The artists formerly known as the St. Louis Cardinals

I know I'm upsetting the baseball gods just by posting this, but these are not your typical St. Louis Cardinals that are limping into PNC Park for an early week series. They've lost four out of their last six (and six out of ten). They're playing without Pirate Killing Pujols. Carpenter, who typically owns us, didn't pitch all that well in his first start off the DL last week and hasn't pitched like himself in general this year. The heart of their lineup tends to feature So Taguchi (.282/.339/.362), Juan Encarnacion (.258/.286/.441), and Jim Edmonds (a very un-Edmonds like .251/.348/.408) prominently. What I'm saying is that beyond the fact that they're wearing blue and red and have that little curly STL on their hats, there's no reason they should embarass us at PNC this week. We've been playing some good baseball lately, they haven't. I'm not saying we should sweep them, simply that we should hold our own here and taking 2 in this series shouldn't be out of the question. If we're serious about turning this team around both for the end of this year and next year, things like beating the Cards at home are the exact type of mental blocks we need to get past. That being said, and the baseball gods being angered, I'm ready for the sweep.

As for tonight, as I said, Carp has struggled lately, but he still absolutely owns us. Just look at that career line (mostly in his three years as a Card) against us. 7-1, 2.66 ERA, 1.01 WHIP, 56 Ks and only 13 walks in 64 and 1/3 innings. If him and the Cards need anything to snap them out of their respective slumps, it's probably a visit to PNC that will do the trick for them. We counter with Oliver Perez tonight and your guess is as good as mine when it comes to how that will go. I am holding out some hope, but only because Ollie seems to pitch better when he has extra motivation and he seems to really dislike the Cards a lot, plus there's demotion talk swirling again. No word on Burnitz condition after being removed from Sunday's game, but I'd guess Craig will play no matter what if the Cardinals are interested in him. Since the summer program I work in gave out free tickets for tonight's game I'll be there in my Irate Fans shirt hoping for the best (and at least partially hoping that they tell me I can't enter the ballpark with the shirt on... oh I will raise some serious hell if that happens, I'll be on Outside the Lines by the end of the week if that happens, mark my words).