DENVER — St. Louis Cardinals pitching coach Dave Duncan, as he is often apt to do as a Dugout Socrates, answered a question with a question.

“Let me ask it to you in this way,” he said the other day in Houston. “If we were to face Roy Oswalt at his best today and then face him again next week, is facing him today an advantage for us?”

The answer-and-question was in response to an inquiry about the pluses and minuses of facing a potential postseason opponent this close to the postseason. The Cardinals will start Chris Carpenter tonight and Adam Wainwright on Saturday against the Colorado Rockies — which means both the Rockies lineup and the Cardinals presumptive Game 1 and Game 2 starts will see each other on the eve of a possible playoff meeting. In the time-honored Tony La Russa rule of not getting “too cute”, the Cardinals never toyed with setting up this series any other way.

But I wondered if such a series did offer a plus for the pitchers, who get a quick refresher course on an opponent that’s better than any video can offer.

Duncan didn’t agree, necessarily.

“All your top of the rotation guys, they’re top of the rotation guys because they have more than one way to get you out,” Duncan said. “They’re not one dimensional pitchers. If they were one-dimensional pitchers it probably would work to your disadvantage. If he pitches good, then it’s beneficial to him. If he doesn’t, then it might bolster the confidence of the other team.”

The same question was posed to the two Cardinals pitchers and their very differents answers is where we begin today’s 10@10, live from the Courtyard by Marriott’s business center here at the 16th Street Mall (long story):

1. Said Carpenter: “I don’t think so. I mean I don’t look at it that way. I look at it as one start. I start on Friday and I’m going to take it like I always do.” Wainwright had a different view, seeing his start against Colorado as a chance to gain first-hand intelligence more than anything. “Yeah. Yeah, I think so,” he said. “Any time you can have some more experience facing a hitter and learn their waysd and tendencies is a little bit more for the pitcher. I think the advantage is always lies with the pitcher. If we can exploit or find out some weaknesses over there then, yeah.

“We faced them a long time ago,” Wainwright said. “They swept us obviously. We’re a different team now.”

2.La Russa was quick to quash any idea that this series was any different than, say, the one in Houston this past week or the one coming up in Cincinnati. Sure, they may see Colorado in October. Sure, the Rockies swept them in four games earlier this season. Sure, sure, sure. But it would be a mistake to paint this series with any sort of postseason brush because October is different, the manager said. The manager was in a movie mood in Houston and he described how there is no Rudy moment or Red Herrings coming this weekend, not this time of year. “I don’t think you complicate it,” he said. “It’s a three-game series against a major-league team. You don’t tell them, ‘Hey, let’s play better!’ Or, ‘Let’s lose on purpose so we don’t show them our game.’ Or, ‘Let’s make sure we do this’ You just play and see what happens. Maybe I’m too simple, but that’s the approach that works here. Otherwise, you’ve got to come up with something dramatic every single series. And I can’t.”

We then all agreed that was the writers’ jobs. 

3. Within the Cardinals’ clubhouse, shortstop Brendan Ryan is viewed as the best defensive shortstop in the league. Clearly, there’s a bias. But a few opponents have echoed that opinion this season, and Chris Carpenter recently said that Ryan is probably the best shortstop he’s had behind him in his career. His resume may not be long enough to capture the Gold Glove this season, and he’s certainly not yet in the conversation presented by today’s poll. Colorado’s shortstop is. Troy Tulowitzki, who wears No. 2 for the obvious reason a shortstop of his age does, hit his 30th home run last night, staking Colorado to a brief 3-0 lead. One reason by the Rockies are back in the mix for the postseason is because Tulowitzki is back in the lineup. That inspires today’s poll, the 200th poll posted here at Bird Land:

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4. If you’ve been watching the fluctuations this season on ESPN.com’s “Cy Predictor”, you’ll be interested to note that it has settled recently on a clear favorite in the National League: Adam Wainwright. The Cy Predictor is based on an equation of stats devised by Bill James and Rob Neyer. It assigns point values to various indicators they believe influence Cy Young votes, including a 12-point bump for leading a team to the division title. Both Wainwright and Carpenter get that, but oddly wedged between the two is Jonathan Broxton, the Los Angeles Dodgers closer. Those three are the top three according to the Predictor. That is, until Carpenter pitches tonight. That’s how this race is going …

