I've known Adam Morris for...God, I don't know, something like the last nine or ten or eleven years. For those of you who don't know, Adam Morris is the guy who founded and continues to run Lone Star Ball, our network's Rangers blog. But I knew him before Lone Star Ball ever existed. I knew him before the concept of SB Nation occupied a single neuron in Tyler Bleszinski's brain. I knew him when I thought the Mariners would be okay without Alex Rodriguez because they signed Bret Boone and Boone had 74 RBI the year before.*

*bad process, good result!

I knew him as meno71 on the ESPN baseball message boards, where I spent entirely too much of my time during high school. It was that experience that started me on the path to where I am today, which is cool and makes it seem like less of a waste, but I probably could've been off getting laid. I wasn't off getting laid. I was online, talking about baseball, often on the Mariners board, but frequently on the Rangers board, because the Rangers board was smarter.

A lot of the time, meno71 would be on the Rangers board, and he stood out to me the way people on a message board stand out when you can tell they actually know what they're talking about. He was the rare internet user with whom it's a pleasure to interact.

We continued to interact for some years, and right around when I started up Leone For Third, Adam began his imaginatively named Texas Rangers Blog. The way I remember it might not be the way it actually happened, because it's been a long time and it's also dreadfully late at night, but I believe that, after I joined SBN, I recommended Adam for the Rangers site. Adam was a great Rangers blogger - the best I knew, and probably the best there was.

Adam and I have been colleagues of a sort ever since. We don't talk all the time. We've never met. I've only actually heard his voice once, and I liked the way it sounded more in my imagination. But I consider him to be an internet friend. You know what I mean. Many of us have real friends and internet friends, and while internet friends can become real friends, there's still a connection there regardless.

Why do I bring this up? That's a good question for me to ask myself right here because hopefully it'll help me stay on track. This was a World Series between the Texas Rangers and the St. Louis Cardinals. Immediately, when the matchup was set, I knew I'd be rooting for the Cardinals, and rooting hard. I'm a Mariners fan, and as a Mariners fan, the last thing I want is to see a division rival celebrating a world championship. Particularly a division rival that had never won before. The Mariners have never won before, and it's nice to have company.

There was no doubt in my mind which way I was leaning. Then I tried to break it down. Why? Why root so hard for the Cardinals, and so hard against the Rangers?

Something I realized is that, from a Mariners fan's perspective, it doesn't really matter whether the Rangers win the World Series or not. The Rangers made their second World Series in a row. They built an outstanding team, and they are, overall, an outstanding organization. They're set for the present and they're set for the future, and a championship wouldn't change their situation one bit. It would, I guess, give them a little extra money to spend, but not much compared to the money they already have, and it's not like a championship would make them a more appealing team to free agents or young players they might be looking to sign to extensions. Basically, a championship wouldn't determine whether or not the Rangers are great. The Rangers are already great.

So there wasn't a rational reason to root against them. Then I thought of Adam. None of my personal friends are Rangers fans, nor are any members of my family. None of my personal friends are Cardinals fans, nor are any members of my family. I know two Cardinals fans - one who posts here, and one who just moved in nextdoor a couple weeks ago. They both watched the World Series in 2006. But I know a handful of Rangers fans, and Adam the best among them. I like them, and they have never seen the Rangers win the Series. It would seem sensible to root for the Rangers, right? So that these people could be happy? Why would I want these people to be sad?

It's not like I ever had any actual investment in the Cardinals. I don't care about the Cardinals. My rooting interest was never so much for the Cardinals as against the Rangers, and when I thought about the Rangers fans I know, that made me feel kind of shitty. I was essentially rooting for those people to be sad, for no other reason than I would have the satisfaction of knowing the Rangers lost, and that those people would be sad.

Horrible. Rationally, because of Adam and a few other guys, I should've been rooting for the Rangers. Rationally, because of Adrian Beltre, I should've been rooting for the Rangers. But it was my mistake to try to break this down rationally, because there's nothing at all rational about sports fandom. I've mentioned it before, but if we were truly rational about sports, we wouldn't watch sports.

As far as I can tell, this was the internal thought process:

• Go Cardinals
• Why?
• Because the Rangers are the enemy
• Why?
• Because they play in the Mariners' division
• So what?
• So that makes them the enemy
• But the Mariners aren't playing anymore
  
• But rivals
• What's a rival?
  
• A team you don't want to win
  

Fandom just is, and you can't control it, and my fandom was with the Cardinals. As such, I found this to be just about the perfect World Series, right down to all of the agony. The irrational sports fan in me, the fan who loves the Mariners and hates their rivals for some reason, is absolutely delighted by the fact that the Rangers twice came within a strike of winning it all. If the point is that the Rangers and their fans have to suffer, I'm not sure they could've suffered much more than they did these last few days.

Feelings are so stupid. I'm glad I can have strong feelings about sports, because at the end of the day they're just sports, and strong feelings make sports what they are, but I can't rationally process why I would root for good people to be miserable. Some bad people are miserable, too, and that's fine (fuck 'em!), but there are bad people everywhere. How can I hope for misery and not feel like a 6'5 pile of shit?

Man, I'm starting to lose track of what I'm writing. I might have to wake up and take this whole post down, even though I don't plan on waking up until Tuesday because baseball season is finally over. I love baseball season, and the past month has been nothing short of breathtaking - can you believe the last day of the regular season and World Series Game 6 happened just 30 days apart? - but I'm going to savor this. After the final out, there were a lot of people tweeting something along the lines of "come back, baseball." It's like, hey, don't hurry. Speaking at least for myself, I need this breather.

I feel like I've barely said anything about the Cardinals. One of the tricky things about this year's Cardinals is that I don't know what lesson we can take from them. Last year, when the Giants won it all, we could realize that the Giants won it all with Brian Sabean as their GM, and that was enough to make even the most negative baseball fan a little more hopeful. But this year, what's the lesson? "Never give up"? It's a fine lesson, I guess, but it's overly simple and hardly original. We don't need the Cardinals to teach us shit we learned in first grade.

I remember back in the spring, before the season started, I was doing division-by-division previews with the host on my weekly radio spot, and one week we got to the NL Central. At that point I still liked the Cardinals, but I liked the Brewers a lot more, because the Cardinals had recently learned that Adam Wainwright needed Tommy John surgery, and I could hardly wrap my head around that kind of loss. It was severe - a probable blow of something like four or five or six wins. Four or five or six wins that I didn't think the Cardinals could afford to lose.

And they survived. They survived without Wainwright. They survived a ton of other injuries. Actually, "survive" isn't the right word. Obviously, "survive" isn't the right word, because the Cardinals did so much more than that. They survived for their first 130 games. They thrived for their final 50. They finished 34-16, actually slowing down once they reached the playoffs.

