Winning more than games

That was indeed a handshake line you saw moments after the Cardinals beat the Dodgers in Los Angeles, three games to one, to settle half the bracket for the National League championship series.

Just don't get used to it.

Respect is hard to come by in baseball around playoff time. The last time anybody can remember two teams shaking hands at the end of a playoff series was 1991, after the closest World Series ever, and you definitely won't see the Yankees-Red Sox series end that way in a week or so. Then again, few teams merit respect the way the Cardinals do.

Their opening-day payroll of $75.6 million ranked 11th out of 30 major league teams, but nobody got more professionalism for the buck. The Cards' lineup is loaded top to bottom with patient, lethal hitters, their pitchers contest every inch of the plate, and they send out a Gold Glover at just about every position. The guy who calls the shots day to day, Tony La Russa, is a lawyer by training, once known as the "Thinking Man's Manager" and "Baseball's Answer Man" because he was using computers long before they fit on a lap. They even celebrate with restraint.

So maybe it wasn't a coincidence that Dodgers manager Jim Tracy described the rare handshake exchange Sunday night as, "a professional show of class between two very classy organizations."

"To play this series the way it was played with the intensity it was played," Tracy added, "it said a lot."

It would have said just as much if the Dodgers carried a white flag out onto the field. That's how soundly the Cardinals handled Los Angeles throughout. Their only hiccup came in Game 4, when Los Angeles starter Jose Lima threw a complete-game shutout by nibbling at the corners, and the St. Louis hitters uncharacteristically obliged by biting at too many bad pitches.

That trend ended early in the clinching game. Albert Pujols, who had only one RBI in the series to that point, climbed out of an 0-2 hole against Odalis Perez and drew a walk in the first inning. Then Scott Rolen, who was hitless in the division series, wrangled another walk after Perez just missed with balls three and four.

Their patience wasn't rewarded immediately, but all the walks eventually wore down Perez. Then, in the fourth, Pujols maneuvered reliever Wilson Alvarez into a 3-1 count and smacked the next pitch into the left-field seats for a three-run homer that sealed the Dodgers' fate.

"Albert is a tremendous player, he does amazing things out there," said St. Louis starter and winner Jeff Suppan, who is a pretty good story himself. "With him and everyone else, it's the best team I've been on."

On paper, the Yankees and Red Sox look a little better -- and much flashier -- but not necessarily smarter. They spent more at the start of the season -- Boston by $50 million and New York by more than $100 million. They keep slush funds for midseason reinforcements and still have enough left to bury their mistakes. That lavish lifestyle won't fly in St. Louis.

General manager Walt Jocketty makes up some of the deficit simply by being shrewd. In his first season, he fired Joe Torre, who went on to become the best manager in baseball, but replaced him with La Russa, the only guy who might be his equal. Two years later, he stole Mark McGwire from Oakland for three guys that even the die-hard fans in St. Louis couldn't pick out of a police lineup.

Jocketty needed only one look at Pujols in the Triple-A playoffs in 2000 to know that the youngster who'd spent most of the season playing in Class A was ready for the bigs. In the four years since, Pujols has produced numbers that only Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams bettered at the same stage of their careers. The scary thing is that Pujols had just as much competition from teammates Rolen and Jim Edmonds for MVP honors as he did from the rest of the league.

As a result, St. Louis won a major league-leading 105 games and its first playoff series with very little fuss. It's an old-school team, assembled the old-fashioned way, versatile and intelligent enough to play small ball, long ball or any kind of ball the situation demands. That's what the Dodgers recognized, for at least this one night, by extending their hands in defeat.

Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press.