2011 World Series Preview

Two unlikely teams are meeting in the World Series when they Texas Rangers play face the St. Louis Cardinals in Busch Stadium for the World Series. Both teams were not the favorites to play for the trophy but came up with explosive offenses and shutdown pitching from their bullpens.  The Cardinals have the home field advantage in the series because the National League won the All-Star game played in July.

The Texas Rangers are back in the World Series for the second straight year. When Cliff Lee bolted to Philadelphia to join the Phillies this season, many experts believed that the Rangers pitching staff would take a major hit and lack the Ace a pitching staff needs to win a championship. Those experts were wrong as the pitching staff as a whole had five pitchers with 10 or more victories. The Rangers pitching staff had the fifth best team WHIP (average of walks and hits per inning) and had 99 quality starts from their starters, forth best in the majors. The offense lived up to its billing with a league high .283 batting average, second with 210 homeruns and third averaging 5.28 runs per game.  One of the starters will need to dominate to get the Rangers their first World Series title.

The St Louis Cardinals out of the playoffs in August sitting 10.5 games out of the wild card spot in the national League. The Cardinals stormed back to get into the playoffs with a patchwork bullpen that has played better than any expectations and leading the team to the pennant. The offense was one of the best in the league. The cardinals were 5th with a .273 batting average and scored 4.7 runs per game. The pitching staff struggled for most of the season. The current staff has come up with outs when needed the most. Chris Carpenter will have to come up big for the Cardinals if they want to go home with the trophy.

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