No matter what Pujols does, the Cards' season rides on Carpenter

PRINT EMAIL FACEBOOK DIGG TWITTER RSS SHARE

Chris Carpenter is 5-2 with a 1.78 ERA and infinitesimal 0.701 WHIP. Brad Mangin/SI The Carpenter Factor St. Louis' pitching stats with and without rotation ace Chris Carpenter Time Period W-L IP ER ERA April 6-14 6-3 81.2 27 2.98 April 15-May 19* 16-14 265.2 132 4.47 May 20-June 29 19-19 334.2 134 3.60 *Chris Carpenter's time on the disabled list.

"Starting in K.C. he just said, forget about it," Cardinals center fielder Rick Ankiel said of his teammate Albert Pujols last week in the visitors' clubhouse at Citi Field. The Friday before, against the Royals, Pujols had begun one of those stretches -- five games, three home runs, 12 RBIs and eight hits in 19 at-bats -- that lead people, his awestruck teammates included, to joke that there must be something not entirely hominid beneath his flesh.

"He's the Machine," Ankiel said, before calling out to Pujols for corroboration. "Hey, Machine!" Ankiel shouted, inadvertently interrupting Pujols in mid-conversation. Pujols, perturbed, glared at Ankiel. "Why are you looking at me like that?" said Ankiel, feigning fear. "Eliminate him," Ankiel said in his best Schwarzenegger-as-homicidal-robot voice, expressing the thought he imagined to be running through the generally good-natured Pujols' brain, if not his neural net processor.

While the idea that Pujols is a finely engineered machine, sent from the future to destroy both baseballs and impudent teammates, might make for a more compelling Terminator sequel than have the last two entries in that formerly august franchise, it is an idea to which the slugger has of late objected. "What, am I supposed to hit everything out of the park or get a base hit?" Pujols said to reporters last Monday night, when they asked him about a rally-killing, eighth-inning double play ball in an eventual Cardinals loss. "I'm ... human, too."

As important as Pujols is to the Cardinals -- and there is clearly no player in Major League Baseball who is more integral to his team's success -- he knows that even he can't carry St. Louis to the postseason by himself. His extraordinary and mechanically consistent production might make the Cardinals a winning ballclub (they have finished below .500 just once during his nine-year career), but to reach October they will need an equally regular contribution from, at the least, their second-most important player -- and, in recent years, that player has again and again fallen victim to frailties that are all too human.

Over the past seven seasons, 34-year-old pitcher Chris Carpenter has incurred, among other injuries, the following: right shoulder tendonitis; a tear in the labrum of his right shoulder which required major surgery; a strain of his right biceps; nerve irritation in his right biceps; back spasms; bone spurs in his right elbow which were removed by arthroscopic surgery; ligament damage in his right elbow that necessitated Tommy John surgery; irritation of his right elbow's ulnar nerve that required it to be surgically transposed; and an oblique strain. It's a list of maladies that would make a professional bullrider blush, and Carpenter did not pitch at all in 2003, which was his first year with St. Louis, and he played in just five games between 2007 and '08.

When Carpenter does pitch, though, he is a clear-cut ace, one of the top five starters in the game. Carpenter won the NL Cy Young Award in 2005 and finished third the following season, and this year he's been better than ever. Even after an unlucky 3-2 loss to Johan Santana and the Mets last Thursday, he is 5-2 with a miniscule 1.78 ERA and an even more infinitesimal WHIP of 0.701 -- the latter a simply ridiculous stat that, if it holds up through season's end and if Carpenter throws enough innings to qualify for the ERA title (and he missed six starts or so from mid-May to mid-April with that oblique injury), would smash Pedro Martinez's single-season record of 0.737.

PRINT EMAIL FACEBOOK DIGG TWITTER RSS SHARE