Daily Dose: 90-win Cards team are more than a nostalgia tour

Patience is still a virtue in sports fandom.

See how it turns out.

Don't panic too early.

Wait for August and September to play out.

Every Cardinals/baseball/sports fan should have these sayings ironed into the mental fabric of their expectations for any given season. 

For the St. Louis Cardinals, 2022 kicked off with modest expectations, but this season was going to be different. Albert Pujols is back! Yadier Molina's final (he's serious this time) season. Adam Wainwright's possible final season. Oliver Marmol's first season as manager. Nolan Gorman arrived. Paul DeJong did not. Tyler O'Neill, coming off a reported contract dispute during arbitration, didn't produce the kind of expected season due to injuries... again. On and on. Let’s recap a few months in a few minutes, but first drop some money in the jukebox.

For the first four months, the Cardinals played .500 or slightly better/worse baseball. They were 52-47 as July came to a close, and then they went on a huge run. Instead of being 4-6 games behind the last Central team standing in the Brewers, St. Louis was suddenly eight games ahead as September began. But then they slumped on the last big homestand of the year, which had *Twitter* fans calling for Wainwright/Goldschmidt to be benched. That's how it goes. 

Tuesday night, the Cardinals clinched the division. Some would say it's the worst division in baseball, and they wouldn't be wrong. Still, it's been a pale division for several years, and this is the first division title for the Cardinals since 2019: their fifth in the past decade. 

All of this is to say that you just never know in this game. Nobody could have guessed Brendan Donovan, Lars Nootbaar, Andre Pallante, and Juan Yepez would have such big impacts this year, most even more so than the highly touted Gorman. Yepez has hit 12 home runs in just 228 at-bats, Donovan has become the Cards de facto leadoff hitter, Nootbaar has risen from utility to starter, and Pallante is a jack of all trades for this team. 

Why are the Cardinals celebrating a division title with seven games to play instead of jostling to the end with Milwaukee?