Cardinals fans will be confronted with a few familiar faces when World Series begins
St. Louis Cardinals fans who turn in to the first game of the World Series on Friday night will be greeted with a familiar sight right at first pitch.
The 12th edition of a championship matchup between the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees will open with a former Cardinal starting the first game for the home Dodgers, and the connections run deeper from there.
Jack Flaherty was announced earlier this week as the game one starter for Los Angeles, instantly creating an unforgettable moment and career highlight for the LA native. After being acquired at the trade deadline from the Detroit Tigers, Flaherty posted a 3.58 ERA across 10 regular season starts, though his walks ticked up and his strikeouts down after what was arguably a career-reviving performance this season for the Tigers.
He’s allowed 12 earned runs and walked seven across three playoff starts for the Dodgers covering 15 ⅓ innings, though much of that damage came in a game five NLCS thumping by the Mets in which Flaherty was eventually tasked with eating up as many outs as possible to save the bullpen. In the first game of that series, he delivered seven shutout innings, and a repeat of that performance or anything close to it should be sufficient to get the Dodgers out to an early series lead.
Flaherty will be supported in part by Tommy Edman, who spent the first half of this season rehabbing a wrist injury with the Cardinals before being shipped to the Dodgers at the deadline in the three-team deal which saw Erick Fedde and Tommy Pham arrive in St. Louis. Edman was named MVP of the NLCS after driving in 11 runs and delivering a 1.022 OPS in the six games of that series.
Seemingly fully healthy, Edman has slotted into the Dodgers lineup in exactly the same fashion he did in St. Louis, bouncing between positions based on team need and shoring up the defense no matter where he’s placed.
Shortstop Miguel Rojas missed the NLCS with an adductor injury which will eventually require surgery, and it’s unclear whether he’ll be available for the Fall Classic. If he’s not, Edman will continue to carry the daily mail at shortstop.
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts has leaned fully into Edman’s significant batting splits this postseason, opting to use him as the Dodgers’ cleanup hitter against lefty starters. In this series, that will mean primetime matchups with Yankees starter Carlos Rodón. Previously injured lefty Nestor Cortes is also in the conversation for a roster spot for New York, and should he get a start, Edman will be deployed similarly.
Edman’s counterpart as ALCS MVP was Giancarlo Stanton, who was famously nearly a Cardinal himself.
St. Louis and Miami agreed to a trade involving Stanton following the 2017 season, but he invoked his no trade clause and instead muscled his way to the Yankees, forcing the Cardinals to take the exceedingly rare step of issuing a press release to announce they would indeed not be a acquiring a player.
The Yankees feature one of the more unexpected resurgences of a former Cardinal in the postseason in recent history, as Luke Weaver has emerged as their primary option to close down games in the back end of the bullpen.
Traded to the Arizona Diamondbacks in late 2018 in the deal which brought Paul Goldschmidt to St. Louis, Weaver has only four career regular season saves – all coming this year for New York as the season wound down.
In the playoffs, however, Weaver has doubled that total, and he was also the winning pitcher in the Yankees’ pennant-clinching extra innings victory in game five of the ALCS. He did allow three runs across four appearances in that series, blowing a save in game three, but Aaron Boone’s deployment of him later in the series is a strong indication that Weaver will still be counted on for the most important outs at the end of games.
Flaherty (34th overall) and Weaver (27th) were taken in the same round of the same draft by the Cardinals, both being selected in the first round in 2014. It’s entirely possible that they could respectively throw the first and last pitches of the first game of the World Series on Friday night, bringing an air of familiarity to Cardinals fans and not at all hearkening back to the pain and frustration which accompanies former players starring in the postseason.
The matchup between these two historic franchises is the most common in World Series history, though it’s the first since 1981 and seven of those meetings occurred when the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn. The Yankees have won eight of the first 11 series between the two, though the Dodgers took down the most recent after losing consecutive matchups in 1977 and 1978.
Whatever feathers might be ruffled locally by the national attention heaped on two of the game’s marquee franchises, it’s an undeniably compelling series. Shohei Ohtani and Juan Soto, two of the game’s biggest stars, moved to new teams last winter, and those two teams are now on the game’s biggest stage. Aaron Judge is making his first World Series appearance for the Yankees, and the Dodgers are seeking their first championship in a full season since 1988.
Each World Series is, by definition, historic, but this one is likely to be remembered fondly and written about in granular fashion for many years to come.
Cardinals fans have a real opportunity to dive deep into its fabric with thanks to familiar faces, and with dread about a long winter with no baseball just around the corner.
