By the Iron_Throne

We’ve already touched on this, but who were the best Cardinals in history? One of the oldest and most storied franchises in baseball, the Cardinals have had more than their share of success. From the Gashouse Gang of the thirties to this year’s pennant winning team, the Birds on the Bat have enthralled their fans (we’ll leave out anything from before about 1926, since the Cardinals may have been a major league team, but rarely played like it). But how do you measure greatness? By pennants and rings? With our eyes? How about by Hall of Famers? We’re all supposed to be statheads here to some degree or another, so there must be a statistical method that can give us some pointers.

Rob Neyer and Eddie Epstein in their book, Baseball Dynasties developed a system for ranking the best baseball dynasties of all time. They did this by taking the number of standard deviations above or below the mean a team was in runs scored and runs allowed, and added them together to get a “Standard Deviation Score (SD)” for that team. They then ranked team dynasties; that is they gave two year, three year, four year, and five year SD scores to teams to rank them in an all time list. This method has the advantage of comparing a team to its league. With differences over history in rules, the players allowed to play, training regimens, and the size of the league, direct comparisons between two eras can’t be made. This method puts no weight on pennants or rings won, simply because in 1934 there were sixteen teams, and in 2004 there are thirty. All things being equal, it’s about twice as hard to win a pennant or the World Series now than it was then.

With all that said, we can get down to brass tacks. As I said previously, the Cardinals have won in discreet bunches. There are very few teams that have had only one good year. In fact, the only good Cardinals team that was distinct from any other was the 88 win 1996 team under Tony LaRussa. Starting from the beginning, the Cardinals as a team weren’t good at the start of modern baseball. Their first winning teams were the late twenties-mid thirties teams that culminated in the Gashouse Gang of ’34 and ’35. And starting in 1942, the Cardinals had one of the best decades in baseball history, winning during the war period, and just dominating afterwards. This was followed a generation later by the Bob Gibson/Lou Brock Cardinals of the sixties, the team a lot of our fathers grew up with. In the eighties came the team whose shadow still looms long over the landscape: the Running Redbirds. With three world series teams and one ring, they set the bar for the current Cards to exceed. And we all know the Cardinals of today; everyone reading this probably has a Pujols T-shirt, or sleeps under their Jason Isringhausen bed sheets and wears their Jim Edmonds Baseball Pants—Now with GrassStainz^TM!

I posted a poll earlier this week to see what teams our loyal readers considered the best Cards teams of all time. The results came back rather surprising; I was expecting the Running Redbirds to do very well, at least not come in last. I’m not surprised that the current model Cardinals didn’t do well; it’s always hard to appreciate what you have in front of you. With the Musial and Gibson teams running neck and neck, we ask, what do the numbers say?

Well, they say that you never can trust your childhood memories. Below is a chart showing just how dominant the 40’s Cards were. These are the SD scores for the teams. The SD scores are made from the number of standard deviations above the mean a team is in its runs scored plus the number of standard deviations below the mean in runs allowed. One standard deviation above the mean in runs scored means that a team would score more than 68% of the teams, and two standard deviations means that they would score more runs than 95% of the teams. It breaks down that a team with an SD score over 3 is an all-time great team, over two is a very good team, and about 1.8 or so is usually the best team in the league.

year	hitting pitching SD score
1949	0.714	1.634	2.348
1948	0.748	0.815	1.562
1947	0.824	1.191	2.015
1946	1.527	1.209	2.736
1945	0.734	1.144	1.878
1944	1.401	1.652	3.053
1943	0.888	1.544	2.432
1942	0.891	0.931	1.822

These Cardinals were just phenomenal: three good teams, three very good teams, and a 1944 team that was one of the best ever. And before anyone makes the argument that they should be discounted because of the war, I’d like to see the line in the draft law where Cards were exempt. And besides, when the players came back in 1946, the Cards were better. Now compare this to the Gibson teams:

year	hitting pitching SD score
1968	0.387	1.447	1.835
1967	1.124	1.059	2.184
1966   -1.349	0.996  -0.353
1965	0.614  -0.263	0.351
1964	0.806  -0.004	0.802
1963	1.480  -0.168	1.312

One very good team in ’67, one good team in ’68, two average teams in the middle, and two teams that were lucky to win their leagues. There really isn’t much of a contest here, the 40’s teams were better longer, at their peak, and in nearly every year, before and after the end of the War. This doesn’t make the 60’s teams bad, it’s just that Musial's Cards were just that good.