It's going to take me a long time to fully appreciate what the Cardinals pulled off. It's possible I'll never fully appreciate it. It's also possible I already fully appreciate it, and this is what full appreciation feels like. The Cardinals were 10½ games behind the Braves with 32 games to play. They made the playoffs on the last day of the year. In the NLDS, they did away with a bulldozer, and then in the NLCS, they knocked off the team that took their division.

Which took them to the World Series, where - and you know I hate this - they captured their whole season in a nutshell. They battled, they scuffled, they found themselves faced with impossible odds, and they stormed back. They stormed back to win. They stormed back to win everything.

Saturday is a day off. It is a day that I don't even have to think about thinking about baseball. It is the first such day I will have had in about eight months. I'm going grocery shopping. I'm excited. And the whole time I'm at the store, I just know I'm going to be thinking about the Cardinals. There's a slight but significant difference between impossible and improbable, and the Cardinals just lived it.

The St. Louis Cardinals did a remarkable thing in Monday night's Game 5. Against C.J. Wilson and a chunk of the Texas Rangers' bullpen, the Cardinals put 17 runners on base, and brought only two of them home.

That, I think, should be the big story. And maybe that is the big story. But my sense is that the big story is the bad in-game managing, and specifically Tony La Russa's bad in-game managing. At least as far as Twitter and the baseball blogosphere is concerned.

Which, I get it. Tony La Russa did not have a very good game, and where earlier in the playoffs we'd seen so many of his moves pay off, Monday night the bulk of them blew up in his face. It's something to write about, and, analytically, La Russa seemed to do a lot more harm than good.

But still, 17 baserunners, and two runs. Throughout playoff history, there have been 93 games in which a team put 17 runners on base in eight or nine innings. Six times did that team score two or fewer runs. The Cardinals did something that's difficult to do. The Cardinals actually did two things that are difficult to do, the positive first one leading to the sad, ugly second.

For the longest time, this game had the feel of being lopsided without being lopsided, because the Cardinals kept getting chances, and they kept throwing them away. They scored two in the second, but left a runner in scoring position. They got two on in the third before a double play ended the frame. They left the bases loaded in the fifth. They left two in scoring position in the sixth. They left the bases loaded in the seventh. They left one in scoring position in the eighth. They let the Rangers hang around, and you don't just let the Rangers hang around, because if you let the Rangers hang around long enough, they'll decide enough is enough and take over. Late in Game 5, the Rangers took over.

Because the Rangers won the way they did, and because La Russa did some of the things he did, La Russa's strategy became this big thing. But we were one or two hits away from a completely different postgame conversation. Call it one hit and an audible bullpen phone. The Cardinals didn't win this game, but they could've, and they arguably should've.

And then what? And then people are poking fun at La Russa, but they aren't saying he managed the worst game of his life. Ron Washington might draw a lot more criticism. It's been swept under the rug, but Washington had himself a pretty shitty game, too. He left C.J. Wilson in too long. He relived Wilson with Scott Feldman instead of someone else. He intentionally walked Albert Pujols three times to face Matt Holliday. While I understand the playoffs have been the playoffs, Pujols' OPS+ this season was 150. Holliday's was 153. Matt Holliday is really good, too. Results-based analysis suggests that Washington managed La Russa's pants off, but process-based analysis has them both standing naked.

It's late. It's later than I can even believe. The only reason I'm still up is because there are only one or two more nights like this in the year so what the hell. I'm just kind of typing now and I don't know if everything's coming together, or if everything will come together at some point later on. But basically, the Cardinals put a ton of runners on base, they finished 1-for-12 with runners in scoring position, and they were tied with the Rangers as late as the bottom of the eighth. It's hard for me to sit here and try to pretend like Tony La Russa is the big story when the Cardinals' offense is the bigger story. It's the less interesting story, and writing about an underachieving offense doesn't allow the author to put on his Intellectual Superiority cap the way writing about a manager does, but the offense was more responsible for the Cardinals' loss than the manager was. That's it, and now the Cardinals are in the unfamiliar position of having to blame their bats for a loss.

It's a funny thing about a series like this. In a playoff series, the idea is that, by the end, one team will have clearly outplayed the other, and will thus either advance or win a trophy. And a lot of times it happens that way. The 2007 Red Sox clearly outplayed the 2007 Rockies. The 2004 Red Sox clearly outplayed the 2004 Cardinals. Pretty much every team that's faced them in the playoffs this decade has clearly outplayed the Twins. But look at the Rangers and the Cardinals. It's been five games, and who the hell is winning? The Cardinals have 22 runs. The Rangers have 19 runs. Three of the games have been unbelievably close. The other two games were close for a while before the winning team pulled away. Based on what we've seen so far, has either team looked better than the other? If you say yes, you're lying. Don't.

It's a handy reminder that the MLB playoffs don't really prove anything, except that one team outscored its opponent 11 times. I just remembered that all four teams who won in the first round were outscored by the teams that they beat. That's crazy, and that's the MLB playoffs - a month when everything suddenly starts to mean so much more, even while everything starts to mean so much less.

Wednesday or Thursday - or Friday, in the event of rain, which is in the forecast! - the Rangers or the Cardinals will win the World Series. They will get a trophy for their efforts. "Congratulations on something" is not engraved on the base, but it should be, and all the little flags should have question marks.

*****

After Mike Napoli's go-ahead double, Joe Buck and Tim McCarver remained silent for a minute - a full, exact 60 seconds - so that the viewing audience could listen to the crowd and watch a series of replays absent distraction. Buck and McCarver catch an impossible amount of shit this time of year, much of it deserved. I liked this maneuver.

Pitcher consistency is a funny thing. It's funny because, as much as people like to talk about it, it's very poorly understood. For example, we don't even know if pitcher consistency is a good thing. There are suggestions out there - statistical arguments too smart for me to argue with - that, all things being equal, it's better to have an inconsistent pitcher than a consistent one.

Of course, we don't even know if pitcher consistency exists. Obviously some pitchers are statistically more consistent than others over a year, but we don't know if that's noise, or if pitchers have varying true talent levels of consistency. What makes the analysis so difficult is that much of it is based on results, and results are but an indirect measure of pitcher performance. A pitcher can throw the exact same game with the exact same sequencing and get very different results, and so we're kind of stuck at a point where we can't say for sure whether or not this guy is more consistent than this other guy.

But here's one thing we can say: over the course of the 2011 regular season, based on his results, Derek Holland was a very inconsistent pitcher. He may not be an inconsistent pitcher, but he was an inconsistent pitcher, or at least he seemed like one based on the hitters' performances. Holland was so famously inconsistent that it's become a part of his identity. You just never know what you'll get from this kid.

Sometimes it can be hard to properly understand somebody else's inconsistent player. A.J. Burnett, for example, is probably the player most well-known for being inconsistent, but because he's never played for the Mariners and because I've never watched a bunch of his starts, I don't really get what it's like. You might not get what the Derek Holland experience has been like. But, conveniently, we have an easy comparison.

