Cardinals Will Not Recover From Hole

It truly was one of the more magical endings to a baseball playoff game we've ever seen, a game that can't be described any better than a Hollywood ending in which the hero miraculously manages to fight off an entire army with one gun and six bullets to save the girl.

In the movies, we never get to see the loser's epilogue. The NLDS between the Dodgers and Cardinals leaves its Hollywood atmosphere and shifts to St. Louis this weekend, where we'll find out if the Cards can bounce back from a game in which both Matt Holliday and the entire roster took a collective line drive to the groin.

The Cardinals can say all the right things about putting this loss behind them and just worrying about Game 3 on Saturday, but there's no way that their psyches aren't affected by all this. They have to be. It's impossible to go from a brilliant performance from Adam Wainwright, who pitched eight magnificent innings and only made one mistake -- and really, that pitch that Andre Ethier took out to left-center field wasn't even a mistake -- to one out away from heading back to St. Louis even, to having what happened happen and not be shaken up by it.

Now they're supposed to go back home and put together a three-game win streak against a team with all the momentum in the world at their back? Yes, in baseball momentum is only as good as your next starting pitcher, but the Cardinals have already played their two best hands in that department and lost.

The best thing the Cardinals had going for them in this series was the combination of Chris Carpenter and Adam Wainwright in the first two games, and both of those men have pitched. The Redbirds have nothing to show for it.

On the other side, they have an offense that really isn't anything spectacular but for the two men in the middle of it, Albert Pujols and Holliday. Pujols hasn't hit a home run since Sept. 9 and is clearly pressing at the plate, trying to do something, anything to help his team. He's 1-for-6 in the series and hasn't seen a pitch worth hitting, but in atypical Pujols fashion, he's helped the Dodgers out by swinging at pitches he normally doesn't even give the time of day.

And there's no way he's going to see a pitch worth hitting for the rest of this series either. Not with Holliday behind him, a Matt Holliday that has been huge for the Cardinals this season, but also one who might be trying to do too much in light of what happened to him on Thursday.

The Cardinals can say all the right things and talk about how they're going to put this all behind them and soldier forward, but they're not. No, this is the part of the movie where the hero and the heroine ride off into the sunset while the "bad guy" lies on the ground behind them bleeding to death.