Slop go the Cardinals

Posted on October 12, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

Anibal Sanchez, appreciating the man who busted his Game One no-hit bid and the plate ump who called the game, as he leaves in the bottom of the eighth . . .

It looks as though the Cardinals have something else to worry about beside the Nationals’ three aces. There was a joker in the Nats’ deck Friday night.

And what he did in Game One of the National League Championship Series would have been a laugh and a half if he hadn’t had to face a pinch hitter who slapped a clean single off him in the bottom of the eight.

For seven and two-thirds innings Anibal Sanchez threatened to become baseball’s third postseason no-hit pitcher. He threw nothing like the hard stuff usually delivered by Max Scherzer, Stephen Strasburg, and Patrick Corbin. Slop tossing doesn’t begin to cover it.

If you could swear you saw marshmallows going up to the plate until Jose Martinez delivered his hit, your eyes weren’t playing tricks. Sanchez’s fastest pitch barely crosses 90 miles an hour. His split finger fastball is more split than fast. His changeup is called a butterfly, but real butterflies come in like a squadron of fighter jets by comparison. His cutter wouldn’t cut a sheet of paper.

But they move. He moves them all around the strike zone. He and the Nats watched one after another Cardinal batter check in at the plate determined to hit that slop into the Mississippi River and wondering why their biggest swings were barely good for summer day camp softball hitting among ten year olds.

“I just tried to keep focused on every pitch that I’m going to throw,” Sanchez told reporters after the Nats finished what he started, a 2-0 Game One shutout in Busch Stadium. “I don’t want to miss any kind of pitch in the middle in the zone against those guys.”

He succeeded in ways even he probably didn’t fathom. He threw 103 pitches and—count ’em!—only two of them hit dead center of the strike zone while only two more hit immediately around it.

One of the two hitting dead center damn near meant disaster in the bottom of the eighth, when Tommy Edman, playing right field in Game One for the Cardinals, sent a cannon shot toward the right side. Nats first baseman Ryan Zimmerman picked the perfect moment to channel his inner Superman, diving like the Man of Steel on takeoff to snap his mitt around it before it landed for a base hit to short right.

Sanchez thought right then and there that he’d have a shot at finishing the no-hitter. A fly out later Martinez thought otherwise, pinch hitting for Cardinals reliever Ryan Helsley, sending a full-count splitter into center for a clean base hit. The only Cardinal hit of the night.

“He was just hitting his spots and keeping us off balance all night,” said Edman, “and we just didn’t execute our plan very well.”

Time was when Sanchez threw harder, particularly what Gomes called “the power slider.” On Friday night he made a statement on behalf of junkballers the world over. You don’t need power to survive on the major league mound no matter what you throw. Especially when the other guys are about as good with off speed pitching as a hay fever sufferer is with pollen.

“When you kinda lose the power slider,” Gomes said of Sanchez, “there’s power in there (his heart) and power up there (his mind).” Pointing to his chest and his head. “He went out there, controlled the zone, controlled everything they were doing,” Gomes continued. “It’s almost like you get kind of a chuckle off them. When a guy like that can manipulate his speeds it’s pretty amazing.”

Manipulate his speeds? Sanchez’s swiftest pitch wouldn’t have equaled speed four on a Mixmaster. He folded ingredients, blended them gently, maybe mashed a few potatoes, but he wasn’t anywhere near enough power to roll out the attachments.

Almost the moment Martinez pulled up at first in the eighth, Nats manager Dave Martinez went to the mound to lift Sanchez for Sean Doolittle. The Busch crowd bathed Sanchez in a standing ovation that seemed six parts appreciation and half a dozen parts thank-God-he’s-finally-out-of-there.

Sanchez waved his glove in gestures of appreciation to the Cardinal who’d busted the no-no and to plate umpire Phil Cuzzi, who called the pitches. Hopefully, he had a similar gesture or word for Cardinals’ starter Miles Mikolas, whose own six splendid innings went for nothing partly because Sanchez was bound to hog the headlines.

