Redbird Rags To Riches Remembering The 2006 Cardinals World Series Roster

The 2006 Cardinals Were Not Supposed To Win Anything

If you look at the Spring Training projections that year, nobody in St. Louis was talking about October baseball. They were talking about staying .500 and hoping the division didn't completely collapse around them. The Mets and Phillies were spending money like it was going out of style. The Cardinals had Jimmy Wilson managing and a roster cobbled together from late signings and guys who had been discarded by other organizations. I was there for most of it, sitting in the lower bowl at Busch Stadium, and I can tell you right now the atmosphere in May was not electric. It was tense. People were already planning their summer. What makes that roster interesting is how unbalanced it looked on paper. You had Albert Pujols locking up a historic third MVP season. You had Larry Walker in his final year, still hitting but visibly slow. You had Scott Rolen, who was the best third baseman in baseball and the emotional engine of that clubhouse. But the rest? A lot of question marks. Jeff Suppan had thrown one good year in 2003 and then fell apart. Chris Carpenter was recovering from Tommy John surgery. Ryan Franklin was a mediocre setup man. Tadahito Iguchi was a guy you picked up at the deadline because you needed someone who could touch the ball.

Redbird Rags To Riches Remembering The 2006 Cardinals World Series Roster

That phrase keeps coming up when people try to package this season into a narrative, and there is some truth to it. But the reality is messier than the slogan suggests. This team did not transform from ragtag to rich overnight. It happened incrementally, through a series of decisions that looked questionable at the time and brilliant in retrospect. Jim Edmonds is the first thing people forget about this team. He was coming off a serious hip injury in 2005 and everyone expected him to be a fraction of his former self. He came back and hit 42 home runs with 110 RBIs. That single season basically carried the outfield and the middle of the order. Without Edmonds hitting from both sides of the plate, the Cardinals' offense folds in October. I ran the spray charts for a column I used to write about this team, and the lefty-on-lefty matchup advantage he created is something modern analytics still struggles to fully capture. Pujols and Walker both batted left. Having Edmonds in the three hole meant the lineup had two powerful left-handed hitters and then a switch-hitter who could punish anything. Most teams in that era did not construct lineups with that kind of platoon flexibility built in. The starting rotation is where the second major counter-intuitive point lives. Nobody trusted this staff. Suppan was 13-11 the year before. Woody Williams had a 5.08 ERA in 2004. But Rick Ankiel, who had been released by the Cardinals after his phase, came back and pitched eight scoreless innings against the Mets in the NLDS. That was not luck. Ankiel had spent the offseason working with a new pitching coach on his delivery and had cut about four miles per hour off his fastball while adding a tighter slider. The Mets tried to sit on his fastball and he buried the slider. I watched the tape afterwards and it was textbook adjustment. The Cardinals rode that for the rest of the postseason.

The bullpen was another story entirely. Ryan Franklin started the season as the closer and blew four saves in May. Jeff Suppan was pulled from the closer role and moved back to the rotation, which was the right call but it exposed how thin the relief options were. By July, the Cardinals had acquired Adam Wainwright from the Pirates in the Ryan Ludwick trade. Wainwright was not ready to close games yet, but he stabilized the eighth inning and gave Tony La Russa something he did not have earlier in the year. The bullpen saved the season, not the other way around. I should mention the edge case that always comes up when people dig into this roster. The Carlos Beltran trade at the deadline. The Cardinals sent Chris Duncan and a minor leaguer to Houston for Beltran. Everyone thought it was too much. Duncan was a solid outfielder and the kid they sent back was projected as a middle infielder. But Beltran hit .341 with a 1.058 OPS in his first month in St. Louis, and he gave them a right-handed power threat that the lineup desperately needed against left-handed pitching. The workaround I used when analyzing that trade was to look at what the Cardinals gave up versus what they received on a per-game basis. Duncan played 92 games that year and hit .254 with six home runs. Beltran played 58 games and hit .341 with eight home runs. The math was brutal and obvious in hindsight, which is why it still gets debated. One detail that does not get enough attention is the bench. Edgar Renteria was the starting shortstop and he was adequate but not spectacular. David Eckstein won the MVP in the World Series partly because he was the only player on the bench who could play multiple positions at a competent level. He backed up second base, third base, and occasional outfield. That versatility mattered in Game 4 when the Cardinals needed a defensive replacement in the eighth inning and Eckstein was the only guy who could fill the spot without hurting the defense. Most managers would have left a inferior defender in the game. La Russina knew he had the depth and he used it.

There are limitations to remembering this roster through a nostalgic lens. The Cardinals did not win because they were deep. They won because they got hot at the exact right time and their opponent, the Detroit Tigers, had a rotation that could not adjust to right-handed power. Justin Verlander was a rookie. Jeremy Bonderman was good but hittable. The Tigers relied on four starters and when those four struggled, there was nowhere to hide. The Cardinals had five viable starters by August and that difference showed up in Game 7 when Suppan went seven innings and held the Tigers to three runs on six hits. The Tigers countered with Porras and Fogg, who combined for eight innings of relief but gave up six runs. The rotation depth gap was the actual story of that World Series, not the underdog narrative. If you want to study this roster, the best resource is the 2006 postseason game logs combined with the Spring Training depth chart from that year. The contrast between the projected roster and the actual October roster is where the story lives. You will see names like Mike Matheny, who was a backup catcher and stayed healthy when George Sherrill got injured. You will see Shane Victorino, who was called up in September and contributed two hits in the World Series. These are the kinds of details that separate a genuine understanding of that team from a Wikipedia summary. The 2006 Cardinals are remembered as a Cinderella story. They were not. They were a team that made three or four smart deadline moves, got a career year from a player everyone wrote off, and faced a Tigers team that peaked too early. The roster had holes. Big ones. They just never had to be exposed at the same time.