Rangers vs. Cardinals: Matt Holliday Saved by David Freese's World Series Magic

By a matter of inches and seconds, Matt Holliday was taken from the cast of Cardinals heroes and placed into the collection of St. Louis villains. Only by fate and the unlikely bat of David Freese was he bailed out.

Imagine a world in which the St. Louis Cardinals didn't act like honorable men that refused to quit, or cockroaches that refused to die—it sort of depends on your perspective on the matter.

The Texas Rangers would be the 2011 World Champions and the St. Louis Cardinals would be by their lockers, weeping.

The next thing to ensue would be blame and finger pointing. I'm not saying the Cardinals—most of the blame would come from the media trying to assess what went wrong in Game 6. When putting a name and face to a loss, it's easy to scapegoat.

We have seen this in Steve Bartman and Bill Buckner. For a moment, we almost had another scapegoat for the Mt. Rushmore of such things.

Holliday had a horrible game. It started with him allowing Rafael Furcal to bumble a pop fly that should have been all Holliday's, and ended with being picked off at third base, a cardinal sin in baseball circles.

Instead, we have a much more different tale to tell. Holliday is 20th on a list of things we can talk about in Game 6. This was simply a classic. Forget how it ranks in the pantheon of great baseball games, this was an epic sports final regardless of type.

The most intriguing part of this game was that it went from ugly and atrocious to beautifully epic. The two men that benefited most from that were David Freese and Matt Holliday. Both had their fielding errors, and Holliday exacerbated it with a bone-headed running error.

Yet we won't hear about the pick off or the bumbled pop up. We will only hear about comeback after comeback ending with a David Freese walk-off home run. Three blown saves? I'd rather talk about this Freese guy instead.