Well, damn [1].
I watched this one in the company of my friend Will, a diehard Cardinals fan whose inherent decency has been unsullied by his time in the Gotham irony mines, in a bar on 14th Street. (Last time we witnessed Mets/Cardinals, Will's Ankiel jersey and Cards rooting made him the target of peanut-throwers [2], which he found strangely delightful.) Before we get to the game, a reality check for any of us who think first place in the NL East should have changed something in this city of frontrunners: The tally of TVs in our bar was Yankees/Rangers 7, Some Fucking Soccer Game in Some Other Hemisphere 2, Mets/Cardinals 1.
Between Mark Mulder flinging ungodly curves and getting ground ball after ground ball and Steve Trachsel being possibly the most impressive I've ever seen him, this one had the look of one of those One Mistake games. Except Trachsel didn't make a mistake. Who didn't want him to walk Bad Albert? Who blamed him for Scott Rolen rocketing an 0-2 pitch off his shoe tops and seeing it go up the gap?
In the ninth, after Reyes wound up on second and it was obvious Mulder was exhausted, his arm angle jellied, I told Will: “This has gone from one of those games where you lose 1-0 and say, 'That was a great game' to one of those games that rips your heart out if you don't win.”
Alas, it would be the latter.
Not that I have a second-guess in me. I've studied the base-out matrix [3], and maybe it's just my old age talking, but I had no problem with Lo Duca bunting Reyes to third, not on the road with Beltran, Delgado and Wright coming up. Walking Beltran was obvious, Delgado's HBP was just the final sign that Mulder was finished, and Wright…ugh.
David Wright is my favorite player. And I have absolutely zero doubt that he's the next Franchise. But he's still just 23. Ray Knight famously said that “concentration is the ability to think about absolutely nothing when it is absolutely necessary,” but Knight was 33 when he said that. At the risk of waxing avuncular, there are things you learn in the decade between 23 and 33 that you only learn by watching a decade go by.
So chalk up one for the Cardinals — and alas, the rubber game awaits with Pujols hitless and Lima Time! no longer avoidable. But thinking of Knight, I'm imagining a 33-year-old David Wright (still in gray/black, blue and orange, of course) at the plate, bases loaded, one out, tying run on third.
And you know what? I'll take whatever odds you give me.
Meet me in St. Louis.