I need to apologize to Edmonds. It turns out he had a darn good reason to look clueless at the plate:

Edmonds mentioned to assistant trainer Greg Hauck that he was having difficulty focusing and had blurred vision before taking the field for the fifth inning... Until he woke up Wednesday, Edmonds had thought it was only the second inning when he came out...

There were other shaky moments on Tuesday. During his second at-bat, which ended with an awkward swing for strike three on a pitch from Aaron Harang that was up and in, Edmonds said he was just trying to survive.

"I swung at a pitch and felt like I was going to, not literally, but fall over," Edmonds said. "I was like, wow, how am I going to get through this?"

Yeah, wow. Get it taken care of, Jim. You only get one brain. I'm not real happy to see LaRussa pushing/hinting for Edmonds' quick return. Jeez, put the man on the disabled list to prevent something silly.

Anthony Reyes's outing was a big downer in its own right. Consider this:

That's some substantial deterioration at the major league level, especially in the walks category. Yeah, I know major league hitters are better. That said, I saw Edwin Encarnacion at AAA a year ago, and he wasn't shooting rockets all over the field. So unless he went to Harry Potter's school during the offseason, he doesn't have magical MLB hitter dust. OK, there are adjustments and yadda yadda yadda. Still, if it was that big of a difference, would Chris Duncan have an OPS 200 points lower at Memphis in 2006?

The thing is, all of the Cardinals non-Cy Young starters have struggled this season. Meanwhile Dan Haren is throwing another six shutout innings. Mark Mulder was probably damaged goods; we can curse Billy Beane and the mindset that the Cardinals Needed Big Name Pitching to win in the post-season. There's a bigger problem here though. In spite of Bernie Miklasz's repeated complaints to the contrary, the Cardinals have invested a decent chunk of resources in their pitching, and most of that investment has been in players they've had ample opportunity to develop and evaluate up-close-and-personal. Haren, Marquis, the 2006 Mulder, Suppan, Reyes -- these are the guys the Cardinals should've known better than anyone (or anything, in the case of statistics). It just doesn't look that way.

The final downer of the night was Timo Perez, the outfielder with the career 77 OPS+ hitting in the 5th spot of the lineup. They say the ball will find a weak defensive player. In this case the key at-bats found the weak hitter, as Timo twice batted with the bases loaded. Man, the Cardinals have some tough questions to ask themselves.