“I had a rough regular season,” said Mikolas, the owner of a 4.16 regular season ERA. “I’m doing my best to make up for it in the postseason.”

Mikolas and six Cardinals relievers did their best to keep the Nats off their own game plan at the plate. Sure, they scored their first run thanks to a leadoff double by second baseman Howie Kendrick and a two-out double by catcher Yan Gomes in the second, and their second run thanks to a one-out triple by right fielder Adam Eaton and Kendrick’s two-out single in the seventh.

But they went 2-for-12 with men on second or beyond, stranded first and second in the sixth and the ninth, and the bases loaded in the fifth and the seventh. They could have gone for the Cardinals’ throats and settled for a couple of raps on the mouth. Lucky for them Sanchez’s lone walk and two accidental hit batsmen came to naught for the Cardinals, too.

The walk, to Wong with one out in the fourth, got dangerous after Goldschmidt flied out, when Wong stole second and took third on Gomes’s throwing error, but Sanchez got Ozuna to foul out to third baseman Anthony Rendon.

Pinch hitter Randy Arozarena—he who sent Cardinal manager Mike Shildt’s foul postgame rant viral for a spell after they won their division series—got plunked with one out in the sixth and stole second himself, then got pushed to third while Fowler grounded out to second, but Wong lined out softly to center to end that one.

And Yadier Molina with two out in the seventh got kissed between his shoulder blades with one of Sanchez’s butterflies but Matt Carpenter grounded out to first unassisted for his trouble.

Doolittle was on call for the end because Daniel Hudson was on quick paternity leave with his wife giving birth to their daughter. Not one Nat begrudged Hudson. “I think the mood of the guys in the bullpen,” Doolittle said afterward, “[was] we really wanted to find a way to pick him up and allow him to enjoy a really special moment with his wife and his family.”

“Apparently,” their skipper said, “the baby didn’t want to come out until later on this morning.”

Doolittle did his part, getting the asked-for four-out save almost effortlessly, luring Dexter Fowler into an eighth inning-ending grounder to third before throwing Kolten Wong out on a leadoff bunt attempt, luring Paul Goldschmidt into grounding out to Zimmerman at first unassisted, then striking Marcell Ozuna out swinging to end the game.

Thus did the Cardinals lose an NLCS opening game without having to deal with the Nats’ vaunted Big Three starting pitchers. Amend that. Sanchez just gave them a Big Enough Four. Almost surprisingly, considering he had a 3.48 road ERA this year and the Redbirds took two of three from the Nats in a regular season Busch set.

They also didn’t have to deal with the Nats’ fully-A lineup. Center fielder Victor Robles was still missing in action nursing a hamstring strain and catcher Kurt Suzuki was still under concussion protocol after taking one off his wrist into his face from Dodger pitcher Walker Buehler in Game Five of their division series.

And they couldn’t push Sanchez out of the game early enough to force the Nats into a Wander Suero option out of the bullpen, Suero occupying Hudson’s spot for the time being, knowing full well that Hudson, Doolittle, and maybe Fernando Rodney are the only three Nats bulls these days who don’t sink Washington’s antacid market.

But this was essentially the same Cardinals lineup that bastinadoed the Braves for ten first-inning runs two days earlier. The problem: they’re vulnerable to off speed stuff thrown by pitchers who know how to keep the stuff away from the middle of the plate. The only pitch Sanchez threw dead center busted up his no-hitter.

Even Max the Knife, Stras, and Prince Patrick should be making notes: don’t live on your fastballs with these Cardinals. And this is not the time to take the middle ground while you’re at it. Sanchez didn’t believe in the middle ground Friday night, and neither, really, did Doolittle, which is why Gomes had one more hit than the entire Cardinal lineup.

“Why any pitcher who can throw decent off speed stuff ever gives this team a fastball within the general vicinity of the strike zone is a mystery,” agrees St. Louis Post-Dispatch writer Ben Frederickson. “The Cardinals’ inability to adapt on the fly resulted in their eleventh and most costly shutout of the season.”

