Next Up: Indians vs. Cardinals

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday this week will see Cleveland matched up against St. Louis, the Tribe’s first National League opponent of the season.

The St. Louis Cardinals. Now, there’s a Major League Baseball franchise! One of the all-time winning-est teams and also one of the best in recent years; winners of eleven World Series championships¹ . The longest period without a world championship was between 1982 and 2006. Imagine having to wait only twenty-four years between World Series championships (Sorry, I told myself I wasn’t going to stoop to jealously in this column.). The Cardinals also have nineteen National League pennants and twelve Division titles. Oh, and they do a fantastic job of drafting and developing their own players.

St. Louis is out there on the prairie, 950 miles from New York City, the number one baseball market in the land. Boston, Philly and the Mets are two, three and four. St. Louis is 1,800 miles from the LA markets where the Angels (fifth) and Dodgers (seventh) reside. The Cardinals are 300 miles from Chicago’s two top ten market teams, the Cubs and White Sox. So, St. Louis, in the 19th largest market in baseball, has maintained a remarkable and consistent record of success and have shown that winning baseball games at the major league level is not directly proportionate to market size.

The Cardinals? Dating back to the 1880s, the St. Louis team was originally a barnstorming club, not tied to any particular league. Back then they were called the Brown Stockings, then the Browns and, later, the Perfectos. They joined the National League in 1892 and, in 1899, the team changed its stocking and trim color to red. As the story goes, during the 1899 season a sports writer overheard a female fan remark about the new colors, “Oh, what a lovely shade of cardinal.” Evidently, the idea took flight, and St. Louis became the Cardinals beginning with the 1900 season.

The state bird of Missouri, by the way, is not the cardinal. It’s the Eastern Blue Bird. If you’re recalling with indignation that the cardinal is the state bird of Ohio, I’m with you there. And if you’re wondering if the “Indians” might someday work out some kind of trade in order to become the alliterative “Cleveland Cardinals” I’m with you on that too. (Sorry, there I go again.)

But, back to the present and back to reality. The St. Louis Cardinals open their three-game series in Cleveland with the best record in baseball at 22-9, and I’ve lost track of the number of times Tom Hamilton has followed a reference to the Cardinals with the phrase “ … arguably the best team in the Majors.”

The Cardinals currently rank at or near the top of almost every statistical category. The St. Louis pitching staff leads the NL with a 2.75 ERA. Their starting pitchers are 13-6 with a 3.38 ERA (3rd best in the NL),and, in the NL, no one is close to the Cardinal bullpen, which is 9-3 with an ERA of 1.61. (That makes the KC bullpen, at 8-2, and a 1.56 ERA pretty astounding given that they haven’t been pitching to pitchers.) Batters are hitting only .239 against Cardinal pitching, which is third best in the NL.

Offensively, the Cardinals don’t hit many home runs, but otherwise they’ve been potent. Their team batting average of .273, and their on-base-percentage of .338 are both second best in the NL. They’re fourth in the NL with 142 runs scored, tied for second with 294 hits and their slugging percentage (.409) and OPS (.747) both rank third in the NL.

The Cardinal starting lineup will likely feature four batters hitting well over .300, and one² close to it, at .292.

Defensively, they’re closer to the middle of the pack, ranking 23rd in the majors (compared to the Indians at 17) in fielding percentage. But in DER (defensive efficiency ratio) the Cardinals are ranked 12th in the majors while the Tribe is dead last.

Again, for the Tuesday and Wednesday games this series, there will be an early 6:10 starting time. Thursday’s game starts at 12:10. And, again this series, the Indians will face three right-handed starters: Tuesday evening it will be Carlos Carrasco (4-2, 4.71) vs. Lance Lynn (1-3, 3.82); Wednesday, Corey Kluber (0-5, 5.04) vs. John Lackey (2-1, 3.20); and, on Thursday at lunch time, Trevor Bauer (2-1, 4.19) vs. Michael Wacha (5-0, 2.09).

On paper, then, this looks like another tough series for the Indians. However, if you’re after some better news, consider this: One of the great misconceptions perpetrated by Conventional Wisdom on baseball fans, has been the notion of the National League’s superiority over the American League. For decades, the AL was the presumed inferior younger step-sibling to the NL, even though there was no way to prove the point without regular-season interleague play. Finally, however, in 1997, interleague became a fact of life and, in that first year, the National League bested the American League 117 victories to 97. Overall, however, in the eighteen years of interleague play the little brothers of the Major Leagues have won the interleague season series — get this — fourteen out of eighteen years, including the last eleven!

Of the 4,521 interleague games played, the AL has won 2,375, and the NL has won 2,146.

We might add here, that in their twenty regular-season games thus far with the St. Louis Cardinals, the Cleveland Indians are 14-6.

The one truly absurd fact that remains at the center of this silly family feud between the NL and the AL, however, concerns the designated hitter. The American League adopted the DH — forty-two-years-ago — in 1973. Really now, how can anyone this far into the twenty-first century still be trying to justify the continued existence of two sets of rules for the game of baseball? Does any single issue say more about Major League Baseball’s inability to cooperate with each other and get things done? One way or the other?

If they ever do get it right, some sportswriter will undoubtedly overhear a female fan remarking, “Oh, what a lovely shade of maturity.”

1. second only to the Yankees [↩]
2. old friend, Jhonny Peralta [↩]