The Running Redbirds polled very poorly, and this is most likely due to that fact that they had three good years with three poor years in between.

year	hitting pitching SD score
1987	1.165	0.773	1.937
1986   -1.418	1.012  -0.406
1985	1.686	1.366	3.052
1984   -0.116	0.233	0.117
1983	0.314  -1.285  -0.971
1982	0.404	1.353	1.758

What shouldn’t be overlooked is that the ’85 team was extremely good, one of the all time great teams by this metric. They could hit, they could run, all of it. But the down years really cost them as a dynasty; you have to be good continually if you want to take the crown as Best Cardinals Dynasty.

The biggest disservice, though, is done to the current team. They have only one pennant to their credit, two heart breaking LCS losses, and 2001, where they lost to an inferior team that just happened to have their value packed into the top of their rotation. It’s either this lack of shiny rings or a grass-is-always-greener mindset that keeps us from seeing the real team:

year	hitting pitching SD score
2004	1.322	1.130	2.452
2003	1.552  -0.555	0.998
2002	1.299	0.903	2.202
2001	0.749	1.091	1.841
2000	0.993	0.601	1.594

Of course this last year, the team was very good, but not at the level of all time great like the ’85 or ’43 teams. The 2002 team that lost to the Giants was also a very good team, and the two that came before it were serviceable as well. Only the disappointing 2003 team hurts the current dynasty, even though it had the best hitting of the five, and in fact only behind the ’85 team in scoring runs for all of the teams under discussion; but substandard pitching keeps them from being an all time great team.

And finally, there were the early century teams, spread over ten years:

year	hitting pitching SD score
1935	1.207	1.031	2.238
1934	1.481	0.738	2.220
1933	1.254	0.056	1.310
1932   -0.348  -0.148  -0.497
1931	1.244	1.156	2.400
1930	1.023	0.710	1.734
1929	0.045	0.212	0.257
1928	1.102	0.721	1.823
1927	1.238	0.549	1.787
1926	1.099	0.286	1.385

These teams were good for the longest consecutive period of time, but had two years in which they were average to poor. I place them behind the 40’s teams, and ahead of the shorter and more erratic 60’s and 80’s teams. The question remains how they stack up to our modern team. Their run was twice as long as the current team has to this point, and even though they didn’t have to contend with free agency, longevity is important. The modern team’s best was better than the 1931 team, though the second tier ’34-35 teams were better than the 2002 team. Over the five years of the modern team, they have a cumulative 9.087 SD score, compared with five year sums of 8.001 for the ’26 to ’30 teams and 7.671 for the ’31 to ’35 teams (the two highest 5 year scores). It’s a bit of a toss up between these two teams, with the current Cards being better at their peak, and the earlier teams good over a longer period of time. The current team, however, has a chance to improve on its record while the ’36 Cards slipped in the rankings and weren’t seen again until 1942.

I’ll admit that the original purpose of this article was to prove that the modern teams were every bit as good as those that came before, but I have a new appreciation for the history of the team. I hadn’t realized just how good the teams were in the forties, or how spoiled the citizens of Saint Louis must have been from 1926 to 1949. I didn’t have an understanding just how good that 1985 team that I barely remember was, or how good the ’67-’68 teams were. I just hope we can all realize how lucky we are to have this franchise, and that the current team stacks up very well in the context of history.

the Iron_Throne