Derek Holland started 32 games during the season, and threw 198 innings. Jason Vargas started 32 games, and threw 201 innings. Holland had six starts in which he posted a Game Score over 70. Vargas had six starts in which he posted a Game Score over 70. Holland had seven starts in which he posted a Game Score under 30. Vargas had seven starts in which he posted a Game Score under 30. Holland allowed zero or one runs 11 times. Vargas allowed zero or one runs 12 times. Holland allowed five or more runs ten times. Vargas allowed five or more runs 12 times.

You know how inconsistent Jason Vargas felt? That's how inconsistent Derek Holland felt. Holland, of course, is known for his four complete-game shutouts. Vargas threw three complete-game shutouts, and had another scoreless nine-inning performance that wound up going to extras. Those were the great games, and both guys also had clunkers.

Whether or not there's anything predictive there, I don't know. I don't know if the fact that Holland and Vargas had wildly up-and-down 2011 seasons will mean anything come 2012. But I know what it means psychologically - start to start, you really just don't know what you're going to get. We could never feel certain of anything with Vargas, and Rangers fans could never feel certain of anything with Holland.

So imagine how it must have felt to be a Rangers fan prior to this game, with Derek Holland's boom-or-bust left arm set to get the baseball with his team behind 2-1. Holland had been bad in the playoffs and he had a chance of putting the Rangers way behind early, but he also had a chance of completely shutting the Cardinals down and singlehandedly lifting his team to a tie. It seems to me like that would add some extra anxiety, although maybe it just gets lost in all the general anxiety of watching your team in the World Series. I wouldn't know.*

* >:(

And then Holland went out and did what he did. Tonight, in Game 4 against the Cardinals, Derek Holland turned in one of the best starts in World Series history, where by "one of the best" I don't mean top-5, but more like top-30 or 40 or 50. Maybe that sounds less impressive, but there have been a lot of World Series games. Holland was superb. Obviously, there's the zero runs in 8⅓ innings. Obviously, there's the seven strikeouts and the two walks, the second of which came in the top of the ninth with an elevated pitch count. I think what I find most incredible is the batted ball distribution. Against Holland, the Cardinals hit three balls to the outfield. One of them was a grounder up the middle.

This was the St. Louis Cardinals. The St. Louis Cardinals, with a DH. The team that had scored 16 runs the night before. Holland opened the door just wide enough for the Cardinals to think he was inviting them in, then he slammed the door in their faces.

This was a spectacular start from a guy who isn't a spectacular starter, but who could become one one day. While Vargas and Holland were similarly inconsistent during the year, it's obvious that Holland has the stuff to reach another level. On one hand, it's real frustrating when a guy with that stuff has inconsistent success, but on the other, when you have a guy with that stuff, inconsistency is tolerable, as it's a part of his development.

There's no guarantee that it ever clicks for Derek Holland. It just dawned on me how appropriate it was that Holland's opponent was Edwin Jackson, and that Jackson struggled. Jackson these days is better than a lot of people give him credit for, but he's not what he could be. He's not what people thought he would be, once. He's still a guy with good stuff and inconsistent success.

But boy did it ever click for Derek Holland tonight. While you can't ever count on anything from Holland before a game starts, he sure can leave you feeling amazed when it's over.

---

I got a late start with this and it's, oh my, two o'clock! so here are some super-fast bullet holes:

• Reagins: Right, I have potatoes on the list. Anything else?
  Wife: How do you feel about kale?
  Reagins: What for?
  Wife: I saw this recipe for chips that sounds interesting.
  Reagins: Kale chips, you mean? I don't -
  Reagins: Hold on, got a call on the other line.
  Reagins: /switches
  Reagins: Hello?
  Caller: hahahaaaaaaaaaa
  Reagins: /switches back
  Reagins: Sorry about that.
  Wife: Who called?
  Reagins: Napoli homered again.
  
  
• At one point very early in the game, FOX flashed an Allen Craig stat graphic, showing that he'd batted 7-for-22 against lefties since September 18th. Batting 7-for-22 is good for a .318 average. Craig posted a .313 average against lefties over the whole year. Even worse, Craig is 5-for-19 against lefties since September 19th. That was one shitty graphic.
  
  
• Tweeted Jon Morosi after Edwin Jackson issued his seventh walk:
  

  
  Eventually, these walks are going to hurt the Cardinals. You just can't win a World Series game like this.
  
  

  In 2005, White Sox pitchers walked 12 Astros batters (albeit in 14 innings) in Game 3 of the World Series, and Chicago still won. There have been three instances that a team won in the World Series despite issuing nine walks. Five instances with eight walks. Fourteen instances with seven walks. I get what Morosi was saying and obviously the walks were bad, but I wish people wouldn't deal in absolutes. Absolutes are for coroners.
  
  
• When Derek Holland was removed in the top of the ninth, one source had him at 116 pitches. Another source had him at 118 pitches. Yet another source had him at 119 pitches. This happens more often than you might think. It is completely inexcusable.
  
  
• Here's how good Albert Pujols was yesterday: so far, Pujols has gone hitless in three of four games in the World Series. His World Series OPS is 1.264.
  

I know that Albert Pujols hit three home runs tonight. Obviously, I know that, because I watched the whole game - all 244 minutes of it - and Pujols' achievement was impossible to miss. His first home run felt like it drove the final nail in the Rangers' coffin, and then the next two were like he was just showing off. Pujols is Game 3's biggest story.

But I'm not going to talk about Albert Pujols right here. I'm not going to talk any more about him, anyway. Because something else happened that I think makes for a much better lead, and I'm not going to run two separate leads. You can't have two leads! I don't want anybody to interpret this as me saying that the Cardinals didn't clobber the Rangers, because they did, but they got some help, and I'm going to talk about the help.

If you watched, you know. If you didn't watch, but if you've been on the internet, you know. The Cardinals were leading 1-0 in the top of the fourth. They had a runner on first base and nobody out. Matt Holliday stepped in against Matt Harrison and hit a grounder to short. Elvis Andrus tossed the ball to Ian Kinsler at second for one out, and then Kinsler threw to first to try to complete the double play. His throw sailed wide, but Mike Napoli hauled it in and swung his arm around to tag Holliday on the back. The tag was applied before Holliday stepped on the base, but umpire Ron Kulpa determined that they happened simultaneously, so he called Holliday safe. The Cardinals would go on to score four runs in the inning, and the rest of the stuff that happened happened.

Now - well, I'm not a football fan. Not much of one. I like the Seahawks when I watch them, but I don't go out of my way to watch them, and I don't care at all about what happens in college. It's just not my thing anymore. But tonight when I was browsing on Yahoo!, I accidentally clicked on the college football tab instead of the NHL tab. The lead story was a last-second Hail Mary touchdown that Michigan State scored to beat higher-ranked Wisconsin. I'm a sucker for last-second heroics, so I immediately went to YouTube to see if there was a highlight posted yet. Drama and loud crowds and everything. Irresistible.

