Padres - Cardinals Playoff Series Preview

"The Padres are so bad," my wife said as we watched them clinch the NL West the other night, "that the Cards will probably eliminate them in two games." Well, technically it's going to take three games to win the best of five division series featuring the 100-win Cardinals and the 82-win Padres, but I think I got her point. Never has a team with so bad a record made baseball's post-season; rarely has there been this big a disparity between two teams' win records facing off in a post-season series.

But let's think again on this: the previous entrants in the worst-record-to-the-post-season have not all fared badly. The '73 Mets, with an 82-79 regular season record, made it to the seventh game of the World Series before succumbing to the A's juggernaut. The '87 Twins, with 85 wins that year, rolled over the 98-win Tigers 4-1 in the LCS and beat the Cards in seven games in the first all-home-team-win seven game World Series. Every now and then David scores a rock on Goliath. Boasting a strange homefield advantage at the pitching-friendly Petco field, an ace in Jake Peavy and with Adam Eaton showing strongly his last few starts, and with the best 7-8-9 inning combo in the NL in Rudy Seanez, Scott Linebrink, and Trevor Hoffman, couldn't the Padres pull an upset?

Sure -- they will probably lose in three games, four tops, not two, as my wife predicts. OK, point given: The Padres have a chance -- in a short five-game series, anything can happen. Here's why "anything" probably won't unless by "anything" we mean a Cardinals' sweep.

Peavy has been battling a strained right shoulder for over a month. He's got a stellar 2.00 ERA over his last six starts of the season, but he skipped his warm-up start at the end of the season. Peavy was excellent this season despite his 13-7 record; 23 of his 30 starts were quality starts of three earned runs or less, and his sub-3.00 ERA was even split between the road (2.98) and home (2.81), so the road start in St. Louis won't be a factor. But he threw more innings this year than any of his previous four years in the bigs, and even so he missed six starts this year. I suppose miracles happen, but he's simply got to put down the big bats of the Cards -- probably twice, both on the road -- for the Padres to win a five-game series, and a tired, sore shoulder is not the recipe for this kind of success.

So what's up for the Friars' rotation after Peavy? You'd think, having clinched a week in advance, more or less, manager Bruce Bochy would've set it by now. But nope. Adam Eaton pitched most of the game Sunday and won't be available until Game 4, and despite a good finish, there's no glossing over a year with a ballooning 4.00+ ERA and a lousy walks and hits to innings pitched ratio of 1.43. Woody Williams, who has had past glory with the Cardinals, turned in an abysmal second half with an ERA hovering around 6.00 until having an excellent final start, and will be ready no earlier than Game 3. It looks for now like Pedro Astacio, who was released by the pitching-starved Texas Rangers in mid-season, will make the Game 2 start. Astacio had an oddly brilliant second half, although his 4-2 record doesn't show his effectiveness; he hit his spots and scattered his hits and as during his best years, kept his walks to a minimum.

The strength of the Padres' ragtag rotation has been, oddly enough, the bullpen propping it up. Bochy has gone to it often and with great effect to relieve this bizarre rotation of the injured and the has-beens of the burden of carrying games too late. Hoffman isn't the dominator of old, but you wouldn't know it to look at his stat line, with nearly a strikeout per inning pitched and 43 saves. Rudy Seanez and Scott Linebrink have been brilliant in set-up roles. Seanez struck out a remarkable 84 in only 60 innings itched, while Linebrink struck out 70 in 73 innings; their ERAs were 2.69 and 1.83 respectively. Akinori Otsuka was a bit off this year, but as a sixth inning man he also had nearly a strikeout an inning. It's an impressive array, and quite possibly the main reason why an upset might be possible. If the Pads can get to the sixth with a couple of runs' lead, they have a chance.

So, can they do it? Can they get those runs? Their 12th-in-the-NL offense (.725 team OPS, 682 runs scored compared to the Cardinals' 804) says "no".

The lineup is as follows. Dave Roberts has been battling a strained quadriceps, and couldn't make a start in the final game of the season. He's penciled in for center for now, with veteran Eric Young waiting in the wings for leadoff duty if he can't play. The rest of the Padres lineup shakes out to be Ryan Klesko in left, Brian Giles in right, Ramon Hernandez as backstop, Mark Sweeney (or possibly Robert Fick) at first, Khalil Greene at short, Mark Loretta at second, and "My" Joe Randa at third. It's hardly a lineup that will inspire much fear in the Cardinals' rotation. It's what we used to call a supporting cast in search of some stars to be the feature players (Giles is no longer the superstar he once was).

Ah, those Cardinals. Bridesmaids last year in the World Series to the Red Sox, they were without doubt the best team overall in the majors that year and this. Nagging injuries and the loss of their key starter, Chris Carpenter, in the post-season did them in, as well as an exhausting seven-game NLCS against the Houston Astros. The Cards clinched early this year (late June or so, as I recall, or so it seemed), and have reset their rotation and done all the tune-ups and live-batting-practice they can handle. They're heading into the post-season rested and relatively injury-free, and that spells trouble for the Padres.

