NL Wild Card: St. Louis Cardinals vs Los Angeles Dodgers

i think they f'd up?

i'm also confused by the dodgers/giants. the dodgers have to play a 1-off WC game, which immediately puts a dent in their world series odds, yet they come out waaaaaaay ahead of the giants, who are ranked similarly by "team quality"

welp, it seems i have posted a rather large image chart with numbers on it which may be a total lie :-/

yeah the comments on that post are universally "wait WHAT?"

i put one in for you! (i'm "weinventyou" on there)

damn, i didn't watch any games this weekend but i missed this:

In the midst of the exciting games with all sorts of playoff implications, it was a jarring moment when Kershaw came out of Friday night’s start against Milwaukee with what is being described as forearm discomfort. Based on both his and Dave Roberts’ post-game comments, whatever is going on with one of the best left arms in the history of the game is not good, and his 2021 season is likely over. As far as his Dodgers career, that’s still to be determined; his contract expires after the final out of the World Series

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

i predict a dominant cardinals victory, both in this thread and the game itself. chances of me being right are over 75% right now

alright cardinals nation, who is ready to watch the moral crusader cardinals defeat the evil wealthy team tonight?!

Not following baseball much this season, I looked at the Giants stats and I have to wonder how that group of mismatched parts won 107 games. Looks like they had a heck of a year out of their bullpen but that roster is made up of some oddballs all having career seasons.

What the heck medical/eldrich science got that power out of Brandon Belt and Brandon Crawford? They find a stash on Ebay left over from Steve Finley or Luis Gonzales? That is some unexpected late power surge by those two.

For someone who has watched just about every Giants game this year. Short answer is the coaching staff, the Giants have the biggest coaching staff of any Major League Team. Posey taking off 2000 is what his body needed. They moved the fences in... They're having a magical season.

As a jays fans I’m as jealous as I am baffled. Jays have a Cy Young, MVP runner up, second baseman setting a record in home runs, pitcher who will probably be 5th or so in ROY voting and two consecutive years with big name FA signings and all they could manage was 4th place.

yeah, whenever i look at the leaderboards it's crazy to see so many jays near the top! vlad and semien alone is great, but also bichette, but also hernandez, but also george springer?! more than half of their line-up should be all-stars!

oh wait, now i see why. randal grichuk.

He was actually amazing while Springer was out. didn’t see a lot of playing time once Springer and Guirriel were back (and they also traded for Dickerson)

Maybe this won't mean a thing, but it looms over this wild card matchup, especially since Cards starter Adam Wainwright still has one of the best curveballs in the game: the Dodgers this year were 27th in baseball against the curve (by FanGraphs' pitch type values).

— Eno Sarris (@enosarris) October 6, 2021

i honestly can't remember the last time the cardinals did well against Scherzer. but...actually i'm going to look that up now.

minor but potentially interesting development: Juan Yepez got added to the Cardinals roster for this game. it would be his debut, if he gets into the game. i don't recall seeing him hit before, not even in spring training, but apparently he has some "pop", and any sort of positive result would be a hell of a debut!

https://i.imgur.com/aBbxoU4.png

just the recency bias of his last 2 starts being pretty dominating, I guess.

i hadn’t realized that max muncy is out

i thought bellinger or pujols might cover 1B tonight, but they're going with Matt Beaty instead. i assume pujols is fuming because he believes he would dominate tonight.

could be his last game tonight? i guess i don't really know if any team would be interested in him, maybe they will next year

kind of amazed that bellinger is starting

yeah, me too. bellinger has been ICE cold in september/october, too, even worse than before

ah, i see edmundo sosa is starting over paul dejong tonight. there was some question about who it would be. dejong basically lost his job to sosa this season, right there at the end when he got injured. just in terms of watching games, too, in terms of entertainment value, dejong is a below-replacement player (tied with goldschmidt and dylan carlson in the 'we have no emotions' style of playing), and sosa seems to get excited about playing well, has excellent range and a strong arm as SS, but he frequently chooses to make impossible, silly throws to 1B that fly straight into the dugout.

btw, the cardinals almost doubled the second place team in OAA (outs above average), and the cardinals broadcasting team is so incredibly averse to advanced stats that they didn't even mention it all year. they didn't know their own team was by far the best defensive team in baseball!

OOA relates to team fielding?

check it out!

https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/leaderboard/outs_above_average

one thing that's cool about it is that you can take a glance and see which directions they tend to be better at (toward the plate or away from it, left or right)

Outs Above Average (OAA) is the cumulative effect of all individual plays a fielder has been credited or debited with, making it a range-based metric of fielding skill that accounts for the number of plays made and the difficulty of them. For example, a fielder who catches a 25% Out Probability play gets +.75; one who fails to make the play gets -.25.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

i don't even recognize some of you

but this is where the devil magic is born. it comes from failed recognition of best fans in baseball. it comes from the pain that we have to face when that's not recognized

can we play future hall-of-famer bingo / drinking game?

every time an announcer references the hall of fame with:

drink 1
pujols
molina
scherzer

drink 2
arenado

Bye,bye Joe West

lol, it's a Joe West game at home plate, excellent

xp!