There was a highlight. The highlight:

If you watch that, you'll notice that it's not a clean touchdown. The guy makes the catch, struggles, and then gets tackled near the goal line. The call on the field was that he was down just shy of paydirt. It was only after a subsequent review that the ref called it a touchdown, and Michigan State got to celebrate a win.

It's a little bit of a bummer to have to wait to celebrate until after a review, but that's not what's important. What's important is that the player didn't score a touchdown, then the ref decided to take a closer look, and then the player did score a touchdown, and the game was over. The system worked, and nobody complained.

Of course, that's not the first time an instant replay review has made a huge difference in a game. It's just the most current and convenient example. I've seen tons of significant reversals in football. I've seen tons of significant reversals in hockey. I see these happen, and I watch that highlight above, and I just can't believe that baseball is still where it is, with people talking about expanded replay, but with no expanded replay system presently in place.

I've seen the point made by replay proponents that, eventually, a blown call is going to cost some team a championship. I don't know if a blown call has cost a team a championship yet, but we've obviously seen blown calls in the playoffs, and tonight we had one in Game 3 of the World Series. Yes, the Cardinals wound up winning by nine runs, so it sounds weird to talk about one play at first base, but if that one play at first base is reversed, so much changes. Everything changes. Harrison pitches differently. The Cardinals' batting order shifts. Different relievers might be used. And so on.

Maybe the Rangers don't win. The odds were slightly against them at the time. But maybe the Rangers do win. Or maybe they lose, but Harrison lasts a while longer and spares much of the bullpen. It's this big cascading effect, and we'll never know how the series could be, if Kulpa makes the right call. We'll only know how the series is, and we'll wonder.

I'm not mad at or disappointed in Ron Kulpa. Rangers fans shouldn't be, either. It's not Kulpa's fault that it's impossible for humans to be 100% accurate on bang-bang plays. We're limited by our eyes and our ears, which kind of suck, relative to much of the animal kingdom, and which completely suck, relative to a slow-motion camera. The blame here lies with Kulpa's superiors - the people who, by way of their stubbornness, sometimes end up leaving umpires out to dry. I just don't think there's any excuse for why we should be able to see something clearly at home, when the umpires on the field are in the dark.

You want to protect the human element? What about the human element in football? There are humans refereeing those games, and they look at a bunch of replays. By looking at replays, they get more calls right. How is it not a priority to get more calls right?

I feel shitty going on and on about a tired subject, especially after a game that featured 23 runs and three dingers from one living legend. The internet doesn't need another pro-replay blog post. But despite those 23 runs, and despite those three Pujols dingers, it's the play at first base that I still have on my mind. Get that call right and the game goes down a different path, a path that probably doesn't lead to a 16-7 final score. That's the path it should've followed, and it sucks that it didn't.

• One of the funny things about this game is that, while Pujols is a huge story on account of his three home runs, just going by the final score, the Cardinals didn't need any of them. They were already ahead 8-6 when Pujols ripped Alexi Ogando, and the Rangers wound up scoring seven. The game might work out differently if Pujols doesn't homer, but it's a curiosity is all.
  
  It was Pujols' first home run that grabbed the audience by its collective ballsack. It was one of those home runs where your immediate thought isn't "is that going out?", but "in which level will that land?" It was such an emphatic, forceful home run that in the few seconds it took the ball to get out, one sensed that the Rangers were done. They'd staged three-run rallies the two innings previous, but Pujols seemed to make a statement that yeah, no, this game is over.
  
  Alexi Ogando probably regrets the pitch that he threw:
  
  

  
  

  In case you haven't figured it out, what you're looking at above are (A) intended target, and (B) result. Yorvit Torrealba set up for a fastball down and away. Ogando threw a fastball up and in, and paid the price. I don't want to say that a pitcher can't afford to miss his spots against Pujols, because realistically Pujols can hit anything in and around the strike zone, but missing your spots against Pujols probably isn't a good habit to get into.

• I have no recollection of how or why the broadcast started talking about Scott Brosius - remember, there were 244 minutes of baseball - but I made a note of Tim McCarver saying that Brosius cleared 100 RBI "a couple times." That got my attention when I heard it, because I had no memory of Brosius being that productive. It turns out that's because he wasn't. Brosius topped out at 98 RBI, which is close, but then his next-highest total was 71.
  
  
• Pujols, regular season: .299/.366/.541
  Pujols, total inc. playoffs: .309/.377/.565
  
  Maybe that doesn't seem like a huge difference, but Pujols came to the plate 651 times during the year. That's a big sample size. In 14 playoff games, he's lifted his OPS by 35 points. That's the kind of thing that can happen when you amass 45 total bases in 55 postseason at bats.
  
  
• Ken Rosenthal to Matt Holliday after the game:
  

  
  Did you think you'd ever see a night like this from a player like Pujols?
  
  

  I don't mean to be critical of Rosenthal because all he was trying to do was get Holliday to talk about Pujols' performance, but doesn't that question work better if it had been like Skip Schumaker or Jon Jay? Wouldn't Albert Pujols be literally the first player you'd expect to have a night like this?
  
  
• The TV cropping didn't do Rosenthal any favors:
  
  
  
  
• And while I'm sitting here posting images, they showed the Cardinals' batboy sitting in the dugout a few times. I assume it was the Cardinals' batboy. It could have been the Cardinals' orphan son Damien.
  
  
  
  
• I'm trying to put together in my head a list of things that are always funny. My current list is incomplete and not ready for sharing, but as a sneak peek, in the bottom of the first inning tonight Elvis Andrus took a 3-2 pitch and started trotting to first when he was called out on strikes. That is always funny. 

For a very long time, I had no idea what I was going to write here. I had no idea what angle to pursue. I had no idea what angles there were that were available. Then Allen Craig came up and did what he did, and it was obvious. It basically took the choice out of my hands - I was going to have to write about Allen Craig, because Allen Craig had come off the bench to drive in the winning run for the second game in a row. For six and a half innings, there wasn't a clear story, and then for one and a half innings, there was one big giant obvious story.

Then the Rangers came back in the top of the ninth and won the game. I want to say that it all happened so fast, even though I know that it didn't, since Tony La Russa made a pair of mid-inning pitching changes. All of a sudden it didn't make sense to write about Craig anymore. Craig was still interesting, but he wasn't something to focus on after the Rangers turned the game on its head.

So what was there to focus on? I suppose there's a Josh-Hamilton-redemption angle, since he played through injury and came up with a critical sac fly. There's some kind of Tony-La-Russa-pitching-change angle, too, since you can argue over whether or not he should've gone to Arthur Rhodes like he did. But for me, the thing that most stood out, and the thing I most want to discuss, is the baserunning.

In the top of the ninth, there was some fantastic baserunning. Some fantastic, game-changing baserunning. Baserunning is often the forgotten value component. It took forever for FanGraphs to include it in the WAR formula, for example. People act like baserunning doesn't make much of a difference, and it's true - most of the time, it doesn't make much of a difference. But it can, and it most certainly did tonight.

