These three games will culminate in the national television spotlight Sunday night and will serve as more of a heat-check for both teams than some cliched measuring stick or statement. St. Louis is 9-1 over its last 10 and Chicago is 7-3 in the same stretch after taking four straight on the road. The Cubs are second and the Cardinals are third in baseball in run differential, with a mere one game difference in their Pythagorean records calculated with those numbers.
It's possible the Cubs have already reached escape velocity from the gravity of .500, having snapped back from a 1-6 stumble out of the gate to stabilize as the good team they expected to be. It's also possible the Cardinals can cause them to question that once again.
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It's nowhere near as much fun to dislike the Cardinals as it was when boneheaded Mike Matheny was in charge of the dugout, managing rosters and games as if it were 1992 and fomenting an odious clubhouse culture. Mike Shildt just doesn't engender such feelings of animus, even if he still bunts too much. This is the first meeting between the teams since Yadier Molina intrepidly defended the honor of his fair city after Kris Bryant cast aspersions upon it by noting at the winter fan convention that St. Louis is "boring."
"It will carry (into the season)," Molina said. "I can't wait to get on the field."
Cardinals reliever John Brebbia also joined the fray, calling Bryant a "loser." All very mature and clever stuff, of course, and now we'll see what if any further baseball stupid comes of it.
And here's Paul Goldschmidt, too. Often it can seem like a certain player has outsized success against your team because of selective memory -- it's easier for the heroics to haunt us than all the other times he wasn't so dangerous, so we create flawed characterizations of a guy as a Cubs-killer. So let's see what's real. Goldschmidt has a large sample of performance against the Cubs, a full 43 games and 187 plate appearances, so a little more than a full quarter of an MLB season. Over that time he has slashed .353/.471/.699, for an OPS of 1.170. He's hit 14 home runs and has 107 total bases. In other words, against the Cubs, Goldschmidt has been the not-too-rough equivalent of late-1920s Babe Ruth.
So, um ... yeah. But he's 31 now and his rate stats are all trending below his career averages. Or something.
We're already a month into 2019 and it feels like time to do this. The miserable weather is breaking for a warm-up and an actual sighting of the sun over Chicago after days of monsoons, just in time for some baseball that at the very least allows us to make it feel a little more compelling.