There is no reason to think that the Houston Astros are in trouble. Any talk of a swing in momentum resulting from Albert Pujols’s dramatic ninth-inning home run Monday, which took the Astros from being one strike away from the World Series to down by a run, is premature. To defeat Houston the Cardinals will still have to defeat Roy Oswalt and Roger Clemens – two of the 10 best pitchers in baseball – in the next two games. It might happen but it probably won’t.

Still, there’s a devil’s advocate case to be made here. The Astros, a team that has never won a pennant are in their home park, with a two-run lead and their tremendous closer, Brad Lidge, on the mound. There is pandemonium in the stands, the players can taste victory, and all of a sudden a seeing-eye grounder finds its way through the usually airtight Astros defense, a walk is issued, and a manager, playing by the book and refusing to put the winning run on base, chooses to pitch to the best hitter in the game. The resulting game winning homer has yet to land. This was a game the Astros could and should have won, and it’s not insane to think the loss will affect them through the next two games.

On top of that, it’s hardly as if no team has ever come back from a 3-1 deficit in a seven game series under similar circumstances. Just two years ago,the Florida Marlins beat the Chicago Cubs in three straight elimination games, facing Carlos Zambrano, Mark Prior and Kerry Wood – not quite as formidable a trio as Oswalt, Clemens and Andy Pettitte, but not all that far off, either. With Mark Mulder and Matt Morris, two excellent veterans with plenty of playoff experience, taking the hill for them, and the home-field advantage the Marlins didn’t have, the Cardinals have a real chance to complete one of the more dramatic playoff comebacks in recent memory.

I have sympathy for these arguments, but I don’t think they hold up. The first is based on a faulty premise, which is that baseball is a game like basketball or football, in which an entire team can be simultaneously psychologically defeated. I don’t think that’s true. Baseball isn’t, for the most part, a hustle sport – it’s easy to recall basketball teams that stopped running the floor or pounding the boards quite as hard after getting the wind sucked out of their sails, but it’s hard to recall baseball teams for which the same is true. More important, baseball players don’t rely on one another in the same way players in other team sports do.

Let’s say Craig Biggio is so dispirited by Monday’s loss that he simply stops playing hard. What are the consequences? It would harm the Astros, sure; but it wouldn’t make other players hit worse, nor would half-hearted defensive play be likely to affect more than a handful of plays. To buy the argument that a bad loss can sap a team of its will, you have to both allow that the larger part of two dozen professional athletes who have spent their lives in about as competitive a profession as exists in the world can’t get over a bad night at the office (rather than, say, using that bad night as fuel to play harder) and that they’ll play consistently badly through a whole game because of it. That’s a bit much.

The second argument doesn’t make much more sense. Of course the Cardinals can beat Oswalt and Clemens; the 2003 Detroit Tigers, losers of 119 games, could beat Bob Gibson and Sandy Koufax in their primes if things broke right for them. That’s not the point. A victory like the Marlins’ is so notable and memorable precisely for its rarity; it took errors, Steve Bartman, the evil winds of Chicago, and pitcher fatigue for the Marlins to beat the Cubs’ troika of young aces, and even then the Cubs could easily have won. The simple fact is that the situation is precisely as it seems, and the Cardinals, despite a dramatic win, are still in a world of trouble.

These narratives are created simply because writers need something to write about. If the Cardinals come back, it will be something to write; but the truth is that four teams without national followings (the Cardinals have a large but essentially regional fan base) made the playoffs, two of them played a crisp but less than dramatic series, and we were left with an Astros-Cardinals matchup in which every Cardinals victory is just a delaying of the inevitable. If the Cardinals win, it won’t be because Pujols’s home run shifted the psychological landscape of the series, but because they outplayed the Astros. That’s more than a story enough on its own.

tmarchman@nysun.com