Faces Have Changed for Rematch

Hold off on that “you again?” refrain for a moment.

The Houston Astros and St. Louis Cardinals may be meeting in the National League championship series for a second consecutive year, but a lot has changed since Scott Rolen’s two-run homer against Roger Clemens in Game 7 catapulted the Cardinals into the 2004 World Series.

For one, Rolen is not around to torment the Astros again in the postseason after suffering a shoulder injury during a May collision with the Dodgers’ Hee-Seop Choi that limited the third baseman to 56 games.

The Astros have suffered their own power outage with the departures of sluggers Carlos Beltran and Jeff Kent, who each belted game-winning homers in last season’s championship series.

Then there are the starting pitchers in tonight’s Game 1 at Busch Stadium, Houston’s Andy Pettitte and St. Louis’ Chris Carpenter. A year ago at this time, Pettitte was sidelined after undergoing elbow surgery and Carpenter was out because of a strained muscle in his right arm.

“The better team won last year,” Astro first baseman Lance Berkman said Tuesday. “They outplayed us. But if we had Andy last year, I think it would be a different story.”

The addition of the veteran left-hander gives the Astros a hard-to-beat front of the rotation in Pettitte, Clemens and 20-game winner Roy Oswalt.

“It makes a tremendous difference when you have three top-of-the-line starters you can run at a team like the Cardinals,” Berkman said.

St. Louis fortified its interior defense and added some pluck with shortstop David Eckstein and second baseman Mark Grudzielanek. And left-hander Mark Mulder, the Cardinals’ boldest off-season acquisition, stabilized a somewhat shaky rotation until being hit on his pitching arm by a line drive in Game 2 of the division series against San Diego.

Mulder threw about 40 pitches Tuesday in what Tony La Russa described as a “positive” bullpen session, but the Cardinal manager said he would wait to see how Mulder felt today before deciding whether he could start Game 2 of the series Thursday.

If Mulder is unable to pitch, La Russa could bump scheduled Game 3 starter Matt Morris up a game or go with Jeff Suppan or Jason Marquis, neither of whom pitched in the division series.

After being shut out 17 times in the regular season, Houston hopes to continue the clutch hitting it displayed in its division series victory over Atlanta. In Game 4 on Sunday, Berkman hit a grand slam, Brad Ausmus added a tying homer in the ninth inning and reserve outfielder Chris Burke ended baseball’s longest playoff game with a homer in the 18th.

“We have the ability to struggle like no other, and we have the ability to score runs and make things happen,” said third baseman Morgan Ensberg, who helped offset the loss of Beltran and Kent by posting career highs with 36 homers and 101 runs batted in.

“Last year we just had a lot of thumpers in the lineup, guys who could hit the ball out of the park. This year we don’t have that.”

Carpenter, who was 4-0 with a 1.85 earned-run average against Houston in five starts this season, nonetheless complimented the Astro offense by comparing it to the juggernaut of a Cardinal lineup that features Albert Pujols, Reggie Sanders and Jim Edmonds.

“They take quality at-bats, they are patient, they have an idea about what they are doing and the pitcher that they are facing,” Carpenter said. “They have got speed, and they have got some guys that can hit the ball out of the park.”

In last year’s championship series, the home team won every game, often in dramatic fashion. After Kent hit a walk-off homer in Game 5, Edmonds matched the feat with a game-winning blast in Game 6. Rolen and the Cardinals then scored three runs against Clemens in the sixth inning on their way to a 5-2 victory in Game 7.

Astro Manager Phil Garner, whose team lost its regular-season series to the Cardinals, 11 games to five, hopes for a different ending this time.

“They have really thumped us pretty good,” Garner said. “Just as a matter of pride we would not want to see them celebrate here again. We’d like to change that.”