Bryan Burwell

ST. LOUIS - In this baseball-obsessed town, there’s nothing sadder than the sound of an empty ballpark in the autumn. Yet as the cars on the elevated highway whistle by the home of the defending world champion Cardinals, Busch Stadium is closed for business until next year.

Life changes quickly. A little more than a year ago, the Cards were on an unconscious roll toward an unlikely World Series title and this ballpark was alive with championship noises. Today, the Redbirds are on the road, finishing out the string of an unsuccessful regular season in the unfamiliar role of National League spoilers.

Yet there are plenty of ballparks in the NL in the season’s final days that are full of baseball’s sweetest sounds. Playoff chases and pennant races. Scoreboard watching and nervous tension. The American League has pretty much decided everything. But in the senior circuit, there are seven teams scrambling for four playoff berths, and life couldn’t get much better.

Or more excruciating.

In the NL East, the Mets are staggering to the finish line in much the same manner that the Cardinals did a year ago. They have lost four straight games entering Friday night's game, and all the scoreboard watching in the world won’t help them if they don’t find a way to do it themselves. “We don’t need (Atlanta) to beat Philadelphia,” said David Wright. “We need to win.”

Down in Miami, the first-place (NL Central) Cubs are battling all sorts of ghosts, curses and have been swept by the suddenly feisty Marlins, and because they are the Cubs, we are almost positive that some cruel and unusual punishment will befall Cubdom once again. I don’t know when, I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but over the next three days, the sky will fall and there will be a darned little blue bear smashed on the pavement.

In Milwaukee, the Brewers are two games back of the Cubbies, and beyond Prince Fielder’s hot bat, the best thing Milwaukee has going for it is that the Brewers are not the Cubs.

This is why sports are fun. This is why the wild card is one thing Bud Selig got right. I love the wild card. I love the idea that seven teams cannot fit into four NL slots. I love that it’s a mad scramble and it’s impossible to tell how it will all end. All three division leaders have teams on their heels, and the NL wild-card race has four teams separated by one game. I love that even the most passionate old-school baseball wise guy would have to concede now that the wild card did not ruin baseball. It enhanced it in so many exciting ways.

The lights might be out in St. Louis’s ballpark, but what can be wrong with a system that provides eight baseball towns with so many anxiety-filled moments this late into the process?

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There are MVP ballots that can’t be filled out for another six days and manager-of-the-year ballots that won’t be decided until the conclusion of the season’s final weekend. It can’t get much better than this if you are sitting on the outside looking in. The fun is watching them fight and scratch and claw. The fun is watching the pressure build and seeing how all that anxiety will forge a champion and expose the challengers.

Oh yes, it’s loads of fun to all of us sitting on the outside looking in. But what does it look like and feel like to all the players who are feeling the intense heat? On Monday night, the Mets were on their way to another excruciating loss (a 13-4 butt whipping at the hands of the Washington Nationals). The Shea Stadium home crowd was an angry mob, booing and cursing. The players were at a loss for how to fix this untimely slide. By Wednesday night, they had lost eight of their last 12, and the Mets were just trying to hold on.

“The way we’re playing,” Paul Lo Duca said, “we’re fortunate to be where we are right now.”

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