Baseball may be a game of numbers, but the St. Louis Cardinals never let statistics get in the way of their unconventional run to a world championship.
After beating Detroit 4-2 Friday at Busch Stadium to capture the World Series in five games, there was no doubt the Cardinals did things the hard way in 2006.
“It was unreal out there,” said Series MVP David Eckstein. “No one believed in us, but we believed in ourselves.”
The Cardinals lost 10 of their final 14 games to back into the National League Central title. Their starting pitching ranked 12th in the NL, and their offense went into the tank in the second half, ranking 13th after the All-Star break.
Perhaps the most astonishing stat was the Cardinals’ 8-11 record against the Cubs, the worst team in the NL.
“Facts are stubborn,” Missouri native son Mark Twain once wrote. “But statistics are more pliable.”
And when all was said and done, when Cardinals closer Adam Wainwright struck out the Tigers’ Brandon Inge to end it, none of those stats made Friday’s outcome any less gratifying to a Cardinal-crazed town, or diminished the sweet sting of a champagne shower in the postgame clubhouse.
“We had doubts that we could put it all together,” Cardinals manager Tony La Russa said. “But there’s one thing–and our club knows it–nobody ever lost the desire to go out and try to play Cardinals baseball. And we thought if maybe someway we could get into the playoffs, this could happen.”
St. Louis won its 10th world championship, its first since 1982 when the Cardinals beat Milwaukee in seven games. With an 83-78 regular-season record, the Cardinals became the worst World Series champion in baseball history, statistically speaking.
The 1987 Minnesota Twins were 85-77 before beating the Cardinals in a seven-game series.
Former Tigers right-hander Jeff Weaver pitched eight dazzling innings, allowing one earned run on four hits with nine strikeouts, while Eckstein, the diminutive hero, drove in a pair of runs.
The Cardinals took advantage of two more Tigers errors and survived the brutal defense of their own right fielder, Chris Duncan, finishing off the Tigers with relative ease.
The game-turning play came in the fourth when Tigers starter Justin Verlander committed the fifth error of the Series by a Detroit pitcher, making a wild throw to third with two on and one out.
The tying run scored on Verlander’s throw, and Eckstein followed with a run-scoring groundout, giving St. Louis a lead it would not relinquish.
With their pitchers treating baseballs like Frisbees, leading to eight unearned runs, and unexpected plays like center fielder Curtis Granderson’s slip on a routine flyball in Game 4, there was a sense the Cardinals didn’t beat the Tigers as much as the Tigers beat themselves.
“It’s part of the game,” Tigers second baseman Placido Polanco said. “Go ask Granderson. Do you think he wanted to fall? Did [Joel] Zumaya want to throw that ball away? I wanted to have a couple of hits. I don’t have any.”
Polanco was robbed of a hit on a great diving play Friday by Albert Pujols in the seventh and was hitless in 17 at-bats in the Series.
Appropriately enough, the first run of Game 5 occurred in the second when Inge made a diving stop at third of an Eckstein shot, then threw the ball away, allowing Yadier Molina to score from third.
But Duncan dropped a windblown fly off the bat of Magglio Ordonez in the fourth, preceding a two-run homer by Sean Casey, giving the Tigers a 2-1 lead. After Verlander’s error put the Cardinals in charge, Scott Rolen added an insurance run with a two-out, RBI single in the seventh off Fernando Rodney.
A cold, biting wind played havoc with fly balls much of the night, making it difficult for the outfielders.
“It’s kind of hard to check exactly how the wind is,” Granderson said.
“I’ll feel it, but [the flags are] not going to necessarily gauge exactly what the ball is going to do.”
The only time anyone knew what the ball was going to do was when a Tigers pitcher fielded one, then promptly launched it past an infielder.
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psullivan@tribune.com
