When the St. Louis Cardinals woke up Wednesday morning, they had an 85 percent chance of making the playoffs, according to FiveThirtyEight.com.
By the end of business day, their chances had slipped a whole eight percentage points after they lost a frustrating 4-3 game to the Pirates. Should they lose Thursday’s game to the Dodgers, it will drop more precipitously than that.
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Probabilities, not to mention emotions, shift and slide suddenly at this time of year. That unease is particularly intense when you are playing virtually all of your games against teams jostling with you to get to the playoffs.
From now until the end of this month, things will come fast and furious at the young Cardinals, who rely on rookies throughout their pitching staff and at key spots on the diamond. St. Louis has five series left, and four of them are against teams either in playoff position or within two games of it.
The challenge arrives fast, on Thursday, when many of the Cardinals hitters will get their first look at Clayton Kershaw. The big left-hander is, perhaps, a bit diminished due to injuries over the past few years, but is still a likely future Hall of Famer nonetheless. The Cardinals will counter with one of their three rookie starting pitchers, Austin Gomber.
Kershaw-Gomber: a matchup emblematic of what they’ll be trying to accomplish in the coming weeks, make a World Series run with a team populated primarily by players from their Triple-A team when the season began.
“I’ve never been in a pennant race, so I have no idea what to expect,” Cardinals rookie center fielder Harrison Bader said. “So, what I tie my confidence into is what we’ve been doing all year and how I prepare for a game and this team, how we live in a bubble, how we take that onto the field. Anything in this game, you take it as a challenge or an experience, not anything negative.”
The Dodgers pull into town having preserved their claim on a playoff spot with an 8-1 win over the Cincinnati Reds to avert a sweep. They trail the Cardinals by two games in the wild-card standings, and they can’t have forgotten the Cardinals’ sweep in their home stadium Aug. 20-22.
The Dodgers, like the Cardinals, have had a tumultuous and injury-pummeled season, but they still are the defending National League champions.
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“We’re going to have to come out ready because these guys are hungry for that spot, too, and we know they’re right behind us. We know what we did to them in L.A., and they remember that,” Cardinals shortstop Paul DeJong said. “They’re coming in here trying to sweep us. We’ve got to take it day by day, but I think our goal is to try to get on the starters early and get in that bullpen and extend some leads.”
Kershaw probably isn’t too keen on getting brushed aside that easily, but the Cardinals still have a considerable upper hand in this series. The Dodgers would have to sweep all four games to take sole possession of the Cardinals’ current wild-card spot. If L.A. wins three out of four, the teams would be in a dead heat with 12 games left. If they finished the season tied, they would play a one-game tiebreaker at Busch Stadium since the Cardinals would have won the head-to-head season series.
The bigger question for St. Louis this month is in regards to shepherding young pitchers, many of whom are at or near unprecedented workloads, and young hitters, many of whom have never had to swing a bat under intense pennant-race scrutiny.
Cardinals manager Mike Shildt, who took over from Mike Matheny nearly two months ago and had the interim tag removed from his title about a month later, said he has a simple plan to ease the pressure: Stay in the present.
“Don’t get lost in the competition, stay in the particular moment of that particular game and then everything doesn’t have to be so big,” he said. “This club has good habits. All we can do is play the game right, execute and take our shot.”
To summarize, the Cardinals have a rookie manager, three rookie starting pitchers, a rookie relief ace in Jordan Hicks and first- or second-year players at every starting position but wherever Matt Carpenter plays, left field, third base and second base. They are hopeful that Yadier Molina is progressing nicely, but they still aren’t sure when they’ll get the backbone of their team back from a hamstring injury.
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It’s not a trivial challenge they face. The idea is to not let things snowball on them, and the first step in accomplishing that would be to win a game or two between now and Sunday.
“You just play the ball. Whatever pressure you decide to put on it as a result of the end of the season or playoff race or whatever, that comes from the player,” Bader said. “The game is the same.”
The smart move, if you follow a contending team at this time of year, is to avoid looking at the playoff odds daily. Maybe glance once a week or so, but take them with a grain of salt. The Cardinals made an improbable charge to the postseason before their last World Series title and backed into the playoffs the championship before that.
Virtually anything can happen over the next 16 games and, if you don’t know how a player is going to react to his first taste of what the playoffs are like, it can make for gripping theater. The Cardinals have a clubhouse filled with guys like that, so sit back and enjoy.
(Top photo of Gomber: Dilip Vishwanat / Getty Images)