Beyond Belief

Every year as a football fan, it's easy to get out the schedule and go down the list of the games that your team should win. No one should really do this, as it just leads to disappointment when they screw up and lose to the Raiders, like my Steelers did last year. But many of us fans do this with football because it's so easy. There are only 16 games and just 12-13 in college. No one wastes their time doing this with baseball, because there's 162 games in a season. The starting pitcher changes every game, so the results are too hard to determine for each game in general by just looking at the schedule. However, as Cardinals fans know all too well, when the games actually are played, it's quite easy to see who should win them. And unfortunately, the Cards have dropped quite a few games this year that they should have won. But lately, the problem is that they shouldn't win them.

Tony La Russa insists on putting together ridiculous lineups that have Nick Stavinoha batting fifth after he's spent most of this season in the minors. Tyler Greene, who also has spent most of the year in Triple-A, was batting lead off last night. It's things like this that leave me to insist, that we need to part ways with La Russa. It's been a good run, as he's made the playoffs in half of his seasons here, but he can't keep pulling crap like this and expect John Mozeliak to keep him around. If La Russa is sending a message to the front office, saying,"Hey, this is what you gave me, this is what you get," then he's an idiot. He's the one that got fed up with Ryan Ludwick and shipped him off for a rental pitcher who, while Jake Westbrook hasn't pitched poorly, I'd hardly say that he's made a difference, being that the team is 2-4 in games that he's started. Ludwick would have influenced far more than six games and probably could've kept this offense out of some of it's huge lulls. The Cards have just 23 runs in their last 10 games. Some easy math will tell you that is an average of 2.3 runs per game. This means that in order to win, nearly flawless pitching is required. And guys that have been great all year like Chris Carpenter, Adam Wainwright, and Jaime Garcia, have finally hit a couple of bumps. That's ok, except that when they weren't hitting their bumps, the team still wasn't scoring very much and thus didn't capitalize on the great pitching that they got while they had it.

This team was officially done when they went 2-8 on a 10-game road trip against the Astros, Pirates, and Nationals, perhaps three of the most inept teams in the National League. Going 6-4 against those clubs wouldn't have been great, but it left overtaking the Reds as a doable task. Two and eight? That's telling the fans that you've packed it in, so they might as well do the same until spring training. The Cards got some nice crowds for their three-game set against the Reds, but that was primarily based on the previous series being so solid and changing the division race for the better. I would expect to see some sparse crowds over the last few homestands. People can call us fair weather fans for that, but it's not about winning, it's about trying. And when the team looks like they're packing it in, why should we bother? At least the Pirates' players try. They might be ill-equipped, hence 18 consecutive losing seasons, but the effort is usually there. With the Cardinals, most days, it's hard to watch them because it'll just frustrate the crap out of you. Thank God football season is starting and we can all pretend that baseball season is already over. I'm jumping on the Rays (or anti-Yankees) bandwagon for the rest of the year, but I'm quite ready for both football and hockey to arrive.

The NFL starts tonight with a rematch of the NFC Championship game and my teams, the Steelers and Rams both get it going on Sunday. As I mentioned earlier, you never should go over a schedule and pick out wins and losses for a team, but I admit it, I did it with the Rams. I could see them winning as many as eight games and with this division as weak as it is, the playoffs are possible with a couple of fluke wins added in. That said, I'm picking the Rams to actually win five games, which would still be a huge step in the right direction after going 1-15 last year. As for the Steelers, who are without Ben "She was asking for it" Roethlisberger for four weeks, I'm hoping they split the first four games and go 9-3 or so once they get him back for an overall record of 11-5. That's typically enough to make the playoffs, so they should be ok. I think the TO/Ocho-Cinco combination could blow up in the Bengals' face and half of the Ravens' defense is practically on walkers, so the Steelers should be able to take the division, provided they don't do something stupid like lose to the Browns again.

My picks to make the Super Bowl are the Saints and Jets with the Saints repeating. Of course, we could see the Colts in there again. Every time I think they're on the decline, they go out, win 12 games, and end up in at least the second round of the playoffs. So with that, Go Steelers, Go Rams, and just go away baseball Cardinals. I'll write about hockey soon again, I promise.