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The St. Louis Cardinals arrived in Philly on Monday with a league-best 17-8 record about to face a Phils rotation that had been struggling lately whenever Roy Halladay hadn't started. Prior to this series the Phils had posted a miserable 1-9 record in games in which Halladay wasn't pitching and they scored less than 6 runs in each of those games.

So of course then they had the Cards right where they wanted them. Their starting pitching dominated, allowing them to win 2 out of the first 3 games in the series while scoring less than 6 runs without Doc on the mound.

In the series Blanton, Hamels, Kendrick, and Halladay combined to pitch 28.2 innings and only allowed 6 earned runs for an ERA of 1.92 for the 4-game set. The Phils faced their first real tests of the season in the last week, and they've answered the bell winning consecutive series against the Mets and Cardinals.

Also, perhaps more importantly, at least to all of the Philly-haters in the national media, this marks 2 consecutive games that weren't marred by some douchebag running onto the field. Hopefully we can keep that streak going too.