Cardinals’ Seemingly Storybook Season Closes With an Unhappy Ending

Albert Pujols and Yadier Molina did their part in Game 2 against the Phillies, but the rest of St. Louis’s bats stayed quiet, sending the pair off into the sunset.

ST. LOUIS — When the Phillies and Cardinals last met in the postseason, back in 2011, the end of the series felt like a fork in the road. After St. Louis won Game 5 of that NLDS—and, eventually, the World Series—it went on to enjoy years of continued success. After Philadelphia lost, it entered a confusing, frustrating decade of mediocrity, failing to make it back to the postseason at all until this year. Their playoff matchup was certainly not the catalyst for all that followed. But it did feel like a turning point.

There was a vaguely similar quality to this series. Yet this time it was the Phillies who won—capturing two games on the road to sweep the best-of-three wild card and advance to the NLDS. The corresponding loss does not represent the closing of a window for the Cardinals. (This team is simply too good for that.) But it does represent the end of an era. It means a goodbye for two franchise icons, Albert Pujols and Yadier Molina, who are both retiring and, by extension, guaranteeing that baseball will never look quite the same here again. As was the case in 2011: This series could not possibly be the cause. But it is hard for it not to feel like a turning point.

And it’s hard to imagine that it could have happened in more disappointing fashion for the Cardinals. After a sloppy, uncharacteristic meltdown in the ninth inning of Game 1, they failed to get hot enough to melt anything in the first place in Game 2. Their lineup faced an excellent starting pitcher in the Phillies’ Aaron Nola. But even in that context, the failures of their biggest hitters were glaring, especially in the biggest situations.

The Cardinals lost, 2–0, without so much as one extra-base hit. That meant a farewell season that had so often felt special—almost enchanting—ended not with a bang but with something less than a whimper.

“There’s just so much magic going on with Albert and Yadi,” said Cardinals pitcher Adam Wainwright, a pillar of the franchise in his own right. “I just felt like—you can’t go out like that. There’s too much goodness going around to lose two games in a row to the Phillies. And that’s a good team over there, don’t get me wrong, they’re a great team … But I just thought that with those two guys here, what they were bringing to the table, I just felt like we were going to win it for them.”

Yet they couldn’t.

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Pujols and Molina did their part to try prolonging their careers by one more day. With the two-run deficit in place by the eighth, Pujols strode to the plate for his final at-bat, and he delivered—a single down the third-base line that felt like it might be the start of a fairytale ending. There was just one out in the inning and the Cardinals’ two biggest talents were up next: No. 3 hitter Paul Goldschmidt, the presumptive NL MVP, and No. 4 hitter Nolan Arenado, having the best offensive season of his career. St. Louis could not have asked for a better chance to score.

Both Goldschmidt and Arenado struck out.

A variation of the scenario repeated with two outs in the ninth. Molina came to the plate with a runner on and the season on the line—the set-up for another potential storybook ending, yes, but also a questionable managerial decision. (If the beauty of Pujols’ farewell season has been his renaissance as a hitter, Molina has not exactly been in a comparable situation, with a 53 OPS+.) But the Cardinals nevertheless let Molina have this final at-bat. And he made it worthwhile: He, too, delivered a single, proving there was still a little magic left. This put runners at the corners, with the potential tying run at first, the potential winning run at the plate.

But the next batter was Cardinals shortstop Tommy Edman, who popped out in foul territory to end the game, the series and the season.

“I didn’t want to be the last out,” Molina said. “This was hard.”

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The final outcome was an indictment of the offense as a whole. But it was especially so for Goldschmidt and Arenado. The pair were 1-for-15 with eight strikeouts in the two-game series: A credit to the Phillies’ pitching staff, to be sure, but also an extension of a maddening few weeks for both of them. Both had put together career performances in the summer. Yet they’d then faded hard in the fall.

“Those guys carried us for the entire year. They did a phenomenal job of not taking any at-bats off. And at the end of the day, baseball is tough,” said Cardinals manager Oli Marmol. “They had a tough stretch there at the end. It's part of the game. Obviously the timing of it isn't ideal, but it wasn't the lack of preparation or competing.”

Goldschmidt had finished August a strong contender for the Triple Crown. But in September and the first week of October, he entered his worst stretch of the season, with just two home runs and a 105 OPS+. If that isn’t necessarily bad—it is, by definition, just above average—it was still striking for a hitter who is typically one of the best in the game, and one of the most consistent, too. In 12 years in the big leagues, Goldschmidt has only had nine individual months with an OPS+ as bad as this one. He got on base in this series only when he was hit by a pitch. And the situation wasn’t any better for Arenado. His 86 OPS+ for September and October represented production cut almost in half from what he had done earlier in the year.

On Saturday, given a chance to redeem their recent performances by coming up big when the team needed it most, neither of them could.

The result was a clubhouse left saying its farewells. The season had been full of attempts to capture what the retiring twin pillars meant to not just the Cardinals but to all of St. Louis: Molina is beloved in part because he chose to stay, Pujols, because he chose to come back. The entire year, in some sense, had been an exercise in goodbyes—but the last one, of course, is the hardest.

“This is my home,” said Molina, pulling out a demonstrative pronoun that might have referred to the city, the ballpark, the clubhouse, the locker abutting Pujols’s, or all of the above. There was no need to specify: It was clear how much the word could fit.

“I’m going to miss it.”