This is a collection of stories revolving around the 4 consecutive seasons the St. Louis Cardinals made it to at least the National League Championship Series in 2011 through 2014. Sort of. Because it also includes a section on the 2022 season, when Albert Pujols came back for his last year and became only the 4th player to reach 700 home runs.
It more or less ignores the all the seasons in-between, minus some of the sections that discuss Adam Wainwright, since he was on the team throughout. Granted, the Cardinals didn't experience a ton of postseason success in the 2015-2021 years, but they did win 100 games in 2015, and they did make it to the NLCS in 2019, and they won 17 games in a row during the 2021 season to make the playoffs. And it isn't like the 2022 team was in the postseason for long, either. They lost a best-of-three series to the Phillies, in two games.
It's an especially odd reading experience because I guess, this being a revised edition, McNeal put the most recent stuff at the beginning. So you get the section on 2022, and then you jump backwards most of a decade, and keep working back from there. Each year is broken up into shorter pieces focused on a specific player or coach.
So in 2011, you've got a few pages on Matt Holliday and his injury issues, another few pages on Albert Pujols coming back from a broken bone in his wrist in 17 days (I forgot just how fast that dude recovered from injuries), Colby Rasmus getting traded for pitching, Chris Carpenter carrying the pitching staff (and behaving like an asshole on the field), David Freese's postseason heroics, Allen Craig's less-heralded postseason heroics, Lance Berkman's comeback year, Tony LaRussa's last season before (briefly) retiring, and Pujols signing with the Angels in free agency.
(McNeal titles that last one, "Pujols Takes the Money and Runs", which is certainly one way to describe Pujols exercising his right as a free agent to sign the contract he believes pays him the full value he's worth, after years of playing on one that paid him far less than his production merited because the collective bargaining agreement grants the Cardinals all the leverage in negotiations for the first 6 years of his career.)
But even within that style, McNeal usually doesn't confine a piece to strictly what the player did that season. The parts where he dips into the past - Holliday failing to catch a fly ball in the 2009 NLDS, David Freese not playing baseball at all for a year after he graduated high school - make sense, as part of the journey to whatever McNeal's really driving at. But he also discusses the player's later seasons and career trajectory, like Freese's continued injury problems after 2011 and how he was eventually traded.
A lot of the stories are ones I already knew from following the team, although there are details in there I wasn't always aware of. Shelby Miller and Joe Kelly being the best man for each other's weddings, and having a bet over whether either could get a hit off the other the first time they faced off after Kelly was traded to Boston (Kelly won that bet.) I'd forgotten about Holliday having to leave a game because a moth flew in his ear and he couldn't dig it out with his finger (and apparently attempts to sit in dark room, with just a little light coming through a crack in the door failed to entice the moth, because its head was too far in to see the light.)
It feels like there's a narrow sweet spot for this. You have to care about the Cardinals to begin with, but not in such a way where you were consuming enough writing about them at the time these events were taking place. Otherwise you know most of what you're reading already. Unless the reader is looking for the nostalgia fix, which is an impulse I can understand.
'Matt Holliday went for $100 in 2011 but had dropped to $75 by 2014. Michael Wacha, on the other hand, jumped from $5 in 2013 to $70 in the 2014 Winter Warm-Up, following his breakout October. David Freese had an even greater one-year increase, going from $5 to $75 following his dream postseason. Matt Carpenter cost $40 in 2014 just two years after being free. Jon Jay, meanwhile, had been a model of consistency. In 2014 his autograph was priced at $20 for the third straight year.'
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