Cardinals take Game Seven over Mets, 3-1

Right here.

And, how fitting that Cardinal-killer Carlos Beltran strikes out looking with the bases loaded.

What have we learned?

What the Houston Astros have known for three years. Division championships mean nothing. Home field advantage means nothing. The most important thing about the playoffs is getting in, and then hoping the ball drops your way.

The second most important thing is hot starting pitching, and--failing that--lots of good starting pitching. In 2004 and 2005, the Astros clinched the Wild Card on the last day of the season, went into the postseason, and let Oswalt, Clemens, Backe, and (last year) Pettitte take over. Over two seasons, with an anemic offense, the Astros played five postseason series and won three of them, losing one in Game 7.

And? Momentum means nothing--heading into the playoffs and during, both. Two teams surged into the playoffs: Minnesota and the Yankees. They went a combined 1-6 and were out by the Friday of the first round. Two teams limped in: St. Louis (which lost 10 of its last 12 and verged on becoming the disgrace of the sport) and Detroit (which was swept by Kansas City on the last weekend of the season, dropped to the Wild Card, and had to play its first two playoff games in front of 55,000 screaming freaks in the Bronx).

Gee, St. Louis and Detroit. Know anything those two teams have in common?

As for momentum in the playoffs, consider: Last year, the Astros came to within one strike of the World Series. Leading three games to one, with two outs in the ninth inning, with that year's new hot stopper, Brad Lidge, faced Albert Pujols. Lidge tried to end the series with a fastball. Pujols sent the ball flying over the train tracks at the top of the facade behind the left field Crawford Boxes. The Cardinals win, 7-5. And this was the moment when the momentum had shifted completely . . .

. . . except that it hadn't. When the teams repaired to St. Louis for Game 6, Roy Oswalt blew the Cardinals away, enroute to a NLCS MVP.

(Pause here for a moment. This is a strange time for pitching, something I haven't seen in thirty years, right when I began watching baseball. Right now, there is a sizable cluster of pitchers who are no-doubt Hall-of-Famers. Clemens, Redro, Unit, Maddux, Glavine, Mo, Smoltz, Hoffman, probably Mussina, possibly Schilling. This is the biggest cluster I can remember since the late seventies, with Palmer, Catfish, Sutter, Carlton, Seaver, Perry, Knucksie, Ryan . . . my God, maybe it's bigger. There is also a good group of maybe-we-can-start-counting-four-years-from-now types: Oswalt, Mulder, Carpenter, Willis, Papelbon, Zito, Sheets, Zambrano, Santana. What's missing are the tweeners, the official Hall-of-Fame watch types, the pitching equivalent to what Biggio and Bagwell have been subjected to the past half-decade. Two more good years, three more good years . . . who fits that category? Once again, maybe Mosse and Schiil. And? Pettitte? No. Pettitte is eighty wins from anything close to serious consideration. Won't get there. Beckett, Woods, Prior: undone by injuries. Just a thought.)

The best words on the above topic belong to Earl Weaver: "You take momentum. I'll take Jim Palmer."

Finally--and this has come from long inspection--baseball, though the greatest sport ever invented, proves nothing in the end. Only rarely--as in 1998-99, when the Yankees went 22-2, complete with two World Series sweeps--is post-season baseball any proof of real superiority. In 2000, the Yankees won 87 games (four managers who won 85 or more games that year were fired), nearly choked away the division championship by losing five games of softball mercy-rule proportions (13-2, etc.), and were extended to five games by the A's and six by the Mariners, but got hot, drew the brain-dead Mets and took four out of five.

For all that, the Cardinals. As Astorgirl said tonight: "I never loved Detroit so much as now."