Maybe the least surprised man in the house was Zimmerman, the Nats’ elder in the house. “Ever since Anibal came back from being injured, he’s been one of our most consistent, if not our most consistent, pitcher, which is hard to do with the other guys we have,” said the first baseman, referring to the hamstring issue he incurred in May.

“He doesn’t get overlooked but it’s such a different kind of pitching,” Zimmerman continued. “But tonight was obviously vintage Anibal. I’ve seen him do that for almost fifteen years but tonight was special.”

It may be just as special if not more so when Scherzer goes mano-a-mano with Adam Wainwright in Game Two Saturday. Even if Wainwright isn’t the pitcher he used to be thanks to too many injuries. Far as Wainwright’s concerned, getting to face Scherzer is an early Christmas present.

“We have similar games,” the Cardinals’ righthander said. “We’re both attacking with high-velocity fastballs at the top of the zone and nasty sliders and changeups.” Then, he paused thoughtfully. “I would have loved to have reinvented myself into Max Scherzer, that would have been amazing. It just didn’t work that way.”

It never does. There’s only one Max the Knife. And the Nats need him to slice, dice, and carve as deftly on Saturday as he did to the Dodgers in the division series.

A nation of Natitude?

Posted on October 11, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

The Nationals don’t want the party to have stopped at Dodger Stadium.

It stood to reason that if the Nationals could and did flatten their way past the Dodgers in the division series, you had to like their National League Championship Series chances. Especially when one Astro gave them a terrific endorsement going in.

“They’re legit,” said Alex Bregman, the Astros’ third baseman, when he and their Game Five conqueror Gerrit Cole were asked if they were relieved that the Dodgers wouldn’t remain in the postseason picture.

“They’re legit. The Nationals got three legit starters, similar to what the ‘Stros have,” Bregman continued. “We were in the same spring training complex so we face them all the time. Tell you what, it was no shock that they won that series. We know what they’ve got. They’re good.”

When the man who’s liable to add an American League Most Valuable Player award to his trophy case if Mike Trout doesn’t endorses you, take it right to the safe deposit box. Smile a few moments before you slide it in and lock the box back up. Then get back to business.

Not that the Nats need any reminder.

Remember: this is the team that was 19-31 on 23 May, after the Mets humiliated them in a four-game sweep in which they were out-scored 23-13 and the demands for manager Dave Martinez’s head on a plate hit critical mass.

The team that went 80-38 from there, including a season-ending eight-game winning streak against what remained of the Phillies and the Indians and 36-18 in August and September. Not that there weren’t hiccups and missteps along the way, but 36-18 down the stretch is championship-caliber baseball any way you conjugate it.

They held their own against other contenders collectively; their total record against their fellow contenders was 43-43; the best records against them came out of their own division. The Mets went 12-7 against the Nats; the Braves went 11-8.

But the Mets—whose own manager faced season-long calls for his own execution and finally did go to the guillotine a few days after the season ended—didn’t have enough to stay in the races. And the Braves got thatclose to pushing the Cardinals home early from their division series before the Cardinals upended and then demolished them.

The bad news is that Shildt—who had an image as being so mild-mannered normally that he made Clark Kent resemble Donald Trump—was about as gracious in triumph as a flock of vultures swooping upon carrion.

Even allowing that it wasn’t intended for prime time, and wouldn’t have gotten there if a Cardinals spare part hadn’t been foolish enough to capture it on video and post it on Instagram, Shildt’s rant left him an image as an unsportsmanlike winner dancing on the graves of a team his Cardinals left looking like the victims of a terrorist attack in the first inning of their final division series game.

The Dancing Nats—whose dugout high stepping, boogieing, and Gene Kellying after big moments has become a rather endearing trademark not restricted to the kids we should let play but enjoyed even by the grizzled veterans who’ve rediscovered their fountains of youth—would love nothing more than to go Soul Train on Shildt’s and the Cardinals’ graves.

And they may not be alone. Shildt just might have given enough of the nation a case of Natitude.

Shildt has since apologised—for the rant having been made public at all, not for the drift of it; for the expletives undeleted but not the sentiment. “I apologize if my language offended anyone,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution quotes Shildt as saying.

