As a Halladay fan, I wanted him to face the DBacks because I felt he would easily dominate them. The Cards have some hitters that should present a challenge (including the immortal Pujols), though, especially the way they're hitting. Should be a very interesting series if TLR doesn't find some way to **** it up.

Had to be the best night of baseball ever. My wife is still pissed at me for waking up the kids yelling when philly scored.

Yeah, I woke the dog, kids, etc when freeman bounced into the dp. Great night of baseball, but I was glad the Cards had the 8-0 snoozer. My old heart can only take so much.

Congrats to all of you Cardinals fans! That was quite a run you guys made this past month. Looking forward to meeting you guys in the NLCS! :)

<===== Brewers Fan

speechless.

Sadly that's a forgone conclusion, but it was a great run nonetheless.

Thanks. I remember the last time we met in the post season..... :)

But besides that, it would mean an NLCS between two small market midwestern teams that would make all the scumbags at Fox shit themselves. That alone would make it wonderful.

Congrats Cards - was indeed quite a run to get in. :clap:

Good luck!



STROS in 2025!

I'm still puzzled as hell by what just happened.

I was pretty much dead ass wrong about this team - but why? If you take my individual positions, I was only extremely wrong once.

The infield defense truly is miserable and the OF defense isn't a hell of a lot better.
The bullpen is absolutely spotty and prone to blowups. Ryan Franklin imploded.
The offense is incredibly streaky and can go silent at any given time.
The starting pitching was decent, but not spectacular to the point that it should overcome a bad defense.
The 'chemistry' nonsense was just that - nonsense. This team's 'chemistry' was pretty damn toxic until they started winning in Sept. For the record - that's always been the case; winning creates chemistry, not vice versa.
Ryan Theriot still sucks.
LaRussa still costs this team a bunch of games through hairbrained managing.

All those things that should have made this an incredibly mediocre ballclub happened. I was absolutely wrong about Berkman, though. He clearly had more gas in the tank than I thought and I'm really amazed that he made it through a season in RF healthy.

I guess it's just a matter of the team being better than the sum of its parts. This team is nothing like the '06 team; that squad was loaded and just got healthy at the right time. This team is really unlike any team I've seen in baseball...ever.

I don't get it, I really don't. I have no earthly idea how they made the playoffs, let alone won 90 games. They defy absolutely every bit of conventional baseball logic ever assembled.

But I'll tip my cap to the folks that didn't give up on them. Well, except for Marcellus - he's still just a mindless homer that happened to fall backwards into a win. But congrats to the rest of the die-hards because you've earned your gloating here.

This.

I watched maybe three games after making the trip to Chicago in August - and they were playing well, so I quit watching until this past series with Houston.

A group of us were at Cicero's on The Loop last night watching and had a ****ing blast.

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/nMCaHxZuf94" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

First off, I gave up on them a month ago, wrote them off as gutless. It's posted in this thread. I was wrong. I am not a mindless homer.

I am not gloating, I am just enjoying the PO's. If you have an issue on being called out for wanting to bet everyone they will lose 90 games, that's a you issue. Don't post shit like that if you don't want it to come back to haunt you.

Go Cards.

PHILS SWEEP!

Hey twat, when do the Dodgers play next? Oh yeah, that's right. 2012.

I didn't say they would lose 90 games.

I did, however, say it was more likely that they'd lose 90 than they'd win 90 and that the former wouldn't surprise me.

I'm just completely flummoxed by it.

The team really exploded at the beginning of September, right around the time we picked up Furcal and gave Motte the closer job. Was it really that simple?

Like I said - there's just not a hell of a lot about this season that makes sense.

wow, you guys are gonna play 3 more games than the dodgers. WOOPEDOO!

speaking of the dodgers, what happened in that last series between the cards and them?

You realize you sound like a Royals fan right now, right?

lol, i only came in here to rattle fraz's chain but appears cardinal fans have very thin vagina skin.

You should know all about vaginas - you see one every time you look in a mirror.

The Dodgers are a lot like the Royals - same colors, haven't won shit since the 80s. Of course, the Dodgers are a major market team with no excuses, except for the fact that THEY ****ING SUCK.

