The 2004 St. Louis Cardinals are the most top-heavy team in major league history. That trait could play a big role in the best team in baseball’s quest to win it all.

Three Cardinals – Jim Edmonds, Scott Rolen, and Albert Pujols – are having historic seasons. Each could be a reasonable MVP selection … in a world where Barry Bonds doesn’t exist, at any rate. But the gap between the big three and the rest of the team is enormous.

Baseball Prospectus uses a measure called WARP to evaluate a player’s total value to his team, which stands for Wins Above Replacement Player. It is an estimate of how many more wins the team gains, thanks to a player’s batting, fielding, and/or pitching, than it would have if the player were replaced by a typical Triple-A-quality player (Joe McEwing comes to mind). A WARP score of 10.0 will typically put a player in the top four or five in his league.

Projected to the end of the season, Edmonds has 12.7 WARP, Rolen has 11.9, and Pujols has 10.8.The Cardinals could be the 10th team in history to have three players score 10 or better.

The difference between the Cardinals and every other team in major league history is the magnitude of the drop-off between the third-best and fourth-best players. Those 1937 Yankees, for instance, had Lou Gehrig as their fourth-best player; the Cardinals’ fourth-best player this year is closer Jason Isringhausen. (It should be mentioned that Larry Walker would be a 10 WARP player if not for injuries, and he’ll be a huge factor for the club if he’s healthy for the postseason.)

No team with a comparable drop-off from the third-best to the fourth-best player has ever made it to the World Series; generally speaking, a sizeable drop-off on your fourth-best player has been a recipe for mediocrity.

A way of measuring team balance is to look at the standard deviation in WARP among the top 10 players on a team. Low scores suggest a very balanced team; high scores, a very unbalanced team. The Cardinals’ standard deviation, 3.65, is the second-highest score in the last 30 years. What makes that number important is that, since the start of divisional play, the better-balanced team has had a distinct advantage in the post-season, winning 58% of the time, a figure that increases to 65% since 1996. Balance is good, and the Cardinals don’t have it.

So will the Cards crash in the playoffs? Probably not. To begin with, they are simply better than other teams, balance or not. They are on pace to win 110 games, which hasn’t been done in the National League since the 1909 Pirates. Since starting the season with a pedestrian 23-22 record, the Cardinals have gone 69-22.

The only team in the last 60 years to do better over such a long stretch of games was the 1998 Yankees, who at one point won 70 of 91; they, of course, went on to win the World Series.

But a long winning streak during the season isn’t much help in the postseason. Even for great teams, winning a short playoff series is little more than a break-even proposition.

Nonetheless, the Cardinals cannot be easily neutralized. The problem with unbalanced teams is that opponents can try to bypass a few key players. This can be done either by walking the best players (as happens to Barry Bonds out in San Francisco) or by attacking them through the platoon advantage.

Since the Cardinals’ big three hitters bat one after another in the lineup, though, the first option is closed. Nor can opponents work a platoon advantage, since each of the big three can all clobber a pitcher from either side. And you just know that Tony La Russa, with a bullpen that includes three left-handed pitchers, will be the one exploiting that strategy in the playoffs. You may not enjoy watching La Russa make trip after trip to the mound, but he does execute the strategic matchups better than anyone else.

With Walker added to the fore, there has never been another team in history that could stack four hitters one after the other who are all as good as these four Cardinals. That is what makes them the team to beat in 2004.

This article was provided by Baseball Prospectus. The Sun will run exclusive content from Baseball Prospectus throughout the 2004 season. For more state-of-the-art baseball content, visit www.baseballprospectus.com.