The first example of good baserunning came from Ian Kinsler. Kinsler led off the ninth with a base hit. Not satisfied, Kinsler shortly took off for second, and he got such a good jump off Jason Motte that he slid in ahead of what was a perfect throw by Yadier Molina. Molina's got an outstanding arm, and it's risky to run against him, but Kinsler read the pitcher well enough and sprinted fast enough that there was basically nothing Molina could have done.

The second example of good baserunning came from Elvis Andrus. You can watch the highlight here. With Kinsler on second, Andrus lined a sharp single to right-center field to put runners on the corners. Kinsler rounded third and drew a throw home from Jon Jay, and then Albert Pujols made a poor attempt to cut it off, the ball getting by him and rolling to Molina. Andrus broke for second the instant the ball got away from Pujols, and he slid in ahead of Molina's throw.

And the third example of good baserunning also came from Elvis Andrus. You can watch the highlight here. Right after Andrus took second, Josh Hamilton came to the plate and lifted a sac fly to right field. Andrus tagged up and sprinted for third, and he beat the throw from Skip Schumaker. That meant that, instead of just being in scoring position with one out, Andrus - representing the go-ahead run - was just 90 feet away.

Three examples of successful, aggressive, clutch baserunning, all in a row. Kinsler's baserunning got him in position to score the tying run, and Andrus' baserunning got him in position to score the go-ahead run. Obviously the baserunning didn't complete the rally on its own, but it was a crucial factor.

How crucial? Well, this is why we have Win Expectancy. We can calculate an approximation of the degree to which the Rangers' baserunning improved their odds. Going event by event:

Kinsler on 1st: 27% chance of Rangers winning
Kinsler on 2nd: 36%

Andrus on 1st: 53%
Andrus on 2nd: 61%

Andrus on 2nd: 56%
Andrus on 3rd: 68%

Add them all together and you get just over +27% (trust me; I rounded the numbers above). The Rangers' three additional bases gained improved their odds of winning by 27%. Overall, the top of the ninth improved the Rangers' odds of winning from 16% to 81% - a change of 65% - so you could say that baserunning accounted for about two-fifths of the Rangers' rally. Or maybe not. Maybe that's bad math. What you can definitely say is that the Rangers won having been aggressive on the basepaths, and that they might not have won had they not been aggressive on the basepaths.

This isn't exactly a new thing for them. According to FanGraphs' baserunning statistic, which doesn't include stolen base attempts, the Rangers were far and away the best baserunning team in the league this season. According to Baseball Prospectus' baserunning statistic, which does include stolen base attempts, they weren't at the top, but they were close. The Rangers have run the bases well all season, and tonight Kinsler and Andrus' awareness and footspeed in the top of the ninth helped the Rangers pick up a win in the World Series.

The MLB playoffs: when little things can turn into big things. In one half-inning, the Rangers basically came up with three Dave Roberts stolen bases. I'm not rooting for the Rangers, but they earned that win, and, overall, that was a hell of a baseball game to watch.

• Before the game, Buster Olney was looking ahead, and he tweeted out:
  

  
  Among the 72 best-of-seven MLB series that have started with a team taking a 2-0 lead, those teams have gone on to win 59 times.
  
  

  You see this kind of thing all the time, whenever you're dealing with playoff series. In any sport. People always want to know how many teams have come back from certain deficits. And there's nothing wrong with getting the numbers. But a big part of me wishes that people were just better with probability so we wouldn't have to deal with small sample sizes like, say, 72 historical 2-0 series leads.
  
  If you assume that teams who meet in a best-of-seven playoff series are roughly equal - in other words, if you stick with very simple 50/50 odds in each individual game - the chances of coming back from down 2-0 are about 19%. If you assume that the team behind 2-0 is just a tiny bit worse, and you change the odds to 49/51, then the chances of coming back from down 2-0 are about 18%. If you go by the historical data, though, then 13/72 = ...18%. Well I'll be damned. Hey, look over there!
  
  
• It's no longer more than a curiosity, given that the Rangers rallied to win, but the angle I was going to pursue with Allen Craig was that, while Craig came through with a pair of pinch-hit RBI singles in the first two games, the pitches he actually hit were really tough. Here's the first, which was a 98mph fastball:
  
  
  
  And here's the second, which was a 96mph fastball:
  
  
  Two times in two games, Allen Craig beat Alexi Ogando, but he didn't beat him because Ogando made mistakes - he beat him with straight-up good hitting. Ogando threw a pair of excellent outside fastballs, and Craig just happened to get the bat out in time. It's a good thing for Ogando that the Rangers wound up winning Game 2, because had they lost, Ogando might've started to look like a goat, and Ogando didn't really screw up at all.
  
  
• A Jaime Garcia fun fact:
  
  1st time through order, career: .598 OPS, 3.7 K/BB
  2nd time through order, career: .752 OPS, 2.0 K/BB
  3rd time through order, career: .727 OPS, 1.9 K/BB
  
  Tonight, Garcia retired the first nine batters he faced. He allowed a pair of baserunners and had to pitch out of a jam in the fourth. Like God damned clockwork. Except for the fact that he resumed being effective in the fifth, sixth and seventh. It was like clockwork for the first four innings.
  
  
• Defense saving a run in the fifth:
  
  
  
  Defense immediately preceding Cardinals' run in the seventh:
  
  
  
  It's hard to believe there was a time not too long ago that baseball analysts weren't very concerned with quality of glovework.
  

There aren't a lot of upsides to rooting for a team that doesn't make the playoffs. Sure, most of the teams that make the playoffs fall short of winning the championship, and in this way we get to avoid the heart-rending devastation of watching our team get eliminated, but the playoffs and the pursuit of a title is kind of one of the main reasons we're fans in the first place. The playoffs are - well this is pathetic but the playoffs are where legends are made, and where you can make memories you'll never forget. The emotion is completely different. In that there is emotion, a lot of emotion, for every game, and for all the hours in between.

But among those few upsides, I count this one: at least we don't have to go through what the Rangers and their fans are going through with C.J. Wilson. I'll explain.

Tonight, C.J. Wilson started against the Cardinals. He lasted 5⅔ innings, allowing three runs while walking six and striking out four. One could argue he was lucky he didn't allow more runs than he did, although one could also argue the opposite, given the carefully placed run-scoring hits by Lance Berkman and Allen Craig.

It was an unimpressive start. It was an unimpressive start from a guy who's supposed to be the Rangers' ace. And it wasn't his first in the playoffs. No sir. Wilson has now started eight games in the playoffs over the last two years. He's thrown 45⅔ innings over those eight starts, allowing 30 runs. He has 38 strikeouts, 24 walks, and a hard-to-believe ten homers. In a word, he's scuffled.

