St. Louis Cardinals carry confidence into NL Wild Card game against Dodgers
A week after formally securing their spot in the postseason, the playoffs arrived in earnest on Tuesday as the St. Louis Cardinals and Los Angeles Dodgers convened for a workout day at Dodger Stadium.
Wednesday will bring postseason excitement and moments which will define a season, if not possibly a career. Tuesday allowed the players and teams to briefly settle in after the expected months of uncertainty.
“It’s nice to have a day off, come here, get a workout in and get on the field,” said Cardinals third baseman Nolan Arenado, who grew up in nearby Lake Forest. “I know when I land in California, I can tell by the air that I’m home.”
“It was nice to be able to give some guys a little time off their feet and give guys a little rest in the bullpen and set things up,” Cardinals manager Mike Shildt said. “But at every point, everybody continued to get after it and be ready for any and all situations, which we’ll be ready for tomorrow as well.”
Adam Wainwright will start his fourth career postseason game at Dodger Stadium, and his first here since 2014. St. Louis lost two of those three prior starts; ironically, his worst start of the three represented the one game the team managed to turn into a victory.
“The funny thing about my postseason career is a lot of the good games I’ve pitched, we didn’t win and my two biggest complete jokes we won both of them,” Wainwright said. “That doesn’t mean I’m going to go out tomorrow and do that on purpose.
“But it is interesting how baseball works sometimes.”
Nor, indeed, is Wainwright likely to go out and, like he said in response to a question he deemed to be too similar to a request for a scouting report, “throw fastballs right down the middle.”
What’s more likely is that he continues to flash the pitch mix which has his manager stumping for him as a candidate for the Cy Young Award and which has him, as he acknowledged Tuesday, feeling a great deal younger than his 40 years of age by the calendar.
“Every other job place in America, I’m still a pretty young fella,” Wainwright cracked. “It’s just in this job I chose I’m an old guy. That’s the way I look at it.”
Fellas much younger than Wainwright arrived at Chavez Ravine with taxi squads expanded to as many as nine players during the playoffs. Infielders Brendan Donovan, Kramer Robertson and Juan Yepez joined the team, as did outfielder Nick Plummer. Catcher Ali Sánchez had been with the club on its season-ending homestand.
They’re joined by injured veteran pitchers Wade LeBlanc and Justin Miller.
A team official said Tuesday that the team plans to carry 14 position players and 12 pitchers on its roster for the Wild Card game. Though all four additions would be eligible to play if first added to the 40-man roster, Yepez was the only player of the group to take a regular turn in batting practice and in fielding drills during Tuesday’s workout.
Behind Wainwright, the Cardinals are set to have Dakota Hudson and Miles Mikolas available for potential long relief assignments.
Shildt said Sunday that the team will carry Jack Flaherty on its roster as well, though without having extended his in-game pitch counts in recent weeks, he’s unlikely to be asked to carry more than a single inning, starting with the bases empty.
The starting lineup is also likely to be that seen in Sunday’s regular season finale, with a now-healthy Edmundo Sosa reclaiming his spot at shortstop. Sosa powered several home runs to the Dodger Stadium bleachers on Tuesday, looking fully recovered from the hit by pitch to his right hand suffered during the club’s most recent trip to Chicago.
With the Wild Card game set as their destination for a full week, all that remained for the Cardinals was to determine to which California city they would travel. San Francisco’s victory over San Diego on Sunday locked up the NL West for the Giants and pushed the 106-win Dodgers to a win-or-go-home game.
The Cardinals, with a significant history of playoff success in Los Angeles, are the team that wasn’t supposed to be here. Nearly 20% of their win total on the season came in a single winning streak, and a win on Wednesday would only continue a story that took an improbable route.
Arenado explained it as “that mentality of show up every day and get after it and whatever happens, happens.”
“That has carried us toward the end, where maybe some other teams got tired at the end and lost a little focus because they clinched early or whatever, or they felt the pressure,” he said. “And we just stayed even-keel and we continued to fight and that’s why we went on that streak.”
Or, as Wainwright put it: “Winning attitudes for winning teams. When something happens, you go, ‘OK, well, we have got to punch back. We can come back from that. We will find a way to come back from that.’ And it’s one thing to say, and it’s another thing to believe it, but our team started believing it, and then you saw what happened.”
A lot might happen next.
This story was originally published October 6, 2021 at 8:00 AM.
