A three-city, eight-game swing starts in San Diego, includes LA, and features three winning teams. Cardinals will return to St. Louis a changed team.
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Derrick Goold
SAN DIEGO — The Cardinals’ team that returns to St. Louis from the last lengthy trip of the season will be different than the one that left Monday for San Diego.
It could sport the newest member of the 700-homer club or tote the drained champagne bottles of a second division title since 2015, or both. When these Cardinals return to Busch Stadium in 11 days they’ll have faced three winning teams, crisscrossed three time zones and explored what to do with three outfield positions in flux and try to determine who are the best three lefties in the bullpen.
But there’s more to the trip than regular-season polish.
There’s the chance to leave a postseason impression.
“Win or lose, you want to play those games hard enough to where when the Dodgers see that we won and that’s who they’re going to play they go, ‘Aw (dung), you know, Cardinals won, like, we want to play the other team,’” said starting pitcher Miles Mikolas. “Wherever the Padres finish, if they see they’ve got to play us, you want them to think, ‘Aw (walnuts), got to play the Cardinals.’ That extra little bit of doubt or uneasiness that we can instill coming into a series is great.
“So, we’ve got to go there and play hard,” Mikolas concluded. “We’ve got to try to stick it to them.”