Photograph by Jeff Curry
At some point I guess it was inevitable, but I'm still a little misty-eyed at the end of the run: The St. Louis Cardinals finally got a quality start from one of their starting pitchers, closing the book on an NLCS in which the bullpen threw more innings than the rotation. Fittingly, it was Chris Carpenter bookending the series—his six innings in Game 1 of the World Series constituted the first quality start the Cardinals have gotten out of their rotation since his complete-game shutout sank the Phillies.
It was some consolation, I guess, that the bullpen was still untouchable. Oh, and that the Cardinals won Game 1 of the World Series.
It was strange to watch as a Cardinals pitcher got through the sixth without incident, and stranger still to find that strange. But this hasn't been a normal postseason; we haven't anticipated it all year, as we did in 2004, and yet the Cardinals' postseason success isn't quite as surprising as it was in 2006, the year of the famous "Tigers in 3" prediction. It's just weird, weird that they got here at all—and weird enough that winning four games out of six based entirely on the strength of a mostly unproven bullpen seemed no less natural than the conventional baseball we saw in Game 1.
But weird baseball can't go on forever—the Cardinals got past the Brewers with it, but if they continue to deploy six-inning bullpen stints for the duration it will rapidly stop being weird baseball. I suppose I'll have to get used to it; someone should let the Cardinals know that winning Game 2 would really help speed up my adjustment.
