The St Louis Cardinals, As Excellent as it will get

With the NL Central race being a tie between the Cardinals and the Reds many people are wondering who will come out on top. There are those that will say that the Reds are on fire and cannot be stopped. The other side will be quick to point out that the Cardinals are on fire as well and are matching the Reds hit for hit.

It seems like only yesterday that St Louis was winning their Championship. Since then the team has been an unstoppable force to contend with. This has led the team to be the one team that gets locked into the sights of the other teams. Tony Larussa has done a standup job in creating a team that is able to compete year after year.

While many times they are unsuccessful, there have been a few times in the past that they have struck pay dirt and got to the big game. This is due to two facts about the team. They are led by an outstanding coach with Tony Larussa and there is a ton of talent that is on the team looking to make an impact. Tony Larussa is the Joe Torre of the National league. He has brought a level of success to the teams that he has managed. This is almost like a ritual for him to lead his team into the post season. The only thing separating him from Torre is the lack of being able to win World Series titles back to back.

Players like Albert Pujols have added a new dimension to the team and has a result showed that the team is able to function with only a few key players in place. There is a sense of overall teamwork that comes with being a Cardinals player. This is a classic example of a team that works as a solid unit. This is a good reason why the team is always in the hunt for the World Series year after year.

There are a dozen or so reasons as to why this team has had the success that they have, this is due in a large part to the amount of talent that has come through Memphis and made its way into the Cardinals organization. Many great players got their start in Memphis and went on to be a great success in MLB.

There is also a lot that can be said about the power of the bat for the Cardinals, there have been a lot of teams that have not been able to match the Cardinals hit for hit when it comes to the batting order. Albert Pujols has been a leader for the rest of the team to follow and learn from. This is why the team has such a high home run average.

There has never been a better time to show your devotion to the Cardinals, if you are looking to make an impact, then make sure that you check out the team this season and see what the entire buzz is about when talking about this team.
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Saints - Patiently Keeping the Faith

For the New Orleans Saints, the Louisiana representative of the Southern Division of the National Football Conference (NFC), life in the National Football League (NFL) has been one long exercise in patience. Since their establishment as an expansion franchise in 1966, the Saints have been on an upward trajectory - but one with a very slight uphill grade. It took them more than ten years to manage a breakeven season, and another decade beyond that to finally have their first season with more wins than defeats. They didn't manage a playoff victory until the 2000 campaign. Saints fans have had to endure far more downs than ups over the last four decades as their team struggled to find its place in an NFL dominated by concepts of parity, but throughout it all, patience has been the byword.

Wearing bags

To get an idea of just how ineffective the Saints have often been, and how important patience and faith in the team have been over the decades, you only have to look at the season of 1980. In a campaign that saw the New Orleans team get beaten in their first fourteen contests, fans became so frustrated that they adopted the habit of hiding their faces and heads underneath paper bags in an expression of outright shame and humiliation. The expression became so popular that it was eventually used by fans of other poor-performing teams as well.

Katrina's impact and the team's comeback

The coming of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 marked a low point for the Saints in recent history. The waters in New Orleans had made the team's stadium unfit for NFL play, which then forced the team to compete on the road throughout the entire season. As you might expect, this made an uphill climb even steeper, and the team wound up losing thirteen of its sixteen games. It almost seemed pointless to bother with the cries of "wait 'til next year". But as the Superdome became fit for play in 2006, the team found that everything had changed. They enjoyed a magical season that saw them not only win the South, but earn a berth in the NFC championship game. Despite being beaten by Chicago - a game short of the Super Bowl - fans of the team were sure that they would be back soon and eventually compete for the NFL title.

Which road leads to the Super Bowl?

Of course, the Saints wouldn't be the Saints if they didn't take two steps back for every step forward. After their stellar 2006 season, they followed up with two mediocre seasons in a row before launching into the 2009 campaign. That season saw the team run out to a thirteen straight wins, finishing the season with a 13-3 record. Their victory in the NFC title game was their first ever, and propelled them into Super Bowl XLIV against the seemingly unstoppable Indianapolis Colts. The Saints, however, were not about to be kept from their first-ever NFL title, and went on to win the game in convincing fashion. For long-suffering Saints fans and players, it was a fitting reward for decades of patience.
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