That's what I'm listening to, as I lament the loss of Cory Lidle, by Dusty Springfield. What an odd and sad end to the Yankees' season. False reports that NYC pulled a STL on Joe Torre, Yanks Viagra lineup can't score runs, and now a good baseball guy does a sorry number while flying his plane. RIP Cory Lidle.

And a fitting rain on that tragedy knocks the Birds and Mets out of the sky as well. The only thing on the field tonight is the tarp, but the fact remains we're back in Shea. The alleged mortal wound of losing Pedro and El Duque has turned into a flesh wound, as the Mets cruised down an easy street covered in Dodgers' jerseys and lead by John Maine, Tom Glavine, and Steve Trachsel. What the? We'll see how these guy hold up against a much more solid STL lineup. The bigger than El Duque loss is the loss of Duaner Sanchez, the strictly unhittable righty from their bullpen. Aaron Heilman and to a lesser extent Pedro Feliciano and Chad Bradford are still hanging around to keep it respectable after the seventh, but I think a 7 game series will show more holes in the Mets pitching than their season team averages might make us think.

This rainout also gives us a nice potential for some flexibility with Carpenter. After Suppan, our staff gets quickly flat. The good news is that LaRussa appears to have his head about him and left Marquis off the roster in favor of Anthony Reyes. Who knows when we'll need this kid to pitch, but it will be a lot more often than we'd need Marquis to pinch hit. But the key to us getting through a 7 game series is managing momentum through Carpenter. Suppan is a great play, he's nearly guaranteed to give up 3 runs, no more, no less in 6 or 7 innings. Weaver seems to have the odd ability to dominate a game, but count on him getting tagged hard sometime. David Wright, Carlos Beltran and Carlos Delgado are absolute monsters, possibly the best threesome in the game. You show them Jeff Weaver one too many times and one of those guys is gonna break a car window with a baseball.

This should be a classic series.

Instead of Cardinal red, I've been watching the A's and Tigers play for the second night. I tell you, I'm a renewed fan of pitchers who can throw the ball more than 95 mph and locate at all. I'm also a big fan of Jim Leyland, Thames and Monroe hitting deep in the lineup, Milton Bradley ("I'm Milton Bradley, who the Frank_Thomas are you?"), Nick Swisher, Carlos Guillen, Placido Palanco (remember this guy who TLR couldn't find a daily spot for?) and Ivan "Nomar Pudge" Rodriguez. How about Detroit's starting pitching? We can't hear enough about Oakland's rotation, but Detroit is downright dangerous from the first pitch. Enough about the human interest story of Kenny Rogers, the guy is great in action and great to watch.

Oh, to manufacture or not to manufacture, that is the question.

The Cards can do both, and will need to against the Mets' pitching and solid offense. We'll need to both pick away, grab run-by-run innings as well as put up the 3-run homer sometimes. We'll need tight pitching from Johnson and Wainwright. We'll need honesty from Rolen and good eyes from Edmonds. We'll need pitching from guys we don't expect and hitting from our corners. We'll need Belly from Belliard. We'll need Albert to be Albert and Carp to be Carp.

And we'll need to play hard. This is a fight now, we have no calculated edge coming into this thing. As Fela Kuti would say, "I don't be gentleman at all, no." It's time to step up.