weaver glavine
5-4, 5.18 15-7, 3.82
good news: carpenter will pitch tomorrow night in game 2. way to go tony; if the cards lose the series, all of us chatterers may just have to blame it on somebody else.
if you're desperately bored between now and game time, check out my appearance on "Sportsbloggers Live," which is a podcast produced under AOL's auspices. i went mano a mano with met blogger chris wilcox, who blogs at Miracle Mets. the clip is online at this link. i should acknowledge up front that i did, in front of the entire nation, pick the mets to win the series in 6 or 7 games. i said, in essence, "the cards are an 83-win team; you'd have to be nuts to pick them to win." but i added the caveat that the cards have nothing to lose and might sneak off with the series if they can jump out to an early lead and put some pressure on the mets. the segment was too short for me to challenge chris's proposition that new york holds the advantage at every position on the field except 1st base; i'd have liked the opportunity to debate that one, but the time just wasn't there. i did stick up for the stl pitching when given the chance.
anyway, i'm not apologizing for my prediction so much as trying to provide a little context. i wasn't asked which team i wanted to win; i was asked which i thought most likely to win. and that would be the mets.
i should add, by the way, something that i haven't heard anyone say all week: what a shame these two teams can't be at full strength. restore a healthy mulder / izzy to the cardinal staff, and a healthy pedro / el duque to the mets, and this'd promise to be a hell of a series between two damn good teams. i'm sorry we won't get to see that matchup; hopefully we'll all be entertained nonetheless.
still bored? here's some useless trivia:
this is the cardinals' 9th appearance in the nlcs; they are 4-4 in game 1s to date. when winning game 1, they have gone on to win the series 3 of 4 times; when losing it, they've won 1 of 4 series. they're 0-2 in game 1s on the road.
they've faced glavine twice in the nlcs, both times in 1996; beat him in game 3, lost to him in game 7. (the game 3 start occurred exactly 10 years ago today; how many times in baseball history has a pitcher made postseason starts against the same franchise exactly 10 years apart?) the cardinals also roughed glavine up in game 2 of the 2000 nlds, so the franchise is 2-1 vs this pitcher in the postseason. edmonds is the only player on the current roster who has ever faced glavine in the postseason; he's batting 1.000, with a walk and a double in two trips.
the cardinals' all-time record in postseason games played in new york is 10-8 . . . . .