The Cardinals' terrible World Series loss actually wasn't so terrible

The St. Louis Cardinals played an ugly game of baseball Wednesday night, dropping Game 1 of the World Series 8-1 to the Boston Red Sox.

With the help of two Cardinals errors, Boston had a 5-0 lead after two innings. The game was all but over — Boston's win expectancy at that point was already over 90 percent — prompting comparisons to the 2004 World Series when the Red Sox scored four runs in the first inning of Game 1 en route to a sweep.

Except Wednesday's rout was only a rout in terms of the final score. The Cardinals' offense was actually about on par with Boston's, and they would have kept things much closer if not for some unforced miscues and a bit of bad luck.

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The Cardinals committed three uncharacteristic errors on the night, handing over extra outs to the most dangerous offense in baseball. Two of those errors would have ended innings; instead, Boston piled on more runs.

In the first, Mike Napoli followed what should have been an inning-ending double play with a bases-clearing double. In the eighth, David Ortiz crushed a two-run homer after Cardinals third baseman David Freese threw away a routine ground ball to put a man on base.

All told, only half of Boston's runs were earned. That's without factoring in a second inning popup that should have been caught, but that fell in for an embarrassing hit when no one on the Cardinals infield tried to catch it. (Since no one made a play the ball, it didn't go down as an error.)

Though St. Louis only put one run on the scoreboard, their bats were almost as lively as Boston's. They had seven hits to Boston's eight, and brought only two-fewer batters to the plate over the course of the game. They even had one home run, as did the Red Sox.

Unlike the Red Sox, though, the Cardinals spaced their hits out and, with no runners gifted on base via error, had fewer chances to knock in runs. As Fangraphs's Dave Cameron pointed out, the Red Sox didn't destroy the Cardinals' pitching, getting on base in only one-quarter of their plate appearances. All those errors, though, gave them more base runners who came around to score on timely hits. As a result, they became the first team in postseason history to score eight or more runs while posting a .250 on-base percentage.

In an odd twist, the Red Sox essentially beat the Cardinals at their own game.

St. Louis thrived this season on sterling defense and timely hitting, both of which abandoned them Wednesday. The Cardinals committed only 75 errors all season, fifth-best in baseball. And the team hit .330 during the regular season with runners in scoring position, the highest mark since at least 1961 when such data was first recorded.

Game 1 was something of an anomaly. Surely, the Red Sox outplayed the Cardinals, delivering clutch hits, playing near-flawless defense, and keeping runners off the bases. But the final score belied the fact that the Cardinals weren't completely hopeless at the plate or on the mound.