And for that he's attracted attention. Wilson began his playoff career last October. His playoff career to date has not been very good. So now there's talk. I wanted to say there were whispers, but I don't know if they're whispers anymore. There's talk that Wilson is a wilter. A guy who can't handle the pressure of the playoffs, a guy who folds under the intensity.

It's not a new argument. We've heard this argument applied to a bunch of guys. The first one that comes to my mind is Barry Bonds. There's Alex Rodriguez, obviously. There was Roger Clemens. Wilson isn't a player about whom people are saying new things. Wilson is a new player about whom people are saying old things.

And it isn't really fair. So Wilson hasn't impressed in the playoffs over eight starts, of which three were pretty good. I don't need to tell you how small a sample that is. What usually happens is that the players who fail to impress in the playoffs end up looking a lot better if their samples get bigger. Alex Rodriguez batted 19-for-52 in the 2009 playoffs, with six home runs. Barry Bonds went 16-for-45 in the 2002 playoffs, with eight home runs. If C.J. Wilson got a bunch more playing time in October, things would probably balance out.

But because things aren't balanced now, Wilson becomes a target, because the playoffs make people crazy. Every single little thing takes on an enormous importance and sample size issues go out the window. Between 2010-2011, Koji Uehara posted a 2.56 ERA, with 140 strikeouts and 13 unintentional walks. The Rangers left him off the World Series roster because he allowed three home runs in three games. And that's the team. Fans can become even more irrational. Irrational and unforgiving.

I'm not saying that all Rangers fans have turned on Wilson as an unclutch starter. That obviously isn't true, and the guy has his defenders. But a lot of Rangers fans' opinions have soured, as they read deeply into the fact that Wilson hasn't been great in October. Wilson is a fantastic pitcher who made the leap to the rotation a year ago and took another leap forward this season, and now a segment of the fan base acts like it can't stand him.

Wilson's a free agent in a few weeks. He's probably not going to re-sign. There's a slim chance tonight was the last time he'll pitch as a Ranger. More likely, he'll get one more turn. And if he doesn't pitch well, and I mean very well, you have to wonder about how he'll be remembered. How people will feel when it's official that he's leaving. The "right" way to feel is, oh, bummer, that guy was really great for the Rangers, as a person and as a player. But there could be people who feel very differently. He was a choker anyway.

All because he hasn't pitched well in a few games, even though those games were preceded by him pitching well in many more games. The playoffs, man. They make people nuts, and they introduce these storylines and narratives that shouldn't exist. I'm disappointed that the Mariners haven't made the playoffs in a decade, but at least I don't have to hear people ripping on Felix because he lost a couple games to the Yankees. That would be crazy. Felix is amazing.

• It seems like there are two particular things about this game that people want to talk about more than anything else. One of them came in the top of the seventh. Trailing the Cardinals 3-2, the Rangers had runners on first and second with two outs. The Cardinals had lefty Marc Rzepczynski on the mound and the pitcher's spot was due up, so Ron Washington needed a right-handed pinch-hitter. Most everybody suspected that he'd go with Yorvit Torrealba. Instead, he went with Esteban German, and German struck out to end the inning.
  
  Instantly, it was all over Twitter. People didn't understand. German has 79 Major League plate appearances over the past three years. He hadn't played and hit in a game since September 25th. Torrealba, meanwhile, was considered good enough to DH just a short while ago, against the Tigers. Why the first one over the second one? Why would Washington commit such a blunder?
  
  Of course, whenever a whole bunch of people are arguing one thing, my immediate response is to want to argue the other. Yorvit Torrealba is not good. He is not a good hitter. German is not a good hitter, either, but he has better numbers than Torrealba does, even though most of them were posted between 2006-2008. And though German hadn't faced a pitcher in a game since September 25th, he'd surely been taking batting practice. Torrealba hadn't faced a pitcher in a game since last Thursday. Isn't that also a long wait? Couldn't he have just as easily "forgotten" what it's like?
  
  But honestly, I'm not wedded to any position here. The pro-Torrealba argument isn't convincing, but neither is the pro-German argument. I would wager that German and Torrealba had very similar odds of success in that situation, and that Washington's only catching flak because he went the unfamiliar route, and German whiffed. But pinch-hitting is hard. Pinch-hitting is especially hard when you aren't very good. Chances are, Torrealba would've made some kind of out. Maybe an identical out.
  
  It's such a weird topic of discussion. "I can't believe Ron Washington pinch-hit with this one not-good player instead of this other not-good player!"
  
  
• The other thing people want to talk about is the Adrian Beltre incident in the top of the ninth. The Rangers were still down 3-2. Beltre was batting against Jason Motte with one out and nobody on. Beltre swung at the first pitch and hit a grounder to third, where David Freese scooped the ball up and threw Beltre out.
  
  Except Beltre protested, arguing that he hit the ball off of his toe. Immediately after he swung he started hopping around in pain, which would've been unbelievably quick thinking if he were trying to act. And FOX had been trying out these new military grade infrared cameras that show heat from friction when the ball strikes a surface, and the camera backed up Beltre's story:
  
  
  
  Nevertheless, Beltre was called out, and the Rangers were down to their final batter. Beltre argued, and Ron Washington argued, but to no avail. There was nothing they could do to prove the contact.
  
  Which, of course, is just so dumb. It's so dumb that we can know the truth sitting at home, and that we can know the truth in 30 seconds, but that the umpires can't know the truth, and that they have to try to piece things together based on their flawed eyes and their flawed ears. Okay, baseball, so you don't want to adopt expanded, thorough instant replay review? Fine. Whatever. It's your game, you do what you want. But if you're not going to use expanded instant replay, then stop allowing networks to use instant replay. Just eliminate all instant replay, altogether. Keep your viewers in the dark, because shit like this doesn't do anything to help the game. Shit like this makes people mad. Adrian Beltre should've been behind in the count 0-1. Instead he was assigned an out he didn't make in Game 1 of the World Series. How is that not total bullshit?
  
  
• One of my favorite little FOX graphics of the night showed up early in the game, when a stat box told us that Rangers pitchers walked 22 batters during the ALCS, and that none of those batters wound up scoring. I loved it because you have to figure that some of those walks were leadoff walks, and you know what they say about leadoff walks. Suck it, platitude!
  
  None of the six batters Wilson walked tonight would score. Albert Pujols did score after getting hit in the leg, though, so that deserves an asterisk.
  
  
• From the scouting report graphic on Chris Carpenter: "Has never lost in the postseason at home." I know this isn't a new thing, but it struck me again tonight: at what point did TV scouting reports cease to be scouting reports? A scouting report isn't supposed to just tell you facts about the player. It's supposed to tell you specific things about that player's ability and talent level. A scouting report is what a scout fills out when he's watching an amateur player. If a scout were watching an amateur player and he wrote down "has never lost in the postseason at home," and that was one of only two things he wrote down, and that was the whole report, the scout would be fired. Or he'd be sent on assignment in a really shitty place, like...well like most scouts, really. You probably do not want to be a scout.
  
