern Time Zone, it would be the Best Team in Baseball trying to digest the shock of a first-round execution, while the reincarnated St. Louis Cardinals group-hugged their way toward their next October adventure in Milwaukee?

What an amazing story, shaped forever by a truly amazing night.

"That team we beat -- they're tough," Albert Pujols said, after the 1-0 nail-gnawer over the Phillies that kept the Cardinals' magic carpet floating through the October sky. "But you know what? We're tough, too."

By now, you know the improbable path these Cardinals took to get here. By now, you know all about the 10.5-game hole they climbed out of in the season's final 31 games, the three-game deficit with six to play, the Carpenter shutout in Game 162 in Houston that finally propelled them into this tournament.

But remember too that just three days ago, they trailed in this series, 2 games to 1 -- and knew the only route to survival was to find a way to beat Roy Oswalt and Halladay back to back in Games 4 and 5.

The odds of that seemed even longer than the Pacific Coast Highway. But in the mind of the manager, a vision was lurking -- and it was a vision of this night.

From the moment Tony La Russa set his rotation for this series, this was what he had in mind -- just to get to this time, this place, this matchup:

To a Game 5 duel for the ages, Carpenter against Halladay.

If his team could just scramble its way into this setting, Tony La Russa figured, anything was possible.

"When you pick your rotation in a five-game series," La Russa said Friday night, his champagne-soaked jersey still on his back, "it really comes down to this: If Carpenter doesn't pitch twice in that series … our chances of winning are not good."

So the manager spun his roulette wheel and took the gamble that made this night possible. He pointed Carpenter toward the mound in Game 2, on short rest for the first time ever. And even though that maneuver didn't exactly work out the way he had planned it in his brain, it all worked out beautifully in the big picture.

NLDS: Cardinals vs. Phillies
Complete coverage of the Cardinals-Phillies matchup. More »

Because it set up this.

Pitching Carpenter in Game 2 allowed La Russa to bring his ace back again in this game. And the biggest reason La Russa knew he needed Carpenter in this game was that he also knew it would be Halladay sitting there waiting for him.

Asked after Friday's game if it was this Roy Halladay -- in all his Cy Young glory -- that was what he was worried about, La Russa just nodded.

"Yes," he said. "Unfortunately."

It was no stretch to imagine Halladay painting another eight-inning, six-hit, one-run October masterpiece in a game of this magnitude. It was trying to comprehend that the man he was facing would be even better -- that was the hard part.

But Carpenter is a man who had no fear of this stage, of this lineup or of this duel with one of his closest friends on earth. And so, as spectacular as Halladay would pitch on this night, he wasn't the best pitcher on the field.

Not on a night when Carpenter would unfurl nine innings of three-hit-shutout brilliance of his own -- when only a performance that dominant would do.

As people all around him tried to shower words like "historic" on him afterward, Carpenter went into deflection mode, tried his best to describe this night as merely "another game," another step to "move on to the next round."

But his teammates knew different. Asked if he felt as if he'd just been a part of something special, Skip Schumaker -- the man who would drive in the only run -- understood precisely what he'd just been a part of.

"I felt that coming into this game," he said. "And for them to come out and do what they did, with all the pressure on both of them, was even more incredible."

But just howww incredible was it? Let's try to digest it.

• This was the 340th start of Carpenter's tremendous career, counting the postseason. But it was his FIRST 1-0 shutout.

• And that team he beat, the Phillies, was shut out only seven times all season, tied for the third-fewest times in baseball.

• But this, remember, was on the Phillies' turf. And in their home park, they were shut out just twice after May 22 -- both after they'd clinched first place. One of those two games was started by a fellow named Chris Carpenter.

• Only once in the last three years, since they won the 2008 World Series, had the Phillies lost a 1-0 game in this park -- that one on Aug. 7, 2010, to Johan Santana and the Mets. But no pitcher had gone all nine innings against them to win a 1-0 game in Philadelphia in a decade and a half -- since June 29, 1996, a day when Curt Schilling got outpitched by (who else?) Jeff Fassero.

• And now let's add in the October history that brings it all home. In the many, many winner-take-all postseason games ever played, just two other pitchers had ever closed out a series by winning a 1-0 game. One was Ralph Terry, in Game 7 of the 1962 World Series. The other was Jack Morris, in that indelible Game 7 in 1991. And we're still talking about both of them.

But this was actually the Morris-Smoltz game in reverse. Twenty years ago in that game, the only run was scored on the final play of the game. This game, on the other hand, would turn out, amazingly, to be the only postseason game ever played in which the only run would be scored before either team made AN OUT.

