You have to go all the way back to September 10th in order to find a box score that has the St. Louis Cardinals losing a game.
After the loss to the Cincinnati Reds, the Cardinals have won 17 consecutive games, run away from the Wild Card competition, and have secured a playoff spot.
“Seventeen in a row; you can’t plan for that,” Cardinals star Paul Goldschmidt said. “But going into this last month, we just knew that we needed to win series. If we could win series, we could gain ground. But 17 … you can’t explain that.”
Their 17th win in a row came on Tuesday night in St. Louis with a 6-2 win over the first-place Milwaukee Brewers. They got home runs from Nolan Arenado, Dylan Carlson, and Jose Rondon, and Adam Wainwright went six innings, giving up two earned runs. The win clinched the second Wild Card spot for the Cardinals.
“To be able to go the playoffs is what it’s all about,” Arenado said. “This team is unbelievable. We carry each other. I’m happy to be a part of it. This is why I’m here — to get a chance to play in the playoffs and to be able to do [that] in my first year here is a great feeling.”
On September 11th, the Cardinals woke up with a 71-69 record, sitting fourth in the Wild Card standings — 3.5 games out of the second Wild Card spot — and 14 games back in the loss column to the Brewers in the NL Central.
And they haven’t lost since.
“A lot of credit goes to the coaching staff. No matter what was happening this year, every day they came in the same,” Goldschmidt said. “They kept encouraging us, even at times when we had lost a lot of games in a row, and had made a lot of mistakes.”
The 17-game winning streak is the longest in the MLB since the Cleveland Indians won 22 straight in 2017, and it’s the longest winning streak in franchise history, surpassing the 1935 team by three games.
“Long time ago, and here we’ve blown past it by three games with more to come,” chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. said. “They can’t wait to get to the ballpark in the morning. They just know they’re going to win.”
The Cardinals are slotted to play either the Los Angeles Dodgers or the San Francisco Giants in the Wild Card game on October 6th. The Giants currently hold a two-game lead with five games to play.
Whichever team finishes second in the National League West will be heavy favorites in the one-game Wild Card game, but hot teams are always dangerous come postseason baseball. And there’s no team hotter than the Cardinals.
“We feel dangerous,” Wainwright said. “There have been a couple times where to start the postseason I go, ‘This team could do it.’ We have a team that can do it.”
Joe Morgan is the Sports Reporter for The Daily Wire. Most recently, Morgan covered the Clippers, Lakers, and the NBA for Sporting News. Send your sports questions to [email protected].
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Source: Dailywire
