TOWER GROVE — Adam Wainwright’s final start of the season did more than give him a 5-0 dash to the end of the season since his return from the disabled list. It rounded out a tidy total of starts for the young righthander, a group of performances that when put together not only illustrate what a full season from Wainwright might look like but also the company he keeps.

He has an elite peer group.

Since the 2007 All-Star break, Wainwright has made 35 starts, about the target for a complete season by a staff ace. He has thrown 231 2/3 innings in those starts, gone 18-8, struck out 168 batters and posted a 2.99 ERA. Of the starting pitchers with at least 200 innings and 30 starts in that same span, Wainwright is one of six with an ERA less than 3.00. Four of the five have won a Cy Young Award in their career, and the fifth is the favorite to win his first this season, San Francisco’s Tim Lincecum. The top 10, ranked by ERA in that span (* Cy Young winner):

1. CC Sabathia*, MIL/CLE … 24-14, 2.72 ERA, 360 2/3 ip, 50 games/50 starts
2. Tim Lincecum, SF … 21-8, 2.81 ERA, 301 1/3 ip, 46 games/45 starts
3. Roy Halladay*, TOR … 26-15, 2.86 ERA, 362 1/3 ip, 49 games/48 starts
4. Jake Peavy*, SD … 20-14, 2.88 ERA, 278 ip, 43 games/43 starts
5. Johan Santana*, MN-NY … 21-14, 2.98 ERA, 332 1/3 ip, 49 games/49 starts
6. Adam Wainwright, STL … 18-8, 2.99 ERA, 231 2/3 ip, 35 games/35 starts
7. Cole Hamels, PHI … 19-11, 3.02 ERA, 292 ip, 43 games/43 starts
8. Brandon Webb*, AZ … 32-11, 3.06 ERA, 332 ip, 49 games/49 starts
9. Scott Kazmir, TB … 20-11, 3.06 ERA, 246 2/3 ip, 42 games/42 starts
10. Tim Hudson, ATL … 19-12, 3.13 ERA, 244 1/3 ip, 38 games/37 starts

But, then, Wainwright is missing a few starts.

It’s safe to argue that the Cardinals’ 2008 season shifted on a curveball, literally and figuratively.

While warming up for a start on June 7 at Houston, Wainwright felt an odd sensation in a finger on his right hand. He described it later that night as a pop, or a small crack. He cracked his knuckles and the sensation vanished — until the sixth inning of that game. Wainwright tried to snap off a curveball. Couldn’t. He shook off the call for another curveball, and then he couldn’t locate a fastball. His pressure finger had failed him. The tendon pulley in it had ruptured.

The Cardinals went the next 2 1/2 months without their ace.

That begs the question: What If Wainwright Had Not Felt that Pop?

Unlike the previous What Ifs this week, gauging exactly how Wainwright would have pitched in his missed starts and what that would mean for the team is tricky. Do you go game by game and try to replace the pitching the Cardinals got with the pitching Wainwright might have provided? Do you pull out the PlayStation 2 or the Dynasty League Baseball dice and see where a Wainwright takes the Cardinals? There’s no real concrete way to splice Wainwright’s would-be starts into the actual starts. So, it takes a leap of statistical faith.

Pull out a Cardinals calendar it is possible to figure that Wainwright would have made 13 starts.

A rough, though educated, guess of those starts and what happened in them:

June 12, at CIN … LOSS … Joel Pineiro goes 5 innings, 2 ER

June 17, KC … LOSS … Joel Pineiro goes 7 innings, 1 ER

June 22, at BOS … LOSS … Joel Pineiro goes 7 innings, 2 ER

June 28, at KC … WIN … Mitchell Boggs goes 6 innings, 1 ER

July 3, NYM … LOSS … Mitchell Boggs goes 6 innings, 10 ER

July 8, at PHI … WIN … Joel Pineiro goes 6 1/3 innings, 0 ER

July 13, at PIT … WIN … Joel Pineiro goes 5 2/3 innings, 6 ER

July 19, SD … WIN … Todd Wellemeyer goes 6 1/3 innings, 5 ER

July 24, MIL … LOSS … Todd Wellemeyer goes 5 innings, 2 ER

July 29, at ATL …WIN … Todd Wellemeyer goes 6 innings, 2 ER

Aug 3, PHI … LOSS … Todd Wellemeyer goes 6 innings, 1 ER

Aug 9, at CHI … WIN… Todd Wellemeyer goes 6 2/3 innings, 3 ER

Aug 14, at FLA … WIN … Todd Wellemeyer goes 7 2/3 innings, 0 ER

TOTALS … 7-6 … TW 6, JP 5, Boggs 2 … 80 2/3 innings … 3.90 ERA

The Cardinals got representative starts in those games, mainly because Pineiro pitched well and Wellemeyer fell on the same date after the All-Star break. Obviously, both would have still made their starts — especially Wellemeyer — had Wainwright remained healthy, so maybe it’s better to look at the cameo starters, the Boggs of the equation, who got starts in place of starters. Combined Boggs, Mike Parisi and Jaime Garcia made nine starts. And in those nine starts they went 3-3 with a 8.86 ERA.

How much better would Wainwright have been in those starts? Here’s the leap.

Wainwright had 13 starts before he felt the pop in his finger, and it’s possible just to double his first 13 starts and call it a blog. Say he repeated his first 13 starts of the season in his second 13 starts of the season and then finished with the same 5-0 push, this would have been his line:

17-6, 3.18 ERA, 223 2/3 innings, 202 H, 54 BB, 153 K

It’s a good season, and not an unrealistic season.

The better way would be to go game by game and consider Wainwright’s performances against said team, and also to consider that his final seven starts would have been slightly shifted. (Note: In the guess schedule above, Wainwright would have been on target to start three times against the Cubs, a team he just beat for the first time in his career on Sept. 19.) That would be labor intensive and not as rewarding for the hours of input. But there is another way to look at the Missing 13.

Start by taking a look at the Missing 13’s schedule above.

Of that group, eight were scheduled to be road games, and five were scheduled to be at pitcher-friendly Busch Stadium. Applying Wainwright’s home-road splits to those games and refiguring how he and the Cardinals would have done in those games, it’s possible to get a cleaner, more refined estimate of Wainwright’s Missing 13 starts.

This is what his 2008 statistics actually were:

11-3, 3.20 ERA, 132 innings, 122 H, 34 BB, 91 K

As modified in the what-if scenario described above (and re-recalculated to be sure):

17-7, 3.29 ERA, 216 1/3 inninngs, 199 H, 57 BB, 161 K

Not too unrealistic. Not too shabby. But the truth of what Wainwright would have done in his Missing 13 starts and, then, what it would have meant to the Cardinals to have 33 starts from Wainwright is somewhere in between. There wouldn’t have been the early exposure for the rookies — but there might not have been a Boggs-like performance at Fenway Park, either. The real benefit would have been the certainties of Wainwright’s presence. Not only wins. Not only that ERA. No. It would have meant less of a rotation scramble late in the season to cover starts. And if there had never been a pop, there would have been less innings left to an unsettled and eventually fried bullpen.

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