MLB Playoffs 2011: 5 Reasons Why the Cardinals Will Win NLDS Game 5

Admit it, you didn't think the St. Louis Cardinals would be here. You didn't think they'd be playing an elimination game against, of all teams, the Philadelphia Phillies for the right to move on to the NLCS.

Yeah, okay, the Redbirds played their hearts out throughout the course of their improbable run to the National League Wild Card. But in defense, some credit has to also be given to the Atlanta Braves for becoming inexplicably convinced that their home games were played at Safeco Field when September rolled around. Right?

That's all good and fine, but things have already changed and the enemy isn't hanging itself in Atlanta anymore. These are the mighty, unstoppable, hurricane-force 2011 Phillies they're squaring off against now.

This is the team that made dominance chic again, and the only leather it required was Carlos Ruiz' glove.

This is the team that could hit five-run grand slams, pitch four-strikeout innings and tattoo its name on the small of the NL East's back if it felt compelled to.

These are the Phillies of Halladay, Hamels, Lee and Oswalt—the guys who invented pitching.

This is the team that followed the LeBron James model last winter, and would have signed the Hydrogen Bomb or Operation: Desert Storm to close out games if it could have.

This is a Phillies team that was built to win now—no, that was built to win today. Wait, scratch that, I'm sorry, this is a team that was built to win two hours ago. But I'm sure you've got the point.

As for the Cardinals? Coming into this series, they were just a cutesy little comeback story for when the kids are feeling down. But the time had come for the playoffs, and the Cardiac Cockatoos were now a band of militia fighters going up against the fearsome Redcoats.

I'll bet you thought the Cards were dead in the water after Game 1, huh? Well, guess again.

With the win-or-go-home atmosphere surrounding Philadelphia, strange things are going to happen tonight. 

Now, I don't practice Santeria, and I ain't got no crystal ball, but I'm sensing a lot of rage, disappointment, tears and belligerent intoxication on the eastern side of Pennsylvania tonight.

Why? Because after today's heartbreak, NLCS tickets are going up for sale in St. Louis and Hunter Pence is going to wish he'd grounded out more often a week-and-a-half ago.

The St. Louis Cardinals will win Game 5 and eliminate the Phillies.

Don't say you weren't warned.

The Squirrels Are Running Roughshod on Philadelphia's Dream

Call it a sign, call it a curse, or just call it a random occurrence not really worth anyone's time, but even the most ardent skeptic would agree that something's not right with the Aura of Philly when a perpetually frightened, defenseless little woodland creature can run across home plate without fear of a Roy Oswalt fastball. 

Now, perhaps that squirrel scampered by Skip Schumaker because it wanted an autograph, or maybe Busch Stadium was gearing up to give one lucky fan rabies after the seventh-inning stretch, but historically, animals appearing on the baseball diamond in the past have foreshadowed some cripplingly bad luck.

We all know about the infamous Wrigley Field goat incident, but there's more to it than just that.

In 1969, the Chicago Cubs—who have since trademarked the art of Also-Having-Ran in their name—held a nine-and-a-half game August lead over the New York "Miracle" Mets in their division when a black cat was released onto the Shea Stadium grass during a head-to-head clash between the two clubs.

As luck would have it, that little wiccan whiskers probably urinated some seriously steamy curse juice all over Billy Williams' leg, because the Baby Bears ended up collapsing, while the Mets stormed back to win 39 of their last 50 games, along with the National League East division, by eight games.

Now, self-righteous members of PETA probably want to eat his brains in a tofu stew for his comments after Game 4 in regards to the unwelcome animal, but Phils manager Charlie Manuel was absolutely right in wishing death upon that furry little harbinger of doom.

As professional hothead Bill O'Reilly would say, the Loony Left just can't understand the power of a profound baseball curse.

Charlie Manuel gets it, though. Charlie Manuel is a mountain man who's seen a squirrel or two in his life, and knows what they could do to Ryan Howard's swing. 

It's plain and simple—wingless mammals and baseball just don't mix.

The past is already saying it's so, and she truly is a stubborn one to argue with.

That Philadelphia Phillies dream of a 2011 World Series run ended two days ago in Missouri on the hop-skipping hind legs of an invasive rodent species.

Phillies Fans Already Feel Defeated

This past August, when I was on my flight home from Chicago to South Florida, I had the opportunity to be seated next to a married couple, originally from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who were sociable enough to keep me from remaining stone silent during my return trip. 

When a young man donning a Philllies baseball cap walked past our seats on his way to the back of the airplane, our conversation about uncomfortable travel pillows and the lack of fortune in the selling-firecrackers-from-a-tent industry shifted over to baseball.

This was also when I discovered that this family had left the town of Michael Scott and Dunder Mifflin to become nomadic evangelical preachers across small farming towns in Brazil and Uruguay.

Suddenly complaining about the lack of signal in the mountains and the poor variety of channels on their tiny Brazilian television, the husband of the Jagger couple (I'll just call him Mick for now, since I can't recall his actual name) began wondering aloud how he would find an internet feed of the World Series so he could catch the Phils.

"I mean, I guess anything can happen," I remember Mick saying when I reminded him that a Philadelphia return to the Fall Classic wasn't yet guaranteed, "but I really doubt the Phillies won't be playing."

As it turned out, the wife of this couple would go on to reveal herself as an apocalyptic, tongue-speaking madwoman who had me all but convinced that our flight was going to crash into a swamp before she washed her daily dose of prescription painkillers down with airline wine and mercifully fell asleep, but the attitudes of these two in regards to baseball season were not all that far off the mainstream from the rest of Philadelphia's faithful.

