Interesting proposition. I'm hardly an expert on any of the other eras, but the thing that strikes me most about the 2000-04 Cardinals -- not to mention seperates them from the '80s teams -- is their consistency from year to year. 95-93-97-85-105 wins, and not a year below .500. That's good.

Yeah, I'll admit that may also be a function of the division format, plus a weak Central in several of those years, but it sure does look pretty.

To add a point, here's the Pythagorean wins, which is even more consistent year-to-year (obviously, the difference between '03 and '04 is going to be significant no matter what):

91-94-95-88-100

I've got a soft spot in my heart for the Silver Age Cardinals, since that's the team I grew up watching, but I always got the impression (I don't have the time to actually crunch some numbers, assuming that I would know what I'm doing if I do) that the Cardinals were never more dominant in the league than they were in the Golden Age.

By winning percentage, 1st place finished and WS wins, the Cards of the 40s crush the rest (960-580, .623, 4 1st place, 3 WS wins), but the Cards of the 2000s could eclipse them by winning 3 WS in the next 5 years.

I'd rather be the Yankees than the Braves.

It seems strange to list the 1935 Cards---who finished 2nd despite their 96 wins---while omitting the pennant-winning 1930 team. I mean, how dominant were you if you didn't even finish 1st?

And I always took those '40s teams with a grain of salt; they were great, no doubt, and dominant, but the whole game was turned upside-down by the loss of talent to the military as well as the reconstitution of the baseball itself (no rubber center--the '42 team had 60 hr, the '43 team had 70).

So the 1930 Cardinals should have been included, and the '27 team as well. They will be a part of my final piece.

Check out The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract for a more detailed formula to measure this question. Look at the 1950s section. The 1940s Cardinals are easily the best in team history and are in fact considered by James to have a "five year score" that ranks as the third highest of all time.

This exercise depends wholly on the meaning given to the word "best." If you are planning on staging some sort of time-warp series where Lou Brock leads off against Bill Doak then good luck. If, on the other hand, you are defining "best" as "in relation to other teams in the league," which is usually how historical players and teams are rated in these types of things, then the fact that the Swifties (which is what I always thought was the nickname for those teams, unless Throne can point me to where they are called "Golden Age") ruled during armed conflict is not of much consequence to me.

As for the notion that those teams can be dismissed because it was wartime, I don't buy it. Using that type of thinking, we have to discount every single team prior to the total integration of baseball, if that can ever be measured (and no, Jackie Robinson's rookie year does not count - one player on one team does not make the type of difference I'm talking about.)

Say it with me - 1940s Cardinals. Musial, Slaughter, Cooper, Cooper, Moore, Marion, Hopp, Kurowski, Beazley, Walker, Lanier, Breechen, Schoendienst, Pollet.

All good points.

I am a firm believer in not discounting a team or individuals accomplishments ruing a period solely because of something that didn't occur at any other time (like a World War or segregation). TNBJHBA has scores of examples beyond the ones, Flynn cited.

For example, and this may open up another can of worms, Barry Bonds. Should he be asterisked if he's found to have taken steroids?

Baseball didn't take a stand on steroids until just recently (if you can call it that), so in my belief, everything Bonds accomplished (steroids or not) prior should be considered as part of the period he played in.

The McGwire-and-on Cardinals need a better name, too. I vote "Raking Redbirds."

Yeah, given the evidence presented, I have to agree about those '40s Cardinal teams: when you look at the sheer collection of "name" talent----war or no war---there's no doubt that they were an extraordinary collection of ballplayers that would have success in any era.