I wonder if the bankruptcy court will rent out the stadium for children's parties?

Suck shit, loser.

damn man what happened to you fraz? you used to talk some good shit but now...

i feel like sam l. jackson in the vw bus sitting next to robert de niro

Run along, Nancy. The men are talking about playoff baseball.

I'm still kind of in shock that TLR didn't manage to overmanage them out of the playoffs as hard as he tried. Kinda funny that we had the record for historic collapses broken twice on the same night.

Don't you have a Kemp fathead that is begging to be shoved up your rectum???

Or a Cubs fan.

I never expected playoffs because of losing our ace at the beginning of the year. Some players really picked up for those who were lost. We found out a lot about some young players who seemed to be on the verge of the organization giving up on them. I still think Tyler Greene is our best option at short if he can keep his head screwed on. Everything they get from now on is bonus time. There is also still the 800 lb gorilla. Great night for baseball.

No gloating. Your not a bandwagon fan. You are most welcome to join us homers for some October fun.

lost one of the top 3 pitchers in baseball for the year before the season started. Lost Freese, Craig, Holliday for large parts of the season. Bullpen implosions all year. Despite that we won 90 games. You have to give the overmanaging TLR some credit. The results speak for themselves.

Guys, I know its a longshot but I think if we can keep it close until we reach Phillys bullpen we may have a shot.

Or we will get embrassed.:)

I just can't agree with this. LaRussa was horrible this season. Horrible. The team definitely caught fire late, but we were also incredibly lucky. We needed a historic collapse and a red hot month to win the WC.

The bullpen was horribly mismanaged all year. Broke dick nothings like Franklin and Batista cost us a ton of games. Theriot played at a replacement level for 100 games before losing his job, while the guy we traded away because of TLR's intractability was a 2.5 WAR player.

If Atlanta had gone 2-3 in their last five games, are you really that up on Tony's job this year? In a game we absolutely had to have, he pulled his second best hitter from a tie game, and sure enough, whose spot leads off the 10th?

Provided that our SP can go long enough to where we don't have to get into our bullpen, which is still an atrocity.

We are in agreement with TLR's over management, sticking with Franklin too long, Theriot etc....

But, you don't win 90 games because of luck.

I think Salas, Sanchez, Motte and McClellan are not a disaster waiting to happen.

Well McClellan isn't even on the roster, and you're basing your evaluation of Sanchez based on (almost) two innings.

I didn't list my reasons. How do you know what I'm basing my opinion on?
http://www.forumspile.com/Misc-Missed_it.jpg

Well you obviously aren't basing it on him getting torched before he went on the DL.

Why do you think McClellan will do so well? Oh wait...

You win them because of Albert Pujols, Yadi, Berkman (a good signing by Mo...wow), and Holliday.

Rhodes is on the playoff roster over Eduardo. I can understand why, but I'd rather have Eduardo over Rhodes any day of the week.

Its ok, maybe the owner can float himself another loan.

Cards have nothing to lose. EVERYONE expects the Phillies to sweep them. No pressure on the Cards...it's all on the Phillies.

Yeah, gotta like playing with house money. With leaving McClellan off you just have to figure he's just worn the **** out. He hasn't pitched 100+ innings since A ball and pitched basically the same number of innings this year as he did the last two years combined.

Berkman takes a big steaming shit on Halladay ROFL

Lance crushed that one! Hopefully the September Loshe shows up tonight.

Come on Loshe, lets go!

It's Lohse, goddamit.

BUT LANCE MOTHER ****ING BERKMAN.

Nice inning, Lohse.

Nice first...now keep the pressure on.

This Tinie Tempah TBS postseason promotional song is terror on my ears!!! Please stop playing it.

Lohse has a no-hitter through 3 1/3 innings.

Nice job

Freese ROFL

**** that error cost us.

Limited damage. 3-1 lets go Cards.

14 more outs until victory...

13 more outs until victory...

12 outs until victory...

Halladay just threw a filthy changeup to fan Allen Craig.

In before someone wants to kill Tony for him not pulling Lohse out earlier.

How he didn't pull him after the Howard home run is beyond me.

This.