“
You do everything you can. You know every pitch is going to mean something, and you're hoping we'd get back in it and overcome it. It's definitely a tough way to go.
”
-- Roy Halladay
One second, there was Halladay, finishing up his warm-up tosses in a jam-packed ballpark, throbbing with energy. Four pitches later, Rafael Furcal was pounding a triple up the gap in right-center. And that fast, the Cardinals had made a whole city nervous.

Just six days earlier, Furcal had led off Game 1 with a hit against Halladay -- and he fully understood the importance of setting that early tone.

"My approach was to look for something I could drive, because that guy is one of the best in the business," said Furcal, his lost season brought back to life by the July deal that airlifted him out of Los Angeles. "He knows how to get out every hitter. He controls every pitch that he throws. Even 3-0, you don't even know what kind of pitch he's gonna throw, because he can control anything. But I think he tried to come inside with a cutter, and he left it in the middle of the plate. It was a little high, but I make a good swing, and the ball jumped out of my bat."

So there he was, hip-hopping off third as Schumaker settled in for what would become the most important at-bat of the night. Halladay jumped ahead 0-2, but never could put the pesky Schumaker away.

Schumaker fouled off one two-strike pitch. Then another. And another. And another. And yet another. Finally, after five two-strike foul balls, he stroked the 10th pitch of the at-bat into the right-field corner for an RBI double. And as he pulled into second base, he was still trying to digest what he had just done.

"Are you kidding? Against Doc Halladay?" Schumaker laughed later. "I was happy just to put the barrel of the bat on the ball."

Asked if there'd been one or two ferocious pitches he couldn't believe he had been lucky enough to foul off, Schumaker shook his head in disbelief.

"Yeah," he said, laughing again. "Probably, seven of the 10."

But as it turned out, the one pitch he got to hit was enough to change the course of two teams' seasons -- because it was the end of the offense for this night.

Halladay would be seriously threatened in only one more inning, when the Cardinals loaded the bases in the eighth. But even 120 pitches into his night, he had enough left to strike out Lance Berkman then lure Matt Holliday into a soft fly ball. He strung together seven consecutive zeroes after that first inning. But even nine zeroes wouldn't have beaten Carpenter in this game.

Afterward, Halladay stared into his locker for nearly a half-hour, in near-disbelief over what had just transpired.

"You do everything you can," he said. "You know every pitch is going to mean something, and you're hoping we'd get back in it and overcome it. It's definitely a tough way to go."

He knew from the first pitch that the other guy on the mound would be ready. But he couldn't possibly have known that first-inning run would reverberate not just through the rest of this night, but through the rest of this postseason and beyond.

And that was because Chris Carpenter took that 1-0 lead and wouldn't let go.

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Rob Carr/Getty Images
After giving up a run in the first, Roy Halladay settled into the game, matching old friend Chris Carpenter pitch for pitch.
Oh, there were moments in which his defense rose up to make his job a little easier. There was Yadier Molina's laser beam in the sixth to throw out Chase Utley stealing. There was Furcal's diving, whirling, acrobatic play to rob Carlos Ruiz in the eighth. There was Carpenter's own kick save of a Jimmy Rollins bullet up the middle later in the eighth that second baseman Nick Punto charged and turned into a huge out.

And then there were two long, hold-your-breath rockets, off the bats of Raul Ibanez in the fourth inning and Utley in the ninth, that came within a few feet each of rewriting this entire story. Asked later if those balls had made his heart race as they soared through the night, La Russa replied: "That's a nice way to put it."

But mostly, Carpenter just did what he does best -- threw strike one, lured the Phillies into what he called "swing mode," sinkerballed his way to 16 ground ball outs and pitched himself into the history books on what even he admitted was "an unbelievable night."

Yeah, he tried his best to convince us that he wasn't the story, that all that mattered was "getting this team to the next round." But that spin wasn't working real well, because Chris Carpenter had just had himself a night that will go careening through time, its place cemented in October lore.

Well, we know one man who will never forget it, anyway -- his manager.

It was a night La Russa had been waiting for all week, and when he woke up Friday morning, he felt as if game time would never come. So he went for a walk through the streets of Philadelphia, even though he recognized that had a chance to be "kind of dangerous."

What he found on those streets, though, was a steady stream of Philadelphians who were in the mood to be gentle -- because they had total faith, they told him, that Halladay was about to send La Russa's team, and his ace, home for the winter. Boy, were they in for a shock, courtesy of Christopher John Carpenter.

"They were all confident they were gonna beat us," La Russa reported.

"But you know what?" he chuckled. "If they had a crystal ball, they might not have been so nice."