The Antici....... ........pation Chat Thread

So the Cardinals are playing pretty well here lately, eh? Even Jaime Garcia is cruising on the positive vibration right now, kicking some Astro ass last night despite not having spent the night prior sleeping in his Busch Stadium basement hyperbaric chamber and taking exactly 64 steps to get to the pitching mount last night. Yes, the Cards are handling their business right now. Or, at least, they appear to be playing well against the Houston Astros. And the Cubs, I suppose. So, you know, beating up on the Little Sisters of the Poor and all that.

But, hey, you can win a lot of games doing things that way, cleaning up against weak teams and just holding your own against quality opponents. And, unfortunately, that isn't something we've necessarily seen the Cards do all season. I looked at the Redbirds' records against various opponents back at the beginning of August and found them frankly wanting even against the bottom-dwellers, with the Cubs and Brewers sticking out among division rivals.

Since then the Cardinals have taken care of business in a big way against the Astros, but failed miserably to take advantage of three games against San Diego. They smacked Milwaukee around in early August, but then dropped two of three to the Brew Crew in early September. So overall, well, they've done pretty much the same thing these past almost two months they did the rest of the season. Enigmatic is perhaps the right word.

All the same, this enigmatic team is currently in the process of wrapping up a playoff berth, and that's just fine by me. Back in April I'm sure we all expected it to be of the division title sort, rather than the second Wild Card skin-of-their-teeth-probably-don't-deserve-it-but-them's-the-new-rules variety, but playoffs is playoffs. A fresh start for a talented team that has seen more than its share of inexplicable misery in 2012. It's exciting. And fulfilling. And I'm not going to say another positive, heartfelt word about any of it right now for fear of queering the whole deal.

We have our new blogging platform here at El Vivi Birders world headquarters, and I was curious to see how the whole thing works. I had test-driven the editorial process before we launched, of course, but I kind of want to see how the interaction in the comments section goes. So we're going to do the last chat thread of the regular season today. I'm a little tight on time, but I'll be here as long as I can. We can talk about whatever you like, as always, baseball or no. Let's take this thing out for a spin.