A 3 run deficit right now is going to be a bitch. Halladay is dealing.

I was thinking he should have been pulled after the Utley K or before the 6th.

You wanted him pulled before he allowed an earned run?

Err, not the Utley K.

Pence hit.

No way he should have been out there after the Howard HR.

I don't have a problem with him facing Howard, the pen is ass anyway and he barely had 60 pitches going into the inning. He just threw one too many changeups in succession and paid for it.

Phillies bust it open.

Go Carp!

Lol Boggs

OMG!!!!! Rhodes????

That was a pretty impressive implosion.

Part of me wonders if the game would have turned out differently had Lohse not thrown that meatball to Howard.

I feel like we let a golden opportunity slip away. I actually felt pretty confident that we were going to win the game until FreE5e dropped that damned pop up. Even though Lohse got out mostly unscathed of that inning, he pretty much disintegrated from there.

He wasn't helped by the fact that every ball the Phillies hit from the 4th inning on had more eyes than a swarm of fruit flies, but still. I also wonder what the hell Yadi was thinking calling for a changeup on a 3-2 count with a pitcher who couldn't locate. If you throw a fastball belt high, at least you have the chance that a hitter won't get around on it, but a change that misses location is begging to be hit 450+.

We also did ourselves no favor with our hitting philosophy. Yes, I know we led the NL in most statistical categories, but the offense is still far too prone to long dry spots, and it really struggles against pitchers who can throw strikes on the black, because they are first pitch swinging on pitches they can't center. We were lucky as hell to put up that 3 spot, but fast hacking against Halladay is a sure-fire way to give him an easy CG.

It's like Clubber Lang vs. Balboa at the beginning of Rocky III. We're so predictable and stupid, we're tailor made for Halladay. We come straight ahead at them.

Bad philosophy, bad execution, blah.

LaRussa did nothing wrong this game, there's no need to crucify him. Yeah, he could have yanked Lohse after the Howard bomb, but at soon as that ball hit the facade the game was over.

I don't think any one of us could realistically beat Hallady two games in a row. Yeah we jumped on him before he got on a roll. But thats about the best we can do against him.

Loshe did about the best that he is capable of. That consecutve change up call is just as much fault of Molinas as it was Loshe's.

Our goal in this series was to keep it close, get the starters out of the game as early as possible and get to their bullpen. This game proved that was a correct strategy.

Hopefully Carp can go 7 innings tommorrow and give us a chance. Garcia and Jackson pitch the games of their lives and put the series deciding game ball in a fully rested Carp's hands.

The change is on Molina, but Lohse did agree to throw it and threw it terribly, so there has to be a sharing of blame.

Regardless, it was a moronic idea.

You can't get the starters out of the game early with Charlie Manuel unless you score runs AND run up pitch counts. One or the other won't do it, because he trusts his horses more than he does his pen.

If anything, this game proved that we need to work the pitch counts rather than swinging at the first pitch, which is almost always going to be tailing on or off the black.

We also weren't helped by the fact that the umpire gave Halladay a strike zone the size of a corn field.

I've watched probably most of Halladay's starts over the last decade and I didn't think he got significant help from the umpires tonight (at least compared to his usual generous treatment). There were a couple pitches that should have been called balls (and also a couple that could have been called strikes), but PitchFX doesn't suggest an inordinate strike zone:

http://www.brooksbaseball.net/pfxVB/...=1&s_type=.gif

OK

Yes Cards R good because Atlanta folded? That make them good.........

WTF, Where are the folks on the Chiefs thread that are realistic here?

Oh just a fact there and hope here.

N/M.

This thread here is like suck for Luck...

U guys almost had that one....

Regardless of whether or not Atlanta choked away the playoffs, the Cardinals still won 90 games, which normally makes the playoffs anyway.

But a favorite? OK, Guess football after 2 games is equal to baseball after 160?

Just funny to see the difference from the same fans.

Pujols and Berkman are elite hitters, yes. Holliday, too, if he had played. That's why I referred to the Cardinals as more of a challenge than, say, the DBacks.

Let's tie this series tonight.

Go Carp

Lets do this shit!

What channel is the game on Direct TV?

247 TBS