An ‘unbelievable, amazing, incredible’ victory for Cardinals

From St. Louis -- Albert Pujols might have played his last game for the St. Louis Cardinals.

But it could be a while before the team’s fans start to worry.

Thanks to Chris Carpenter and David Freese, Cardinals fans will party for the foreseeable future. Those in St. Louis will adjust their schedules happily for a World Series parade and much bragging, and this time around Pujols is only a small part of their championship story.

WORLD SERIES PHOTOS: Rangers vs. Cardinals

Although the free agent-to-be delivered the greatest hitting performance in World Series history in Game 3 at Arlington, Texas, he then slid into a supporting role in two games at Busch Stadium that gave the Cardinals their 11th World Series championship while denying the Texas Rangers their first.

After the heroics of Freese and Lance Berkman lifted Tony La Russa’s team to two-run comebacks in the ninth and 10th innings of Game 6 on Thursday night, Carpenter carried the load in a 6-2 victory in Game 7 on Friday.

“Unbelievable, amazing, incredible,” La Russa said, accepting the trophy before 47,399 towel-waving fans.

Working on three days’ rest, in an opportunity he had only because Game 6 was postponed because of light rain and a sketchy forecast Wednesday, Carpenter got into the seventh inning with a 5-2 lead. He was on the ropes early but hung tough.

Doesn’t he always?

Carpenter pitched six innings, giving up two runs on six hits, and controlled the Rangers, who had averaged 6.1 runs in their last nine postseason games. And Freese, the St. Louis native who was acquired from the San Diego Padres in a 2007 trade for Jim Edmonds and is a guy who briefly gave up baseball at the University of Missouri, staked his claim for the World Series most-valuable-player award with a two-run double in the first inning that tied the score. It marked the sixth time in two games the Cardinals had erased a Rangers lead, and it capped an unbelievable October for the third baseman.

Freese, who had 10 home runs and 55 runs batted in during the regular season, put up numbers you see in the Arizona Fall League — eight doubles, one triple, five home runs and 21 RBIs — during the Cardinals’ 18-game postseason run.

“David Freese, if you wrote a story like that — a guy gets traded, comes back to his hometown, he’s a hero,” Commissioner Bud Selig said before Game 7. “If you sent in that script, it would get thrown back in your face.”

Freese’s emergence and Carpenter’s rugged professionalism were typical of a team that authored one of the most unlikely comebacks in baseball history.

Selig remembers La Russa coming to see him in his Milwaukee office when the Cardinals were in town in late August. They were getting buried by the Brewers in the National League Central and trailed the Atlanta Braves by even more in the wild-card race.

“I congratulated him on his great year,” Selig said. “[He said], ‘We’re not done.’ And he wasn’t kidding.”

After trailing by 101/2 games in the wild-card race Aug. 25, the Cardinals somehow passed the Braves to grab a playoff spot that had seemed unlikely when ace Adam Wainwright was lost to surgery in the first weeks of spring training. They fell behind the Philadelphia Phillies, 2-1, in the best-of-five division series but won the two games they had to, then got revenge on the Brewers in the NL Championship Series.

Twice one strike away from defeat against Texas in Game 6, Freese and Berkman came through. Game 7 felt a little anticlimactic.

“One of the greatest runs in baseball history,” Cardinals owner Bill DeWitt Jr. said. “An unbelievable come-from-behind team. We just never gave up.”

Now we will find out whether Pujols decides to spend his entire career in St. Louis or is pried away by $35 million a year from some team in a bigger market — maybe even the Rangers.

Crazier things have happened than Pujols going to Texas. We saw a lot of them from the 2011 Cardinals.

progers@tribune.com