World Series "Signature Moment"

We ruined Billy Wagner's career in the NLCS with our performance in games 2 and 6. Touching him up for 5 runs in an inning and a third.

I also think we may have jacked with Todd Jones' confidence in that near comeback in the pinetar game.

This all kinda reminds me of another closer (Lidge) who had his career ruined by El Hombre last year in the playoffs.

Todd Jones, probably not so much because he didn't have much of an opportunity to pitch.  But Wagner's career may be over after the Cardinals took him to school.

I'm going to take a completely argumentative position and say that Pujols' sweet swing can't be the "signature moment" of the series, because there just wasn't one that fit the character of this team's win. I agree with you that it was a definitive turning point of the series, that that hit and that win tilted the momentum of the series strongly to our side... but to be a "signature moment" it has to be told and retold by all who watched the game, not just Cardinals fans or Pujols fans.

The signature moments of those series past that Gunn mentions all relate to the overarching themes of the series:

• Gonzo's hit to beat the Yankees, a weak little flare that just couldn't be caught, relates to the fable of David beating Goliath with nothing more than a pebble in a sling.
• Gibson's pinch-hit home run puts a happy ending on the "Casey at the bat" poem, plus gives every over-the-hill beer league player an immortal vision of himself, reliving past glories or creating new ones.
• I don't remember Joe Carter well, but I do remember Kirby Puckett skying up the wall to rob the Braves' of a run-scoring double in 1991, and Jack Morris outlasting John Smoltz in game 7, signifying that at this level, baseball was not played by men but by immortals, by superheroes.
• The 2004 Red Sox will always have Curt Schilling and his red sock, and then a blur of shaggy hair and stupid grins, the happy idiots who pretended blissful ignorance of the curse they were breaking, like a baseball reenactment of Animal House.

I take the phrase "signature moment" to relate strongly to this sense of lasting story attached to the scene, and the story revolves around whatever baggage we give to the characters. The Detroit Tigers carried tons of baggage to the series, but the Cardinals left all theirs behind at the end of the regular season.

While the Tigers were supposed to finish off a three-year "worst to first"/ "rags to riches" storyline that they had been steadily acting out, month by month as they jumped out to a huge division lead and refused to come back down to the beckoning earth. Most people won't remember that they entered the playoffs as a wildcard, because the image of that team as perennial underdogs wresting the division away for five and a half months is too powerful. The Tigers' "signature moment" in the making would have been a dramatic home run by Brandon Inge, one of the only players to take that whole three-year journey, or something inspiring from Pudge Rodriguez, their first major free agent signing, their knight on a white horse, or even an inspired managerial move from Jimmy Leyland, the wise man who led them from the darkness.

Any one of these events would have fit a prototypical hero myth that we could all have remembered collectively, as "the story of the 2006 world series."

The trouble with Pujols' home run is that he isn't much of a hero to anyone outside St. Louis, and by that I mean he doesn't have enough flaws to put his heroic acts in perspective. Pujols is supposed to hit that home run. It's what everyone already expects, based on his past accomplishments. So that pitch sequence by Verlander fits more closely with the belief that the Tigers somehow failed - the fact that he pitched to Pujols is more unbelieveable than the fact that Pujols hit it out.

The Cardinals just didn't have a story in the making. We were already pegged as losers - that was our story. The fact that we picked up so many more losers along the way, off the DFA scrap heap, just reinforced it. The Tigers had been losers, but they had also gone through a six-month emergence from the cocoon that we could all watch unfold. People who paid closer attention to baseball saw it as a three-year story, giving it that much more reinforcement.

Our three-year story was like that of the Buffalo Bills, who were "a great AFC team" when such a saying was a backhanded compliment at best. They were seen as deeply philosophically flawed - they were too dependent on Marv Levy's brand of quick strike run-and-shoot. Their failures underscored the popular belief in the powerhouse NFC style typified by the Dallas Cowboys and San Francisco 49ers. The belief that the NFC was simply better in football was as prevalent then as the current belief that the AL is better and stronger in baseball. That we were the "best team in the NL" for two years running didn't even make us worthy adversaries for the monster that would oppose us. That we failed to even achieve that this year made us untouchable. Losers.

For the rest of the baseball world, for our team to act like losers for most of the year, then get invited to the big dance only then get crowned... it isn't heroic, it's almost tragic. It's like the climactic prom scene in "Carrie" - only there's no bucket of blood, no comeuppance coming for the ugly girl who, at best, should be an afterthought at the pretty kids' party.

Ironically, our only chance to change this perception came in 2004. If we had won in 2004 (or even competed well), then this year's story about the Cardinals would have been akin to the 2000 Yankees, who stumbled badly down the stretch of the regular season to finish with 87 wins, and then regained their championship form with the flick of an imaginary motivational switch once October started. Or, the three-year storyline could have been like the Patriots' mini-dynasty in football, embracing La Russa as the prickly genius - like Belichick - that could take any assemblage of players and put them in his system and ultimately mold a champion.

The fact that the Cardinals did shed this perception and go on to win speaks volumes about the underlying character of this team. I venture to say that years from now we still won't understand how they won, but we'll still love them for winning. We will continue to look for the specific moment when this team was baptised and born again, and cast away the sins of its previous 6 months of wretched baseball.

And if I were to propose that moment, it was Adam Wainwright's NLCS-ending curveball to Carlos Beltran, not any single event of the World Series.

Wainwright taking over as the closer was the last piece to fall into place, that made this team's disparate jigsawed pieces suddenly click together into a picture of a championship team. His ability to perform, to snap off his best pitch in the most pressure-packed cauldron - the center of Shea Stadium, surrounded by Mets on all sides, on all bases, when any amount of contact of bat-on-ball could spell doom for his team - that's what elevated this team through the next five games and beyond. It's just unfortunate, for story-telling purposes, that it came a series too early.