Thursday, October 28, 2004
St. Louis batted just .190 and had a 6.09 ERA.
ST. LOUIS (AP) -- The St. Louis Cardinals seemingly could do no wrong during the regular season.
But that 105-win team bore no resemblance to the bunch that flopped in the World Series, losing 3-0 to Boston on Wednesday night and getting swept in four games by the Red Sox.
"I wish we would have given them a tougher fight," Reggie Sanders said. "They put the pressure on and we didn't have pressure on them at all, so it was an easy run for them."
The Cardinals had the National League's best offense and the second-best pitching staff. Not in the World Series, where they batted a feeble .190 and had a 6.09 ERA. The lineup was littered with historically bad performances at the plate, most notably by their trio of MVP candidates. And, the Cardinals' rotation, minus injured Chris Carpenter, was exposed as average.
The Cardinals waited 17 years between World Series trips, only to end the season with a dubious distinction: Only one team had more victories before getting swept, the 1954 Indians, who were 111-43 before losing to the New York Giants.
The wait was nearly as long for La Russa. Maybe it was even more gut-wrenching on a personal level, considering that in his last shot at the championship in 1990 his heavily favored Oakland Athletics got swept by the Cincinnati Reds.
No sign of life
The Cardinals scored one run in the last two games at home, where they had been 6-0 in the postseason, and were a woeful 4-for-28 with runners in scoring position in the Series.
The life seemed drained out of the Cardinals after their most forgettable play of the Series, pitcher Jeff Suppan frozen between third and home with one out in the third inning of Game 3. Instead of tying the score at 1 on a run that the Red Sox had been conceding, Suppan ran into a double play.
Starting with that at-bat, the Cardinals reached base only seven times in 54 plate appearances the rest of the Series, getting a homer, a double, three singles and two walks against a Red Sox staff that was considered far from dominant. They advanced only four runners into scoring position in Game 4.
Cleanup hitter Scott Rolen, second in the NL with 124 RBIs, was 0-for-15 with one RBI. No. 5 hitter Jim Edmonds was 1-for-15 with no RBIs. Sanders was 0-for-9 with five strikeouts before getting benched in favor of John Mabry in Game 4.
Albert Pujols and Larry Walker had their moments, but never with any support from the rest of the offense. Walker was 4-for-5 in Game 1 and homered for the Cardinals' lone run in Game 3. Pujols had three of St. Louis' five hits in Game 2 but was silent in the clincher before singling to lead off the ninth.
Pujols, Rolen and Edmonds were horrible in the clutch, going a combined 1-for-12. None of them got a chance for redemption in Game 4.