  
• The mother of all the Molina brothers was in attendance, watching Yadier keep the Rangers' running game in control. My first thought was, "man, get her and Rob Johnson really drunk, and in 18 years you'll have a catcher," but then no, see, that's a trick. The Molinas are all already catchers who can play defense. You want her to get together with somebody like Pujols or Jose Bautista. Then you'll really have something. I don't know why I'm not a scientist anymore, this stuff is easy.
  
  
• In the top of the first inning, Elvis Andrus hit a grounder to Pujols, and Pujols tossed the ball to a covering Chris Carpenter, who went down and basically wound up sliding to first base with the ball in his glove. Carpenter got there first and Andrus was out, but Carpenter was left in a very vulnerable position with his arms out over the bag. Fortunately, Andrus did not step on him, and so Carpenter escaped unscathed.
  
  You wonder, though. If Andrus had stepped on Carpenter, he easily could've said it was an accident, since it all happened so fast, and then Carpenter might have to come out of the game. It would give the Rangers a boost. I'm not saying that Andrus should have stepped on Carpenter but I wonder if there are players who would have. Shane Victorino, probably. Chase Utley, probably. Ryan Howard, probably not, but only because he'd be crumpled in a heap by the batter's box with a torn Achilles' tendon. That's funny now, right?

I didn't write anything yesterday because I decided on Friday that I would take yesterday off. However, you could also interpret my absence as being in protest of the Rangers' victory if you like. God damn Rangers. Anyway.

There are a few amazing things about this year's Cardinals. Obviously, there are a few amazing things about this year's Cardinals. It's hard to go to the World Series without having amazing qualities, or without having amazing things take place. One is that they managed to have their success without Adam Wainwright. Wainwright was supposed to be the ace of the staff. Instead he developed a torn UCL and had Tommy John surgery during the spring.

Now I know most of us are AL fans, so maybe the name "Adam Wainwright" doesn't mean a whole lot to you. But over the previous two years, Wainwright threw 463.1 innings, with a 3.5 strikeout-to-walk ratio and a 2.53 ERA. According to Fangraphs' WAR, between 2009-2010 Wainwright was about as valuable as Jon Lester and CC Sabathia. The Cardinals thought they'd be able to hand the ball to that guy 33 or 34 times. Instead they didn't hand the ball to him once.

Another amazing thing is that they pulled off their big late comeback in the standings. Don't let all the attention that's been paid to the Red Sox throw you - the National League featured just as improbable a Wild Card race, as the Braves looked like they were sitting pretty right up until they weren't. The Cardinals' CoolStandings playoff odds hit a low of 1.1% on August 27th, when they were ten games behind Atlanta. Their odds were 1.9% on September 8th, when they were 7½ games behind Atlanta. Yet the Cardinals made the playoffs, and the Braves didn't.

If anything, even though the AL situation got more press, you could argue that the Cardinals were more responsible for their comeback than the Rays were. The Rays won 17 of their last 25 games, which is great. The Cardinals won 23 of their last 32. Boston collapsed a little worse than Atlanta did. I don't know if this argument holds up, and I don't know if it matters, but it's something that can be discussed.

What might be the most amazing thing about the Cardinals, though, is how quickly people are going to forget.

Remember, the Phillies were supposed to waltz on through the season and the playoffs to a World Series title. It wasn't supposed to be easy, I guess, but it's what was expected, and it was expected because the Phillies had built maybe the most formidable starting rotation in recent baseball history. And what's more imposing in the playoffs than an awesome starting rotation? The Phillies could roll out ace after ace after ace. Who could possibly beat that lineup of aces in the playoffs? People have long figured that a team needs quality starting pitching to win in October, and nobody had more quality starting pitching than the Phillies.

Of course, the Phillies were eliminated, by the Cardinals. And then the Cardinals won the NLCS over the Brewers in six games. In none of those six games did a Cardinals starter throw a pitch in the sixth inning. In all, Cardinals starters threw 24⅓ innings, and allowed 19 runs. In the NLCS, the Cardinals' rotation was pretty much terrible, and yet the Cardinals advanced.

They advanced because it isn't just about starting pitching. It is, and forever has been about overall team performance, counting all components. Offense. Defense. Starting pitching. Relief pitching. Baserunning. Other stuff. You can't simplify and boil down to starting pitching alone, because you're going to leave way too much out.

That's a lesson people could take away from this. But you know that, a year from now, it's going to be the same discussion as before. Whichever team has the strongest starting rotation is going to be seen as a favorite, because look at those aces. Who could beat those aces? People are so god damn wedded to the idea that pitching, and specifically starting pitching wins in October that many of them will either ignore or forget about evidence to the contrary.

Here's a fun fact for you. As noted, the Phillies were expected to go a long long way because they had an amazing starting rotation. According to StatCorner, the Phillies' rotation finished 166 runs better than average. That's an incredible total. Meanwhile, the Cardinals' offense - also according to StatCorner - finished 152 runs better than average. That's an incredible total, too. A very similarly incredible total. If the Phillies were nearly unbeatable because of their starting rotation, then the Cardinals were and are nearly unbeatable because of their bats. Right?

Overall picture. Overall picture. Always the overall picture.

• The Brewers just set an LCS record by committing nine errors. Worse, seven of those errors happened in the last two games. Each of these errors gave people an opportunity to talk about how defense was a known weakness of the Brewers, and I believed that to be true, too, until I checked. It turns out the Brewers finished with an above-average UZR, an above-average Defensive Runs Saved, and an above-average BABIP allowed.
  
  Now, that evidence doesn't prove that the Brewers were actually a solid defensive ballclub. Defensive stats, and all that. But it suggests as much. It certainly doesn't suggest that the Brewers were bad, which is the angle so many journalists and broadcasters tried to advance. Even if you just look at Fielding Percentage like an idiot, the Brewers were like .001 below-average.
  
  I'm pretty sure that, defensively, the Brewers were all right. They looked terrible at the wrong time, but we don't want to read too much into a small sample when we have a much larger sample.
  
  
• Before the game started, the camera focused on Brian Anderson and John Smoltz in the broadcast booth. Then it slowly pulled back to reveal Ron Darling at stage right. That was a bummer.
  
  
• In the top of the first - and this is a play that'll end up pretty much ignored given the way the game turned out - Albert Pujols was called out at home plate even though replays showed him to be pretty clearly safe. After a replay, one of the broadcasters remarked "Could have gone either way," which is dumb. I mean, sure, I guess it could have gone either way, since anything is possible, but saying "Could have gone either way" implies that it was 50/50. The replay clearly showed that Pujols was safe, so what the broadcaster should have said was, "Should have called him safe."
  
