First pitch is just about an hour away. The Cardinals are in Detroit for the 2006 World Series. The teams have met twice before in the World Series. In 1934 the Cardinals beat the Tigers behind the arms of brothers Dizzy and Paul Dean.  They met again in the 1968 World Series where  Denny  McClain and Mickey Lolich were the heroes for Detroit.  So this is familiar territory for both teams. The teams, however, couldn’t be more different.

Detroit set the pace for all teams until a late slide caused them to enter into the post season as the wildcard team. St. Louis had only 83 wins in the regular season, which is the second lowest all-time for a World Series team.

I think that those facts spell doom for the St. Louis Cardinals who will send Anthony Reyes (5-8) to the mound to start against Justin Verlander (17-9). And that’s only the start of it. Chris Carpenter will most likely start game 3 and then game 7 if necessary.  Beyond Carpenter the Cardinals will have to rely on NLCS MVP Jeff Suppan (12-7) and former Tiger Jeff Weaver (8-14). Not exactly the pitching staff you want to face a very tough and very deep Tigers lineup.

On the other side of the pitching matchup, the Tigers starting pitching has looked great this post season. Verlander, Nate Robertson (13-13), Kenny Rogers (17-8) and Jeremy Bonderman (14-8) are looking a lot like the Chicago White Sox staff from last years World Series. I think that they will dominate in a similar way. I think that Detroit will smartly pitch around Albert Pujols, and take their chances with the rest of the Cardinals.

I think we’re looking at a sweep for the Tigers here folks.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 21st, 2006 at 5:24 pm and is filed under Baseball, MLB. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.