The Cardinals have a new manager, but you wouldn't know it

NEW YORK -- The Cardinals were playing, and the game got to the seventh inning, and the manager was on the way to the mound one more time to get the right matchup.

And the scouts in the stands started asking, "Didn't Tony La Russa retire?"

"He's in the tunnel [behind the dugout]," one joked.

Then the Cardinals were playing, and they were down big early. But they kept coming back.

"You know what, it's still the same," one scout in attendance said. "They don't let you win easy. They're fun to watch, and they play hard.

"It's like they've changed the guard, but it doesn't look like they changed much."

For all the questions on how the Cardinals would be post-La Russa (and post-Pujols), the most striking thing baseball people noticed through the first two months this year was that the Mike Matheny Cardinals look an awful lot like the Tony La Russa Cardinals.

"It wasn't just Tony's way of playing," closer Jason Motte said Friday. "It's the Cardinal way. The Cardinal tradition wasn't just brought here by Tony La Russa."

Fair enough, but the Cardinals as we think of them today were the La Russa Cardinals. He had managed the team since 1996, and he went to the playoffs regularly and won two World Series.

One of the biggest stories this spring was how the Cardinals would respond without him.

Two months later, that feels like a non-story, because the transition from La Russa to Matheny seems to have been almost seamless.

"Mike's been preaching a lot of the same things as Tony," pitcher Kyle Lohse said. "Mike played for Tony. He paid attention."

The tone, obviously, is different. La Russa and Matheny aren't the same person.

One Cardinals coach spoke Friday about how "everybody's at ease" around Matheny. I'm not sure anyone ever said that about La Russa.

But if the approach is different, the look and the results aren't.

"Matheny's got a tremendous presence," said a scout who watched the Cardinals this week.

The Matheny Cardinals entered play Friday with a 27-24 record. They've dealt with significant injuries -- "We've got a really good team on the DL," pitcher Jake Westbrook said -- and with an inconsistent bullpen (8-for-16 in save situations).

"We're fooling with the recipe in the bullpen, trying to find something that's working," Matheny said Friday.

Matheny also said that he thinks this Cardinals team is still in the process of developing its own personality. He pointed to a recent 20-games-in-20-days stretch, along with injuries to Lance Berkman, Jon Jay and Skip Schumaker, among others.

"I feel that helps develop character," he said. "We're still in the phase of defining ourselves."

It was never going to be the easiest of situations, replacing a sure Hall of Fame manager and taking over a team that just won the World Series. Pujols left, and pitching coach Dave Duncan had to take a leave of absence, and then Chris Carpenter got hurt, depriving Matheny of probably the most influential single player on the team.

And all that does is make it more impressive that when people in baseball watch the Matheny Cardinals, they can easily forget that there's a new manager in the dugout.

"There's definitely no difference," Westbrook said. "When I came over to this organization [in midseason 2010], the one big thing I noticed was the expectation of playing the game the right way."

He still notices it. Others still notice it.

They're still the Cardinals, and the manager still gets great respect.