St. Louis Cardinals: A cardinal perspective of the 2017 postseason

The St. Louis Cardinals are not playing in the postseason but the non-capitalized version of their name offers a prudent view of the impending competitions.

The St. Louis Cardinals failed to live up to the potential of its individual parts in 2017. This cardinal failure was the undoing of the 2017 team leaving them watching the postseason from their individual homes.

Ah, a play on words to kick off October… For those not in the know, the lower case version of the word usually reserved for the name of a bird carries with it the definition, “of greatest importance; fundamental” when used as an adjective. Hence the play on the word in the title of this post and in that first paragraph above.

Keeping with the title, then, let us take a cardinal look at the competitions now solidly slated for the 2017 postseason to begin this very week.

Additionally, I will insert the 2017 St. Louis Cardinals in the NL side of things where they might have slotted should they have (1) played better this season, (2) suffered fewer bullpen meltdowns, and/or (3) had a different manager. All of these suppositions are simple “what-ifs” but are worth taking a look for giggle-sake.

An analytical view of the competitions coming this month toward the World Series is something that can be found anywhere on Twitter. Instead of joining the ranks simply looking at the slated competitions, I intend on both sharing my predictions per competition and inserting the what-if of the St. Louis Cardinals in the particular spots.

Let’s go round-by-round on this, starting first with the Wild Card games.