5. Cardinals first baseman Albert Pujols is in a heated race for one title he’s never won: The RBI title. Sluggers Prince Fielder and Ryan Howard have pulled ahead in the National League, tied atop the totals with 132 RBIs each. (They also each have 42 homers, five behind the league-leading 47 from Pujols.) The MVP favorite Pujols has never won a home run crown or RBI title in his career, and a late surge here in the season’s final nine games could clinch both. He’ll be in favorable situations:

at Colorado (career) … .304/.387/.627 … 9 HR, 29 games

at Cincinnati (career) … .327/.407/.628 … 15 HR, 50 games

vs. Milwaukee (season) … .321/.464/.642 … 4 HR, 15 games

6. Cardinals chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. repeated his goal to sign both Matt Holliday and lockup Pujols this winter, this time to SI.com’s Jon Heyman. Several years ago, the Colorado Avalanche were faced with a free-agent nightmare. Three of their best players were about to hit the market. They had just won the 2001 Stanley Cup and three cornerstones of that team were up for free agency — Joe Sakic, Rob Blake and Patrick Roy. (All All-Stars and perhaps a hat trick of Hall of Famers, too.) The Avs GM, racing the clock for free agency, orchestrated an interesting approach. He had the three players talk. Together they decided to stay with the team, with the group that had won, because playing together — rather than seeking riches apart — was the most attractive offer they were going to get. Now, there was money. The Avs didn’t scrimp on the offer. That is key. The total package to three players was worth about $120 million. And they signed before ever hitting free agency. One wonders if a similar gambit, modified of course to allow for baseball’s culture, would be worth pursuing for the Cardinals and the muscle in the middle of their order.

7.The skybox on this morning’s paper in Denver reads: “CARDS FLYING HIGH ON HOLLIDAY SPIRIT”, and it features a cutout of Holliday in his Cardinals road jersey. (Quick aside: This is my first time back in Colorado, where I grew up, since THIS happened. And I was heartsick this morning seeing only one paper for sale, and it wasn’t the paper I grew up to work for. Awful. RIP Rocky.) The Denver Post sports page is built around a photo of Holliday chest-bumping Brendan Ryan, and in Troy Renck’s article this morning, Holliday talks about the atmosphere in St. Louis (even after a rain delay) and former teammate Jason Giambi calls him a “great hitter.” Holliday also continues offering the same wishlist when it comes what he’ll look for when it comes to free agency this winter. You may have read how he described it in my side bar in the Post-Dispatch today, and here is what he told Renck:

“I have gained a lot of knowledge and learned a lot. I enjoy being in a winning environment. But I don’t want to exert any energy on free agency right now. It wouldn’t be fair to my team or teammates with what we have left to accomplish.” 

8.FARMNIK REPORT: Team USA won it’s 12th consecutive game in World Cup play, downing Cuba 5-3 in Nettuno, Italy. Cardinals farmhand Daniel Descalso is with the team overseas. He’s started five games at second base, and he’s hitting .235/.381/.471 with three runs scored, two RBIs, four hits and a home run. The U.S. team will face the Netherlands today.

9.As much I like to track the As So Often Happens in each game (ASOH if you’ve seen it on the Twitter/dgoold feed), I also get a kick out baseball’s moles, so to speak. That was certainly the case last night. At a restaurant here in downtown Denver, the locals fretted not only their home nine’s loss to San Diego but the creeping reality that San Francisco was going to defeat the Cubs and inch closer in the Wild Card standings. (A Giants’ win, of course, would have clinched the division for the Cardinals; I had the story written and ready as the ninth inning in San Francisco played on.) And then with two outs and two strikes, a mole took over. Jeff Baker hit a home run that put the Cubs ahead and kept Colorado’s cushion in tact. Consider him the baseball equivalent of a double agent. That homer was more for the Rockies than it was for the Cubs. And that’s fitting. Baker started the season with Colorado before a trade to the Cubs. Like they had the plant planned.  

10.One of the pleasant things about going to Houston is seeing the row of paintings that line the hallway into the visitors clubhouse. Some of them change every year, with this year featuring a montage of celebration snapshots from the Philadelphia Phillies World Series championship and another that aligns the farewell moments of Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle at Yankee Stadium. The paintings are the work of Opie Otterstad, whom I’ve mentioned before in the blog. You can tour his work at his Web site: http://www.opieart.com/. There’s a rather striking one he did of Pujols (is that some Warhol in there?), there’s an interesting one he did of an Aramis Ramirezwalk-off homer against the Cardinals (always thought it interesting that that one hangs outside the clubhouse, even when the Cardinals visit), and of course there’s the one he did of the Cardinals celebrating the World Series in 2006. Opie attended the series this past week and he had a story about capturing this celebration:

Opie Otterstad's painting of the Cardinals' 2006 World Series celebration.

Because he uses various photos of the players celebration to create the painting, he has been known to place a player multiple times in the painting. Tim Salmon, he said, is in the Angels’ painting four times. This paint was also hanging outside the clubhouse, and Opie showed a few of us how one Cardinal appears twice.

Care to guess who?

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Lagniappe answer from a few days ago: The HALO midnight king … Todd Wellemeyer.

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