Ignore the Win Total; Cards Are No Fluke

If ever you could feel bad for a team that just won the World Series, that time is now.

There wasn't much great about the St. Louis Cardinals this year, and there wasn't much about the way they won one of the least dramatic World Series in memory that would cause anyone to rethink that opinion. Immediately being stamped as the worst team to win the series in baseball history, though, has to hurt, especially since it isn't even remotely true.

Yes, as everyone knows, this year's edition of the Redbirds won exactly 83 games, the least impressive total for a championship team in the sport's history. This is the worst kind of factoid, though, one that distorts, rather than clarifies. The number doesn't really represent the quality of the team, it ignores the broader context of the Cardinals' victory.

As to the first point, it's true that you are exactly what your record says you are, but you can't really draw a line between their regular-season record and their supposed illegitimacy as a champion. The 2000 Yankees won all of 87 games, which wouldn't have been good even for second place in either the American League Central or the American League West; does anyone think they weren't real champions? Of course not. That team was just one in a line of excellent teams, and some quirks of the way it was constructed made it a more effective team in October than it had been in the regular season. There was some or a lot of luck involved, too, but then there is for every team that wins a World Series.

Like those Yankees, the Cardinals were a better fit for the playoffs than they were for the regular season, largely because two starting pitchers they didn't need in October soaked up a ton of innings in the regular season. Mark Mulder and Jason Marquis were absolutely horrible this year; replace those two with the sort of average pitchers St. Louis is usually able to dig up, and they'd have won their customary 95 or so games. Yes, the Cards were lucky to make the playoffs in the first place, but so were the Yankees in 2000 and plenty of other champions. What matters is how you do once you're there, not how you got there.

The Cardinals team we saw over the last few weeks is the same one we've seen pretty much every year this decade, when they've been on one of the less-remarked upon runs of greatness I can think of. With the exception of this year and 2003, the Cardinals have won between 93 and 105 games every year this decade. In every year save 2003, they've either won the National League pennant or been beaten by the team that did. Short of the Yankees and Braves, no team has had a more successful run in the wild card era.

Because of that, and because this team, built around Albert Pujols, Scott Rolen, Jim Edmonds, Chris Carpenter, and a set of mix-and-match utility guys, chumps, washouts, rookies, scrubs, and scrappy hustle guys, is exactly the same team that's been winning 95 games a year this decade, it's impossible to see how this team can even enter into the conversation about which team is the most illegitimate champion. This wasn't a one-off fluke, but the crowning and validating achievement of a truly great team that's been truly great since before George W. Bush was in office and will probably continue to be great after he's left office. During nearly all of this time they have had a transcendently great player in Pujols, likely future Hall of Famers in Rolen and Edmonds, several short-term aces like Carpenter and Matt Morris, and a legendary manager in Tony LaRussa, like his style or not (I don't). That isn't the makeup of a team that's going to baffle baseball historians in future decades while they're going through World Series winners trying to pick out the weak ones.

Winning the World Series is, in and of itself, not a marker of greatness. The 2003 Marlins deserve their rings, but that team was a one-year fluke. The same is true, though less so, of the 2001 Diamondbacks, probably last year's White Sox, and many, many other teams in baseball history. Of itself, a Series trophy means nothing more than that your team made it into the playoffs one way or another and managed to win three short series, in which luck and timing play a role comparable to inherent talent and skill. When a team has proved itself great over a period of years, though, that same trophy can be a marker of real excellence, the culmination of years of success. It was true of the 1995 Braves and 2004 Red Sox, and of this year's Cardinals. Congratulations to the champions on a well-earned victory.