Divergent Paths for Mets and Cardinals There was a cheeky little sequence on "Mad Men" last week in which a friend tells Don Draper that he has been meaning to ask him to a baseball game. The friend says he gets a lot of tickets, mostly for the Mets, and Don sniffs, "Well, I'm glad you didn't." The scene was set in 1968, when the Mets finished ninth in a 10-team National League, and the actor who said the line, Jon Hamm, probably relished it. Hamm is a St. Louis Cardinals fan who narrated the official highlight film of the 2011 World Series. Fans of the Cardinals have a strong distaste for the Mets, going back to the teams" duels in the 1980s. The Mets also beat the Cardinals for the 2000 N.L. pennant, but since the Cardinals got revenge six years later, it has not been a fair fight. The visual is burned into the psyche of every Mets fan: Adam Wainwright's curveball freezing Carlos Beltran, ending Game 7 and lifting the Cardinals to the 2006 World Series. The Mets have not reached the postseason since. The Cardinals have won two titles and made two other trips to the playoffs. This year, the discrepancy could not be much wider. The Cardinals have baseball's best record, while the Mets are ahead of only two teams, the Houston Astros and the Miami Marlins. On Wednesday, Cardinals General Manager John Mozeliak tried to explain his team's consistent success. "This might sound a little cheesy to you, but the one constant's been Bill DeWitt, from an ownership standpoint," said Mozeliak, whose first season with the Cardinals was 1996, the year DeWitt bought the team. His leadership and his vision have enabled us to have the sustained success. The Cardinals reached the N.L. Championship Series in 1996, also the first season for their former manager Tony La Russa, and have returned seven times since. The more they have won, Mozeliak said, the more empowered they have been to adhere to their principles. "The key is remaining disciplined enough to that process where you don't start deviating because it just doesn't feel right," Mozeliak said, adding later, "Once you start doing an exception, you're going to start making multiple exceptions. One irrational decision can lead to multiple irrational decisions. So don't do it. What, exactly, do the Mets believe in? For years after that 2000 pennant, they mostly believed in overspending for veterans. A few, like Beltran, helped out for a while. Most have been major disappointments. Since the Wilpons hired Sandy Alderson as general manager in October 2010, replacing Omar Minaya, the directive has mainly been to stop spending. The Wilpons, of course, were bleeding money from the Bernard L. Madoff fiasco, but either way, the spending sprees were not working. Alderson would have to get creative and build a talent pipeline while waiting for bad contracts to expire. Yet the Mets have found few undervalued hidden commodities to make them competitive. Their farm system seems mostly barren. The young ace Matt Harvey was drafted under Minaya, and Zack Wheeler, who will join the rotation next week, came in a trade for Beltran. Minaya signed Beltran and gave a chance to R. A. Dickey, the Cy Young Award winner Alderson traded to Toronto last winter. The Mets received a highly regarded Class A starter, Noah Syndergaard, and a Class AAA catcher, Travis d'Arnaud, who has missed significant time in three of the last four seasons with injuries to his back, knee and foot. On Tuesday the Mets lost to Michael Wacha, the Cardinals" top draft choice last year out of Texas A&M. The Cardinals got the pick from the Angels as compensation for the loss of Albert Pujols in free agency. Wacha was taken 19th over all, seven spots after the Mets chose the high school shortstop Gavin Cecchini. Cecchini will play for the Class A Brooklyn Cyclones this season. Losing Pujols looks increasingly shrewd for the Cardinals, who used their savings on contract extensions for Wainwright and catcher Yadier Molina, and a two-year deal for Beltran. All three are likely to be back at Citi Field for the All-Star Game next month. Pujols, now mostly a designated hitter who has eight-plus years left on his 10-year, $240 million deal, almost certainly will not. Allen Craig, who replaced Pujols at first base, batted cleanup Wednesday and came in with a .313 average. The Cardinals drafted Craig in the eighth round in 2006, a few months before they beat the Mets and then the Tigers for the championship. Winning soon became a habit for Craig. "In "07 we went to the Double A championship," said Craig, who homered in a 5-1 loss to the Mets on Wednesday. "In "08 we missed the playoffs, but in 2009 we won the Pacific Coast League. In 2010, we went back to the championship, and in 2011 we won the World Series. Craig homered in Game 7 and caught the final out in left field. Within two months, the Cardinals" former scouting director, Jeff Luhnow, was hired to run the Astros by an owner, Jim Crane, who grew up near St. Louis. The Cardinals" model is spreading. "There's definitely a culture of winning for the guys that have been drafted, and that's something that's been taught to us from the organization and the many great players that have put the uniform on before us," Craig said. That's something you learn right when you get drafted: there are people before you that have done an outstanding job. You have that to live up to, and the fans expect that, too. Mets fans cannot reasonably expect the same from their team, given its recent track record, but maybe history offers some hope. The year after Don Draper scoffed at the thought of watching them play, the Mets won the World Series. All it took was a miracle.