Cardinals, Mets Are on Deck

Advance far enough past the tabloids’ back pages here and you’ll discover that the New York Mets are still playing baseball, are in the National League Championship Series and are generally quite pleased with their manager and general manager.

On a warm Tuesday afternoon in which the media were double-parked outside Yankee Stadium, the Mets were on the other end of the Triboro Bridge, taking their final swings on the eve of their best-of-seven series against the St. Louis Cardinals.

They’ll play tonight at Shea Stadium in a rematch of the 2000 NLCS that the Mets won in five, sending them into a World Series they lost in five games to ... the Yankees.

The winner -- if recent All-Star Games, interleague records and World Series results count for anything -- gets fed to the American League.

But, that’s at least four games away, one way or the other.

While the Oakland Athletics and Detroit Tigers gathered in Oakland for their Game 1, and the Yankees settled some of their in-house issues by granting Joe Torre another season, the Mets and Cardinals went about the business of baseball preparation, whether or not anyone chose to pay attention.

Jeff Weaver, dismissed from the Dodgers and discarded by the Angels inside the last year, starts for the Cardinals, who won’t get to their ace, Chris Carpenter, until Game 3.

Tom Glavine, 40 years old and as close as these Mets get to a sure thing, opposes him. He is the survivor of a week-long period in which the Mets lost starters Pedro Martinez to season-ending shoulder surgery and Orlando Hernandez to a random calf tear.

“We’re going to lean on our bullpen heavily,” Glavine said. “But, on top of that, I don’t feel like there’s any added pressure on me. Like I said in the first round, losing Pedro and losing El Duque certainly hurts us. It’s not the ideal situation going in. But, that’s the responsibility of all 25 guys on our team ... not just a starting pitcher here or there or a hitter.”

There exist various subplots to a series that appears largely devoid of starting pitching, including the health of middle-of-the-order attendants Scott Rolen and Jim Edmonds of the Cardinals and Cliff Floyd of the Mets.

There also is the matter of the Cardinals’ late-season trauma, and whether their four-game erasure of the San Diego Padres alleged more about the Cardinals or the Padres. As for the Mets, it is rarely recommended that World Series aspirants average four-plus innings per starter, though it worked against the Dodgers. Their strategy is to hit, keep hitting, and look up in the ninth, to see where they stand.

And, Weaver alone -- his early-career brush with New York and his banishment from it, followed by marginally effective and grandly ineffective seasons in Los Angeles, then something of a revival in St. Louis -- was good for some examination.

“Well, yeah, baseball, I guess you never know what you’re going to get during the course of the season,” he said.

But, in a stadium that for a few hours also accommodated the themes of potentially great offenses pit against potentially exhausted scoreboards, it was the looming Albert Pujols that stood out.

He is, nearly unanimously, the most dangerous hitter in the game, a superb baserunner and a supremely competent first baseman. At his best, he will dictate the game from his place, batting third, in the Cardinals’ order, feeding fastballs to those who hit before him, providing opportunity to those behind him.

It will be left to the Mets to choose when to pitch to him, and then what to throw him.

“Right now, this point in time, he’s the best player in the game,” Floyd said. “Ryan Howard is second. A close second.

“You just got to hope when you’re pitching in, you’re pitching way in. When you’re pitching up, it’s way up. Down, way down. Course, as we’ve seen in the past five years, 800 ribbies later.... “

Doesn’t always work.

“So much of it just depends on the situation,” said Glavine, who’ll be the first in on Pujols. “But, I can assure you we’re not going to stand on the mound and stupidly say, ‘The better side of me wants to get him out and I have something to prove.’ ... Sooner or later, we’re going to have to pitch to him before the series is over. He’s not going to walk every time he comes up there, I can assure you of that.”

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tim.brown@latimes.com