Years from now when they are forced to consider these 2010 Cardinals, baseball historians will likely have one devil of a time trying to put this team in proper perspective.

Will they scratch their heads or tip their caps? Will they call this one of the most fascinating seasons they've ever seen or one of the grandest wastes of statistical genius the grand old game has ever produced?

With a little more than a month to go in this up-and-down season, the Cards are on the verge of a truly remarkable summer that could potentially produce a National League MVP and Triple Crown winner, a Cy Young winner and a rookie of the year — or at the very least serious contenders for all of baseball's top individual prizes — a feat that to my recollection has never occurred in baseball history.

Yet the way they have stumbled around over the past few weeks, the Cards are flirting dangerously close every night to applying the final, frustrating, self-inflicted wound that will knock them out of playoff contention. With an embarrassing 14-5 loss Saturday night to a Washington Nationals team that was 21 games under .500 when this series started Thursday, the Cardinals' postseason dreams are teetering on the brink.

And what will it mean to all those baseball scholars if Albert Pujols can pull off one of the greatest seasons in baseball history, Adam Wainwright can nab the Cy Young (while attempting to pull off the pitching Triple Crown as well) and Jaime Garcia flirts with the NL rookie of the year, and the Cardinals don't even get a sniff of the postseason?

That's one of the reasons Pujols always brushes aside the praise he receives every time he passes another significant individual baseball milestone with his favorite mantra of "I don't play for individual statistics. I play for championships," because he knows what the ultimate measure of a team game has to be.

It's always about victories and getting into October, and right now having lost nine of their last 12 games, the Cards are trying hard to turn this into a memorable season for all the wrong reasons.

Now to anyone who is still willing to cling to the blindly optimistic "they're ONLY 4 games out of first place," or "Hey, they're ONLY 1 1/2 back in the wild card," I can only say that you have not been paying attention.

The Cards are officially in trouble. Even if they are bailed out by another Cy Young-like performance from Wainwright on Sunday, they could easily go into Houston and get gashed by the suddenly hot Astros (winners of six of their last 10, 10 of 16) and come stumbling back into town for next weekend's supposed big series against the first-place Cincinnati Reds dead (or near dead) on arrival.

It's now officially really late, and this is a team that doesn't look anything like it has what it takes to survive the last few weeks of a playoff chase against a Reds team that simply refuses to roll over and die like we all expected two weeks ago when the Cards swept them in Cincy.

This looks like a team that is clearly wounded physically and perhaps emotionally, too. You sweep a strong Reds team on the road, then lose nine of your next 12 to the sorry, no-account Cubs, mediocre Brewers, lousy Pirates and last-place Nationals?

Over the course of the next seven days, the notion of baseball in October could be rendered null and void if they keep struggling like this against so many inferior teams. There are a million reasons why this team has struggled so much, most of it surrounding the unforeseen rash of injuries that seemed to put Tony La Russa on his managerial heels from the start.

But for whatever bad hand has been dealt to this team, in spite of itself, it remains in position to still make something of this season. Only twice in baseball history has a team had two men win the Cy Young and MVP in the same season (the '05 Cards with Chris Carpenter and Pujols and the '06 Minnesota Twins with Johan Santana and Justin Morneau) and both won division titles and advanced to the playoffs.

This franchise has earned a lot of significant pages in baseball's history books for so much achievement. Let's hope the next chapter doesn't include the notoriety of being the first team that sweeps all three of the NL's top individual awards (rookie of the year ,too) while finishing out of the playoffs.