No Excuses Now for Cardinals

Matt Holliday will not be signing a contract extension in St. Louis. If he returns to the Cardinals in 2010, it will almost certainly be via the open market and at top dollar value. Hey, his agent is Scott Boras. What did you expect?

We've known all that for awhile. We knew that when Holliday was with the A's, just like we did when he was a Rockie.

Holliday alone is not what is so interesting about the deal that sent him from Oakland to St. Louis Friday afternoon. Rather it is Holliday's addition viewed through the prism of the first-place Cardinals.

The Cards are 53-46, 1 1/2 games clear of the rival Cubs in the NL Central, but only three up on the fourth-place Brewers. They added Mark DeRosa at the end of last month and now have the best hitter known to be available at the deadline in their lineup protecting the game's best player -- Albert Pujols.

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They have the division lead, albeit a narrow one. They have the offensive help they needed. In fact, they have it in spades with the additions of Holliday and DeRosa and the impending return of Troy Glaus providing added depth. Once again, they have best player in the world. With Adam Wainwright and Chris Carpenter, they have an intimidating 1-2 punch at the head of their rotation, a rotation that is not particularly top-heavy with serviceable arms like Kyle Lohse and Joel Piniero behind them.

In other words, they have no excuse for not rolling to the NL Central title and making a deep run into October.

That's a blessing and a curse.

St. Louis is markedly better with Holliday in its lineup. With Rick Ankiel and Chris Duncan getting the bulk of the duty, Cardinals left fielders have posted a .635 OPS. That's the worst production of any position on the roster -- worse than shortstop (.661) and third base (.649). General manager John Mozeliak has addressed all three deficiencies when you include the trade for shortstop Julio Lugo from Boston.

Holliday, even the sub-par version we saw in Oakland, is a major upgrade (not to mention the fact that he's been hot of late and is switching back to the National League, where he should be more comfortable). Cubs fans can tell you all about the virtues of DeRosa. And Lugo, for all his warts, has been an above-average offensive shortstop this year when he's actually played.

Meanwhile, Houston and Milwaukee are deeply flawed, and those three Cardinal additions have to, if nothing else, cancel out any spike in performance the Cubs would be expected to experience down the stretch as they get Aramis Ramirez, Geovany Soto and Ryan Dempster healthy and producing again.

All of which means that the Cardinals now have to deliver. Surely, that's a problem Tony La Russa and Co. welcome. The NL Central is there for the taking and St. Louis seems intent on taking it. But funny things happen. Rentals don't always work out. There are injuries to worry about. And on and on and on.

Mostly that's just a reality of the trade deadline. You make the big move because it makes the team better in theory. Then you hope for the best.

Fans in St. Louis probably aren't going to be doing much hoping for the next two months -- not with a monster bat like Holliday in the fold. Instead, they'll be doing plenty of expecting. The Cardinals won the World Series in 2006, but that was a stunning once-in-a-generation run by, let's face it, a team that was awfully mediocre.

No, the addition of Holliday hearkens back to the MV3 heyday of Pujols, Jim Edmonds and Scott Rolen in 2004-05. Those Cardinals teams were expected to win the World Series.

Similar expectations might be placed on the 2009 Redbirds now. They'll certainly be facing many more questions if they don't live up to them.