The Cardinals are on pace to have the single greatest earned run prevention season of the last 100 years. There's plenty of qualifiers to that and reasons why it's not likely to keep up over the course of the entire year, but over the first three months, that's a cold hard fact. They're preventing runs in a way no one alive has ever really seen before -- and they're doing it without ace Adam Wainwright, who injured his Achilles tendon in just his fourth start of the season.
We'll get to how they're doing it, but first, let's explain how we can make that exclamatory statement.