Summarizing the Road Trip

Tomorrow, the Cardinals will return home to Busch stadium to take on the Nats at 7:15 CT. Many things have occurred since the last time the Cardinals played in their home ballpark, and the team that will take the field tonight is an entirely different team than the one that began its journey out West over a week ago.

Many positives emerged out of the Cardinals first road trip of the season. During this west coast campaign in which the Cardinals played 10 games against three different  teams, the offense finally woke up. During a six-game stretch from April 11-16, the Cardinals scored at least eight runs a game. Crazy as it sounds, this technique that Tony La Russa implimented of trying to score more runs than the opponents actually yielded five wins for the Cards during this six-game stretch.

Overall, the Cardinals were a solid 6-4 on this 10-game trip. They started things of slowly, picking up just where they had left off at Busch Stadium, by losing the three game series against the defending champs, the San Francisco Giants.

However, they went on to take 2 of 3 from the D-backs, scoring 8, 8, and 15 runs in the three games of the series.

Then, the Cardinals really went on a tear. In a four games series with the Dodgers, the Cardials completed a regular series sweep in the first three games. However, this being a four game series, the Cardinals were still one game away from truly sweeping the Dodgers after Saturday’s 9-2 victory.

Unfortunately, we all know what happened next. The Cardinals sent ace Chris Carpenter to the mound to try to take game 4, and he pitched superbly. Likewise, Dodgers starter Chad Billingsley pitched a great game, shutting out the Cardinals offense through 8 innings. When the Redbirds came up in the top of the ninth, it was a 0-0 game. But before the half-inning was over, David Freese batted in the Cardinals first run of the day, scored by Matt Holliday.

While the Cardinals’ offense was slightly doused in this game, I was quite confident that they would finish off the sweep as Sunday’s game headed into the bottom of the ninth. There’s no way that I expected the Cardinals’ offense to keep putting up eight runs per game for the entire rest of the season, and this outing showed that those guys are actually human. Well, I guess we already knew that fact based on the beginning of the year.

Then, simply put, Ryan Franklin blew his fourth save of the year in his fifth opportunity. It doesn’t take a mad scientist to let me know that this is not the best save percentage. One thing that the Cardinals definitely brought home is a problem with the closing role.

But the Cardinals’ offensive achievements during these 10 games cannot be overlooked. Pujols came out of his slump, Berkman broke out into an RBI machine, and the rest of the team followed suit. Check out the Cardinals’ offensive numbers in their last week here on the St. Louis Cardinals official website. Berkman’s numbers were so good that he earned the title of the NL player of the week.

As always in the blogosphere, with these numbers come questions (don’t we bloggers just love questions?). What kind of Cardinals offense will we see throughout the upcoming homestand and the rest of the season? Since there is no way that the Cardinals can sustain these numbers and since it is bound to have an offensive slump sometime, how will the team respond to such a slump?

These questions, as well as the new bullpen question concerning the closing role, will most likely define the rest of the season for the Cardinals. Because while the team (which is now in 2nd place in the Central) did do a good job of bringing their record up to .500 (8-8) and pulling within 1.5 games of the division leading Reds on this road trip, there is certainly still a long way to go. The World Series cannot be won with great offense in April.