Good Night St. Louis

The Chicago Cubs found a much needed series win on the road this weekend, taking two out of three from the Cardinals in Busch Stadium.  Although this year the St. Louis Cardinals dealt with more adversity than anyone and will still enter the all-star break next week within shouting distance of first place, for all intensive purposes their season is over.

The pitching of the St. Louis Cardinals for this year has been outstanding.  Guys like Braden Looper, Todd Wellemeyer, and Kyle Loush are pitching above and beyond what they were expected to do.  This is however where the wheels fall of Cardinal Nation, this is where the 2008 dream will have died.

The pitching on the Cardinals, the pride and joy of this years team is not going to last.  We have seen Todd Wellemeyer finally realize who he is in his last few starts with the Cardinals losing his last three outings.  Sunday's game against the Cubbie gang shows all you need to know about why this years Cardinals team will not be winning the NL Central.

Bad starting pitching led the way for this team on Sunday, with Wellemeyer pitching poorly, only going five innings.  In those five innings you saw the Cubs scourch him for nine hits and thankfully for St. Louis, only three runs.  Nonetheless, outings like this from the starting rotation will not work in St. Louis this year, but don't expect things to stay the way they have so far.

The hitting of St. Louis also looked terrible on Sunday, as it did all weekend outside of one inning.  Sean Marshall, Ted Lilly, and Carlos Zambrano all were seen dealing to the Cards this past weekend.  Zambrano was fresh off of a stint on the DL but still was able to mow down St. Louis and did so fairly easily.  Lilly has pitched better for the Cubs but he as well as Sean Marshall are the kind of guys that real contenders are able to score runs off of.

The hitting of the Cardinals is a joke, a joke outside of the best hitter in the game that is.  Rick Ankiel can't hit left handed hitting to save his life.  Ryan Ludwick, an all-star, really?  Ludwick is a career minor leaguer, a AAAA player if you will.  Although his first half has him hitting near .300 as he's hit 17 pitches out of the ballpark, he is not going to keep this up.

Troy Glaus is the most overrated third baseman of this generation, a career .262 hitter?  Don't expect him to magically find it in the second half.  Joe Mather, Skip Schumaker?  These guys belong in AAA.

The St. Louis Cardinals are a team that is composed of a bunch of guys who have played outside themselves for half of a year.  The second half of 2008 will bring a time in St. Louis where we find out that Ryan Ludwick and company are not good enough to be the second best team in the NL.

Call me crazy now, call me correct in late September...