Propitious omen or mere coincidence?

To celebrate Opening Day I bought a pack of Topps 2007 baseball cards today, and look who was in there.

Apparently there's a lot of dreck in the Topps 2007 set, like 100 cards that feature the date of Mickey Mantle (WTF??!!) home runs, and 40 different cards that celebrate each of David Wright's 40 doubles in 2006... I guess more = better.

Unlike the Topps cards, however, 2007's version of Opening Day/Night retains all its magical allure: the end of months of non-baseball; the end of the ever-more-excruciating preseason---each day of which is further removed from the words "pitchers and catcher report," just the compilation of more ultimately meaningless evidence that it's not the real thing yet; all the potential: all the what-ifs?, all the can theys? are still hanging in the air but each begins to be answered starting with the first pitch by Carp at 7:05 tonight....

My hopes and dreams after the break:

I'm keeping it simple:

Just make the postseason, and take it from there. That certainly seemed to work in 2006.

The World Series championship seemed vaguely unreal to me: I was so underwhelmed by the team that slouched their way into the postseason, and I never expected them to do much damage, unlike my hopes for the 2004 and 2005 teams.

The emotional high point for me, even more so than the eventual WS win, was winning Game 7 against the Mets in the NLCS: I jumped and whooped after the Wainwright kneebuckler and screamed to my wife "We're going to the World Series" and I felt an excitment and exhilaration that wasn't matched after the subsequent series win. That was probably due to the ridiculous Game 7 to cap off a very tense down-to-the-wire series, as compared to a sloppy, rain-delayed almost anticlimactic 5 Game WS dubbed by more than one cybercommentator "Worst Series Ever."

But it sure is sweet being World Champs (and let's face it: as lifelong fans of the Cardinals, we're World Champs, too) as we head into Opening Night.

I know the pundits are picking the Birds to win anywhere from 72 to 86 games, and I have to admit that it may be tough to see how we'd do much better---or even as well as---that upper figure.

But I see this 2007 team as a potential "breakout" team----as much as a defending World Series champion can be.

Various preseason forecasts have the Birds as a strong pitching-and-defense squad---many have them as 1st or 2nd in the league in run prevention---but almost all have the Cardinals in the bottom third of the league in scoring runs.

I read about how the Cardinals are Albert Pujols then a couple of injury-scarred vets past their primes surrounded by a bunch of black holes.

I just don't see it that way.

Here are the Birds avg/obp/slg by position in 2006:

C: .221/.277/.328 (.605 ops)
1b: .325/.416/.641 (1.057 ops)
2b: .263/.326/.375 (.701 ops)
3b: .305/.379/.554 (.933 ops)
ss: .290/.350/.361 (.711 ops)
lf: .273/.344/.434 (.778 ops)
cf: .252/.336/.404 (.739 ops)
rf: .272/.323/.469 (.793 ops)

The only OPSs up there that don't figure to rise are at 3b, where Spiezio kicked butt when filling in for Rolen, helping tp propel that number beyond Rolen's .887, and in RF, where Juancion's .760 was added to by baby Dunc.

But I foresee increases at C, where I continue to insist, as I have for two years, that there is a .275 avg./700 ops hitter inside Yadier Molina; at 2b, where Adam Kennedy has been well above---well, above, anyway---for the last 5 years the .701 contributed by our trio of second sackers in 2006; at LF, where I hope and pray the baby Dunc isn't a fluke and at CF, where I believe a scraped and sanded Jim Edmonds will put up at least an .850.

If all that happens, and Scott Rolen hits .280/.360/.500, we'll be fine no matter what happens in RF and we'll score 850 runs because of Albert and we'll win the Central, again.

After that, anything is possible.