Carpenter was the ace this year, and will likely start game 1. He is a likely Cy Young award winner, with 21 wins, over 240 innings pitched, a stellar 2.83 ERA, and 213 strikeouts. He has excellent mid-90s velocity and a very sharp curve ball. He is stingy with walks, and his only achilles heel seems to be occasional gopher ball problems. Why he hasn't had more press is a mystery. The Cards will send out "Agent" Mark Mulder, their big off-season acquisition, in the two spot. After a slightly shaky start to the season, Mulder turned out to be everything the Cards wanted in a number two guy, with a respectable 3.64 ERA in over 200 innings. Jeff Suppan also won 16 games with a 3.57 ERA. Matt Morris made an early-season comeback from a disappoining 2004, and despite faltering mid-season ended up with 14 wins and a very respectable 1.25 WHIP and 3.94 ERA. Jason Marquis was a bit off this season, but only relatively, and turned in numbers just slightly worse than Morris'; it's unclear which of them might start in a longer series, or if the Cards would just stick to the front three in their rotation.

The bullpen has been excellent, although not quite to the degree of domination the Padres displayed. Jason Isringhausen's troublesome elbow seems to have stayed intact all year, as he had an outstanding 38-save, 2.17 ERA, 58-inning season. Isringhausen hardly ever went more than one inning and never more than four or five outs, though. Backing him up have been Al Reyes and Julian Taverez from the right side, both of whom spelled Isringhausen as closer after he'd worked on back to back days, and Ray King and Randy Flores from the left side. In the classic LaRussa-Duncan pattern, these somewhat mediocre journeymen have been made into an extremely solid staff by careful match-ups and constant use in specialized situations. The bullpen has stayed healthy all year, but a late injury to Reyes in the season finale (a sprain of some sort) is worrisome. Reyes was the real star of the bunch in pressure situations, with a rate of more than 9 strikeouts per 9 innings pitched. But there's enough depth there to survive the loss of one man.

So on to the meat and potatoes: the Cardinal offense. Despite missing Scott Rolen for the post-season once again, the Cards have as solid an offensive core as any team in baseball. It's lead of course by Albert the Great, Pujols of Missouri, who has been the best offensive player in baseball over a five-year period. He's incredibly consistent and simply has no weak spots in the box. Last year he was bothered by plantar fasciatis going into the post-season, but he's swinging from the heels now. He's surrounded by Jim Edmonds and an apparently-healthy Larry Walker, with former Angel David Eckstein supplying real table-setting ability from the leadoff spot for a change (previous years featured such OBP lowlights as Tony Womack in the role.) The rest of the lineup can be a bit spotty, with Mark Grudzielanek at second, Reggie Sanders and So Toguchi splitting time in left, and Yadier Molina doing the usual Cardinals' catcher thing of providing excellent defense and negligible offense (just like Dave Duncan did during his playing career.) Abraham Nunez, who wasn't good enough to be a bench player for the Pirates, has been the fill-in at third in Rolen's absence, and he's been stuck in second in the batting order; he had a suprising .344 OBP this year, but a pretty empty one, with only 18 extra base hits and no steals.

One may ask: how did this lineup, with its eccentricities and weak spots, then score all those 800+ runs? Frankly I don't think you need to look too much further than Pujols and Edmonds, augmented by Eckstein and Walker. It's an extremely accomplished heart of the lineup and one hard to pitch through four times in a game without giving up some damage. LaRussa also knows how to milk the lower parts of his order for a few runs here and there -- the Cards are not above sacrificing, squeezing, stealing, and playing the hit and run, and their pitchers know how to handle their bats.

The only slight chink in the Cards' game this year seems to be defense. They seem to get fits of boot-itis from time to time, and committed a middle-of-the-league 100 errors on the season (although the Padres booted 109 plays, fourth-worst in the league). Teams will take some extra bases on the outfield, where Sanders, Edmonds, and Walker have all had better days. But the Cards and Molina can hold runners on (wth a 50% caught stealing rate, and a league-low number of attempts against), and the double-play combo of Eckstein and Grudzielanek helped the Cards lead the league in that category. Up the middle, there's few teams to match them right now. So it's not what you would call a serious worry. Since the Padres have to rely a bit on small-ball to generate runs, they are in trouble when facing the Cards' defensive strengths.

The Cards just have a very well-balanced team, and the Padres slid into the post-season with a jury-rigged rotation and a rather tepid offense, home or away. I don't see any reason not to predict the Cards will go all the way to the big dance this year. But it's worth pointing out that even the worst teams in the league can win three straight from the best -- even the lowly KC Royals swept the Yankees this year. The Padres are not a joke, and while I'm truly expecting a three-game sweep by the Cards, I'm nevertheless alert to the real possibility of an upset.

Completely Irrelevant Trivia: the matchup features two cities names after Saints, and two levels of Catholic clerics (Padres and Cardinals)...read here and here to compare the lives of the two namesake saints of the two cities. There will be a quiz.