In 2015 St. Louis, it’s not acceptable for the Cardinals to “just” win the pennant.
What a crazy sentence to type.
And it’s especially crazy to Cardinals fans who survived the 1970s, or to folks who sought salvation via Todd Zeile or Tom Brunansky between 1988 and 1995.
But the current Cardinals set themselves up for these champagne-soaked expectations — since winning it all in 2011, they’ve made the NLCS in each of the past three seasons. And so, simply qualifying for baseball’s “Final Four,” or even winning the pennant, is an underachievement for a team that does this often, as if those are “ho-hum” accomplishments.