  
• In the bottom of the fifth, Albert Pujols was involved in something of a collision at first base, and he went down to the ground in pain, holding his forearm. It was unclear what happened at first, and for a short time it seemed that Pujols might have sustained a significant injury. Thankfully he didn't - I say "thankfully" because I hate the Rangers - but I can't even imagine what it must have felt like to be a Cardinals fan, or player, or coach, or executive for the 20 or 30 seconds that Pujols was down. I've been through a couple Felix injuries, and those were just the worst, but they didn't happen right before the Mariners went to the World Series.
  
  
• Octavio Dotel came in to record a couple outs in the bottom of the seventh. Among pitchers with at least 500 career innings, Dotel owns the fifth-highest strikeout rate in baseball history. After Dotel finished off the frame, the game went to the top of the eighth, and Ron Roenicke called on Francisco Rodriguez. Rodriguez owns the third-highest strikeout rate in baseball history.
  
  It's funny - Ryan Braun is now 2-for-11 against Dotel in his career, with nine strikeouts. I rip on people who make too much of microsplits all the time, but if ever I were going to buy into a microsplit, it would be a microsplit like this. Braun has swung at a Dotel pitch 23 times. Of those 23 swings, 16 have whiffed.
  
  
• There were as many home runs in the first two and a half innings of this game as the Mariners hit in the first 20 days of July.

It's funny - ask the average baseball fan about his least favorite managers, and he'll probably give you a few names. He might give you the name of his own team's manager. Fans pretty much always hate their teams' managers, so long as the team isn't really good, or even if it is. He might give you another name or two or three. And he might say Tony La Russa. He will probably say Tony La Russa. A lot of baseball fans really can't stand Tony La Russa.

And yet, when you read over studies that try to identify the best and worst managers in baseball - be they simple studies, exhaustively researched studies, or studies somewhere in between - Tony La Russa almost always comes out looking fantastic. A lot of people don't like Tony La Russa, but the man gets shit done, and he gets shit done a lot better than most of his peers.

There are a number of reasons for why Tony La Russa might be an effective manager. Some of them are intangible, subjective. Some of them can be measured. And one can look at his in-game management. Strategy is only part of a manager's job, but it's a part where he can make a pretty significant difference, in one of two directions.

Tony La Russa's always been a fan of certain strategies, and I think you could say that he plays more chess than many other managers do. He has a style. If you were watching a baseball game with two mystery teams wearing mystery uniforms, and you had the TV on mute, by the end you could probably pick out which of the two teams was managed by Tony La Russa. He makes decisions that can be hard to miss.

He made two such decisions in Friday night's NLCS Game 5 against the Brewers. One of them, I loved. In the top of the fifth inning, the Brewers scored a run, and had two on and two out against Jaime Garcia. The score was 4-1 St. Louis. At that point La Russa came out of the dugout and replaced Garcia with Octavio Dotel, even though Garcia had thrown just 68 pitches.

You could argue that it was crazy. Garcia, again, had thrown just 68 pitches. Of those 68 pitches, a remarkable 75% were strikes. He had zero walks, and five strikeouts. Garcia was pitching pretty well.

But Garcia was also going through the Brewers' lineup for the third time, and he was about to face the right-handed Ryan Braun. Garcia is left-handed, and Braun was the tying run. La Russa sensed that that was a critical moment in the game, even though it was the top of the fifth, and so he called on a power righty to improve his odds of getting the out. Dotel had better odds of retiring Braun than Garcia did, and indeed, Dotel got the job done. The Brewers didn't really threaten much after that.

The second decision, I didn't love so much. In fact, at first, I thought it was nuts. The Cardinals were ahead 3-0 in the bottom of the fourth, and they had runners on first and second with nobody out. Eighth place hitter Nick Punto came up and dropped down a sacrifice bunt to set up Jaime Garcia himself with a pair of runners in scoring position. I thought it was nuts because who on earth lays down a sacrifice bunt with the pitcher on deck?

But Garcia subsequently bounced a weak groundball that scored the runner from third to make it a 4-0 game. At that point I looked up Garcia's batting statistics, and though he isn't good - he has a lifetime .343 OPS - he's actually posted a better-than-average contact rate, and he's put the majority of his balls in play on the ground. Tony La Russa could've had a fair bit of confidence that Garcia would be able to plate a run.

I still don't love that move, and I wouldn't have done it myself, but it looks better than it did at the time. And, of course, it worked. So many of Tony La Russa's moves this month have worked.

Tony La Russa is a different sort of manager. He's different in some ways that can drive people insane, and that can make people not like him, but he gets baseball. He gets how it works. He has a way of getting more from what he has than you'd expect, and though that means he occasionally has to be a little or a lot unconventional, his body of work is such that you can't really argue with his results. If the Mariners were to hire Tony La Russa next month, I would hate it, and I would love it.

• I saw a troubling tweet during the game. I wouldn't say it was necessarily troubling on its own - it was troubling because of the source. The following tweet came courtesy of @ESPNStatsInfo:
  

  
  Bad news for Cardinals...No team has won any postseason series when their starters failed to go more than 5 IP in any of 1st 5 games (elias)
  
  

  For one thing, when this tweet came across, the Cardinals were winning, and in good shape to pull ahead in the series three games to two. "Bad news"?
  
  For another thing, what kind of sample size are we talking about? In how many historical series have there been teams whose starters have failed to pitch into the sixth inning in each of the first five games?
  
  And lastly, and most problematic, consider the comparison here. Starters usually get removed before the sixth inning if they've been ineffective. If a team has had five consecutive starters get removed before the sixth inning, it's probably because they've been ineffective, and so the team probably lost. But then consider the Cardinals. The Cardinals have had five straight starters fail to pitch into the sixth inning, sure. But in Game 2, Edwin Jackson allowed two runs. In Game 3, Chris Carpenter allowed three runs. In Game 4, Kyle Lohse allowed three runs. In Game 5, Jaime Garcia allowed one run. Many managers probably would've allowed those guys to keep pitching, but Tony La Russa opted to go to fresh relief. Not because his starters were getting pounded. Because he has a deep bullpen.
  
  It's an obvious problem with the comparison, as Tony La Russa is quite the variable. Again, I wouldn't have cared much about this tweet if it came from just some guy, but I expect more out of ESPN Stats & Info. This is just bad statistics.
  
  
• Ahead 1-0, the Cardinals had runners on second and third with one out in the bottom of the second. Nick Punto hit a screaming line drive the other way, but Jerry Hairston Jr. made a tremendous diving catch to rob the Cards of one or two runs. On literally the next pitch - the very next pitch - Jaime Garcia hit a routine grounder to Hairston at third that should have ended the inning, but Hairston let the ball go through his legs, and two runs scored on the error.
  
  There were so many valuable life lessons crammed into those 30 seconds of baseball. If I ever have a kid, when he's ten I'm locking him in his room and showing him those clips over and over, and I'm not letting him out until he understands.
  
  
• After Hairston's error, Zack Greinke ran near home and received a throw, but not in time to do anything about the two runs. Frustrated, Greinke spiked the ball on the ground. It bounced back up and hit him in the chest.