To even be in a decisive elimination game against a Wild Card team that actually needed help from these Phillies in order to make the playoffs is already a failure in the eyes of these Phans. 

When the Cardinals take the field tonight for their do-or-die Game 5, they won't be stepping into an unforgiving, hostile crowd ready to chuck beer bottles and batteries at Jon Jay in the outfield. 

They'll be walking into a deflated atmosphere. They'll be surrounded by fans who figured they'd be at the bar tonight, pounding pale ales while trying to perfect their Ryan Braun or Roberts jeers. 

Sure, the towels are going to be out in full force, and they'll be as classy as ever in Citizens Bank Park, but spirit can't be hidden. These Redbirds will be playing before a crowd that already feels like a bunch of upstarts from St. Louis knocked their beloveds down for the count. 

Just read A.J. Daulerio's sense of impending doom in this article.

This is very real, folks, and this is the kind of negative energy that can carry onto the field, spelling trouble for the home team.

Was That Ben Francisco Bailing out the Phils?

You know what's the only thing standing between a World Series run and Eagles season in Philly right now? Ben Francisco.

Yes, that Ben Francisco. The same Ben Francisco who posted a 17.5 percent strikeout rate this season and qualified for roughly -0.1 WAR before Hunter Pence was brought over from the lowly Houston Astros to pull him out of his misery.

Now, make no mistake, as a backup outfielder and a pop-heavy bat off the bench, Francisco certainly is a serviceable major league player.

And, yes, the MLB postseason is a tournament that favors the unexpected and the unimaginable.

Chad Curtis hit two home runs in one World Series game. He's probably a high school gym teacher now.

Kirk Gibson went yard off Dennis Eckersley in 1988. He could barely even walk the bases afterwards.

Dave Roberts stole second and Reversed The Curse with Mariano Rivera trying to close out the Red Sox.

The 116-win Seattle Mariners of 2001 fell flat on their faces in the ALCS and never even got to smell the World Series air. 

The list just keeps on going.

However, when a lineup that features Chase Utley, Ryan Howard, Jimmy Rollins, Carlos Ruiz, Shane Victorino and the aforementioned Pence—regardless of how frustrating it has performed at times this season—needs a pinch-hitter to save them from a disastrously early playoff exit, I would say it's definitely time to start worrying a tad bit. 

Perhaps the Phillies Clinched Too Soon

On Sept. 17, against these very St. Louis Cardinals, the baseball version of Philadelphia's dream team punched its ticket to the 2011 playoffs with their fifth division title in as many years. 

That's when the complacency began to creep in. 

The Phillies, playing without a care in the world, began to lose. Then they kept losing. And when they were done with that, they lost some more.

All of a sudden, baseball's best team had found itself mired in an eight-game losing streak. 

This kind of thing happens all the time, where a team will clinch a playoff berth early, and then the manager begins to rest his stars for when the games matter again. The problem is, by the time they're playing meaningful baseball again, a lot of the momentum that group of guys had going before an extended pine-riding session is all but gone. 

This is why you saw Charlie Manuel's lineups featuring at least some of Philly's core regulars all the way up to the season's final game against Atlanta.

You have to wonder, though, how much of a sense of urgency this Phillies team lost by securing a ticket to October in mid-September. And you also have to wonder if they let the wrong team into the playoffs.

I realize that hindsight is 20/20, and no team will ever claim to care more about facing one opponent over another, but perhaps the Phillies should have swung like a bunch of Adam Dunns when Craig Kimbrel was trying to close them out in Atlanta a week-and-a-half ago. 

Had the Braves been given new life, gone on to play a one game playoff against the Cardinals and won, Philadelphia fans would have been watching their boys square off against the Arizona Diamondbacks—another team that ran away with its division far too long ago. 

A lot of people said the Phillies would regret punching the red-hot Redbirds' chance for October success in the wake of their comeback win against the Braves that shut Turner Field down for the winter. They claimed the Phillies would regret having to deal with a slugging lineup that had been playing in do-or-die contests for roughly a month.

Perhaps they were right.

The Cardinals Are Too Hot

Playoff intensity arrived in St. Louis this year sometime in early September, when nobody could have pictured them unseating the Wild Card-leading Atlanta Braves for the fourth, and final, spot in the 2011 playoffs.

Well, unseat the Braves is exactly what they did, and they did it by winning with urgency.

If the Boston Red Sox hadn't gone and messed everything up, the baseball world would have been abuzz with Pujols and his boys following their improbable comeback from eight-and-a-half games back from a postseason spot when the season's final month of regular season play began.

When a team comes back from a deficit like that, make no mistake, you do not want to be the fan of their next opponent. 

The St. Louis Cardinals can slug with the best of them. They've got speed on the basepaths. They're not a gang of free-swinging strikeout kings. Their defense isn't too shabby. And even with the loss of Adam Wainwright before this season began, their pitching staff remains solid with longtime ace Chris Carpenter, and midseason acquisitions Edwin Jackson and Jaime Garcia, who will be available to pitch in relief in Game 5.

This is not a team that crept its way into October with a hearty dose of blind luck, or because Jimmy Grazzieri from the mob owed them a favor.

This is a legitimate World Series contender trading blows with the Phils.

And for all the hype surrounding the Phillies, along with the longstanding belief that pitching is what brings the trophy home, the heart of St. Louis' lineup—featuring Albert Pujols, Matt Holliday and Lance Berkman—is far superior to Philadelphia's.

Remember, when all the marbles come down to one game, all it takes is one big swing to send the favorites home.