Bee are you rooting for the cardinals? i'm assuming you'd rather not play the dodgers, with their rotation

if you face the cardinals, they will have to face the likes of proven veteran Jon Lester

but i could understand wanting to face the rival, just to beat them for good

Of course I'm rooting for the Cards

One of four apparently

there are only 2 others. all of the others saw los angeles dodgers as an option and then chose it, which is just unbelievable

wow, really excellent play from Betts there

Didn't think that would be how the first run would score

couple defensive miscues there, surprising.

man, i didn't realize that dodgers fans hated yadi too! i forget their reason

(for being a whining asshole, probably, lol)

Only one run out of that mess, hope it doesn't cost them

Who is this fumbly guy at SS?

check this guy out

https://i.imgur.com/3Olf5JF.jpg

xp that's sosa

he's a rookie, first off and he only became the starter over the last month of the season or so. dejong was bad this year and got injured in september/october, and right when sosa took over he played very, very well and the team went on a 17-game winning streak. but when dejong came back, there was a question of who the starter was. seems like it's sosa, now!

despite appearances, he's actually very, very good with the glove. overall, an equal to dejong defensively, which is impressive because dejong is one of the best defensive shortstops in the NL at least. they have very different styles, though. Dejong's defensive value comes in the form of his strong and accurate arm, his consistency. Sosa has very good range and a very strong arm as well. that first hit to him that he bobbled wasn't exactly an easy play, either - it was 99 off the bat

Going back to Ozzie and Tom Niedenfeur - the Cards have kinda had the Dodgers number in the playoffs. Got to say, I would rather the Cards continue this as I have an eternal loathing of the Dodgers.

also: sosa is very, very fast. fastest on the team at 29.8 mph sprint speed, good for 13th in MLB.

faster: trea turner, 2nd, 30.6
just slightly slower: tyler o'neill, 14th, 29.7, harrison bader, 20th, 29.5

Would be awfully cool though

Back to normal broadcasting

Awww

Karl Malone I feel for you

that would have been horrible but also cool

thank you Bee OK

honestly, given this season, i am already happy with what has happened. it's crazy that they're even here, and it's the dodgers, and they took them all the way to the 9th inning

This is going to be the mother of all extra inning games to make up for all those stunted extra innings over the season. I can feel it.

honestly i think this season ends with alex reyes on the mound for the cardinals in the 10th, and i say that as a reyes fan

or even reyes in the 9th, who knows

Lol, fuck the Manfred rule

"the great molina", drink 4

Who is this scrub catching?!?!

oohhhh

unnggghhhh

ohhhhh

oh man

ooooooooooooof
OOOOOOOFFF

FUCK!
FUCK!

Aaaaaaand the season ends with Reyes on the mound

unnnnngh

Reyes making a habit of doing this

dodgers are pretty good!

good luck giants

go brewers

Sorry Karl.

I love the cards fwiw

Would love to see the brewers win it all.

matt carpenter never got to hit again

but he sucked extremely badly the last few years so

cardinals didn't deserve to be in the playoffs this year, overall. really though, the team they were over the last month could have won the WS - they're excellent, i'm excited about next year

I sort of don't understand. Like, in hockey, the tea.the wins the president's cup usually does not win the Stanley's. It's about not peaking too soon and staying healthy

Was a reference to "didn't deserve to be. . ."

yeah, it's different for sure. i think in hockey they don't start "really playing" until the playoffs, right?

baseball is tilted toward luck a lot more. it's not a total crapshoot, but the best team against the worst team will win maybe 70% of the time. two decent teams against each other will usually be 60/40%. the variability is high with baseball, that's what keeps it fun

the Cards could have easily won this game but they are just not that good

realize that with all those short stop miscues

lol ok

That variability (or parity) in baseball is why it's good to keep the playoffs small and make the division titles mean something. It's not about just getting a spot in the tournament like the NHL.

That was a really good and tense game. Dodgers-Giants NLDS felt kind of inevitable but the Cards couldn't have been much closer to pulling off the upset.

all the shortstop miscues cost them 0 runs (this game), and over the season they came out ahead!

dodgers came out ahead and were the better team for sure, but they'll be the "better" team through this postseason (including against the giants)

looking at the video, reyes barely even flinched after taylor's swing -- just started walking toward the dugout

only thing i have to say about this game is that it was cute and good that juan soto was there cheering on scherzer and trea turner

ya – seeing Soto there was great.