LOS ANGELES — Baseball reveals itself slowly, a six-month process of data collection that gives well-reasoned answers about ways to win. Then the postseason begins and the fun really starts.

Because no matter what we think we know, October does not care. Those thousands of small samples that make up the regular season, when viewed individually, become chaotic — all with a championship at stake.

“That’s what makes baseball great,” John Mozeliak said Friday night, as he navigated a swarm of ashen Los Angeles Dodgers fans on his way to the visiting clubhouse after a mind-bending NL Division Series opener. Mozeliak, the general manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, said it could take a while to process what he had seen.

No kidding. The Dodgers and the Cardinals had just played a game started by Clayton Kershaw and Adam Wainwright, who combined to go 41-12 with a 2.09 ERA this season, and the final score was a 10-9 Cardinals win.

“There’s no explanation for why that happened,” said Cardinals third baseman Matt Carpenter.

Who can explain anything this time of year? Yes, Madison Bumgarner threw a shutout in Pittsburgh to win the NL wild-card game for San Francisco. But seven other aces — Kershaw, Wainwright, Jon Lester, James Shields, Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander and Stephen Strasburg — have taken the mound without any one meeting the minimum requirements for a quality start. Those seven have combined for 20 career All-Star selections. They have also combined for a 7.30 ERA this postseason.

The Baltimore Orioles took a 2-0 lead on the Detroit Tigers in their best-of-five AL Division Series, helped by Delmon Young’s game-breaking three-run double in Game 2. This is the same player whose .317 career on-base percentage and poor defense have contributed to just 2.5 wins above replacement, as calculated by the Baseball Reference website, over nine seasons in the majors.

Yet Young just keeps showing up in October. He has been to the postseason six years in a row, with four teams. In 2012, he was most valuable player of the AL Championship Series for Detroit. Last year, after an ordinary 4 1/2 months in Philadelphia, he quietly joined Tampa Bay and homered in their wild-card victory.

Another unlikely winner in the first week of the postseason: Kansas City manager Ned Yost. Yost used a rookie starter, Yordano Ventura, in relief at a critical moment of the wild-card game with Oakland, and promptly watched a three-run homer sail over the center-field fence. The Royals won anyway.

Then they won twice against the Los Angeles Angels, each in 11 innings, even though Yost stuck steadfastly to convention by refusing to use his overpowering closer, Greg Holland, in a tie game on the road. He waited for a lead to use Holland, and both times the Royals got the lead on a home run. Never mind that they hit the fewest in the majors in the regular season.

By contrast, the Angels led the majors in runs but have scored just three times in 22 innings. Mike Trout, the presumptive AL MVP, has been held without a hit.

Although there may be nothing we can count on in October, lately, at least, there is usually this: the Cardinals’ offense, which has helped them win six of eight postseason series since 2011. The names change, but the character of the hitters stays the same.

“They’re never going to give anything away,” Dodgers catcher A.J. Ellis said of the Cardinals after Game 1. “That’s what’s impressive about them: Their at-bats are a fight. Just the culture of their team that they have, even though on paper they might be overmatched by a dominant pitcher, they don’t know it — or they act like they don’t know it.”

In 2011, the Cardinals lost their division series opener to the Phillies’ Roy Halladay, then fell behind, 4-0, to Cliff Lee in Game 2. By the time Lee was finished, with nobody out in the seventh, he had given up 12 hits and five runs.

The Cardinals went on to beat Halladay and Zack Greinke as they advanced through the NL playoffs, then crushed the Texas Rangers’ bullpen to win the World Series. They thumped Jordan Zimmermann, Gio Gonzalez, Bumgarner and Tim Lincecum in the 2012 playoffs. They bruised Kershaw in the NLCS clincher last fall, and did so again on Friday — impervious, as usual, to opposing aces.

“This time of year, that’s all you’re really going to run into,” the Cardinals’ Matt Holliday said. “So you have no choice. If you’re waiting for the 4 or 5 starter that doesn’t throw that good stuff, you’re going to be waiting awhile.”

Holliday cited Carpenter as a hitter who never gives away at-bats and personifies the Cardinals’ approach. Carpenter chased Kershaw on Friday with a bases-clearing double to cap an eight-pitch duel, a virtual repeat of a pivotal confrontation in last year’s playoffs.

Carpenter, who led the NL in walks this season, averaged 4.36 pitches per plate appearance, well above the major league average of 3.82.

“This guy, he’s the epitome of a professional grinder on their side,” Ellis said. “This guy’s as tough an out as there is in the National League, especially when the stakes are raised.”

Maybe so. But last Oct. 30 in Boston, when the stakes were as high as could be — two outs, ninth inning, the season in the balance against Koji Uehara — Carpenter struck out to end the World Series. It was a final, shining example of the only real truth about October: Nobody knows anything.