On Saturday, Jaime Garcia took the worst beating of his life. (I say this, in all honestly, not knowing whether he's ever joined—presumably under a pseudonym—a nihilistic underground fight club designed to help him escape the shackles of his red-collar existence.) After a nearly perfect start to his sophomore season with the Cardinals, he allowed 11 earned runs in a little more than three innings while triggering a little-used obstruction rule to earn his second error of the season. It was brutal, and it was only through the intercession of little-used Ryan Franklin that the team managed to avoid throwing its entire bullpen into flux for days.
Then on Sunday they won a completely typical game 4-3 to close out a series victory on their way home to St. Louis.
Baseball as a game is better suited to narratives than any other sport. There are 162 games, stretching out across distinct seasons—mild spring and fall sandwiching brutal summer—and the sheer volume of pitches and swings dictates that players and teams will almost have to surprise us, at some point, even if by accident.
And momentum is one of the easiest narratives to construct. Last year's Cardinals just seemed hexed, at times, unable to get out of a funk that made them almost depressing to watch. This year's team, though composed of many of the same players, seemed entirely different prior to Saturday's debacle; where the 2010 Cardinals, for instance, dealt with the loss of David Freese by plugging Felipe Lopez and eventually Pedro Feliz into the role and eventually eating a lot of expensive ice cream right form the carton, the 2011 squad has shown a remarkable flexibility with its flawed-but-interesting young replacements. So, good momentum!
And then Garcia gets walloped, and so, bad momentum. But the Cardinals, behind Kyle Lohse, one of the biggest surprises of the season, carried on much like they had the week before and put together an indistinguishably plain victory against the same team that had crushed.
The hard anti-momentum position, like most positions informed primarily by ideology, is probably wrong; baseball players are human beings, and the events of the day before undoubtedly have some effect on the events of the next. But "baseball players are human beings" isn't an argument for momentum among baseball teams; as human beings, these guys always have things on their mind, and some of them are probably more important to them than being humiliated on regional TV yesterday.
So here's to baseball players, human beings, who do their job, are sometimes terrible at it, and then do their job again the next day. It doesn't work out so well for sportswriting as a spiraling collapse would, but I'm sure Jaime Garcia will take it.