It is not something I like to represent. It’s not to be excused. I will say that I’m flawed. I have my moments. I grew up in a clubhouse and one of the crosses I bear is my language. I’ve done a nice job over the many years of curbing that. Trying to represent always myself and this organization in a positive light with class and dignity. It’s regretful that that was able to get out.

He still thinks the Braves started some excrement and the Cardinals finished it. (The Cardinals weren’t thrilled about Braves center field star Ronald Acuna, Jr.’s, shall we say, exuberance, which is rich coming from a team that has a couple of exuberants itself.) And he still thinks his Cardinals are going to fornicate up any and all comers and that nobody fornicates with them.

He may be in for a big surprise when the Cardinals and the Nats sink into their NLCS.

Among the four last teams standing now the Cardinals had the weakest regular season record. They were closer to being shoved out of their division series than the Nats really were. Their starting rotation has one bona-fide freshly-established ace (Jack Flaherty), a former ace (Adam Wainwright) who can still pitch up in the apparent sunset of a splendid if injury-disrupted career, and a third starter (Dakota Hudson, no known relation to River Phoenix) who’s just that, a quiet and often efficient third starter.

The Nats have three legitimate aces. When you have Patrick Corbin as your third starter behind Max Scherzer and Stephen Strasburg, you’re the next best thing to Houston’s Justin Verlander, Gerrit Cole, and Zack Greinke. And you might even be equal, almost.

Corbin and Greinke have something in common this postseason. They’d be aces on almost any other staff, and they both got destroyed in division series appearances. Corbin got his redemption shot already; working the division series out of the pen, he atoned for his Game Three disaster with critical, spotless relief in Game Five. Greinke won’t get his shot until he starts Game One of the American League Championship Series.

The Nats can also hit. And how. They took a team .265/.342/.454 slash line into the postseason to the Cardinals’ .245/.322/.415. The Cardinals overall hit just a sliver better than the Nats in the division series rounds, and there’s no arguing with that Game Five early-and-too-often attack, but they’re not as powerful an offense as the Nats overall. If the Cardinals seem like comparative mosquitoes, the Nats seem like a can of Raid.

Put each team in the field, though, and the Cardinals may have a big advantage. They went from being the National League’s worst defense for errors in 2018 to the league’s best in 2019. It was like America going from Pearl Harbour one minute to winning World War II the next. And the Cardinals’ pitchers are mostly ground ballers while the Nats aren’t exactly a pure ground ball-hitting team.

But the Nats have a flair for the dramatic, and we’re not talking eighth-inning game-tying singles or walk-off sacrifice flies. When Dave Roberts pushed his luck with Clayton Kershaw in Game Five, Anthony Rendon and Juan Soto answered almost immediately how nice it wasn’t to fool with either Mother Nature or Kershaw’s sad postseason fortune.

And when Roberts pushed his luck with Joe Kelly and the bases loaded without an out even further, Howie Kendrick—talk about awakening a sleeping giant!—pushed it right over the center field fence and right through the Dodgers’ heads. (Speaking of which, Roberts may not be handed his head after all; the Los Angeles Times says people “with knowledge of the situation” say Roberts will be back in 2020.)

“You got to give credit to the Nationals,” Roberts said post mortem, while accepting the complete blame for the Dodgers’ destruction, “the way they played and came in here and won a series.”

But the Cardinals won’t face a Braves-like kid corps augmented with one smart but vulnerable veteran on the mound. And Martinez and his Nats still have to worry about their entire bullpen not named Daniel Hudson and Sean Doolittle. The Cardinals pray Martinez forgets. Everyone else prays otherwise.

It’s not that the Cardinals’ bullpen is invulnerable. They took a possibly fatal hit losing Jordan Hicks to Tommy John surgery in late June. And their pen men seem to like playing with matches a little too much themselves.

But if you thought Curt Schilling was cruelly emphatic wearing a towel over his head over Mitch (Wild Thing) Williams’s relief, watch Scherzer, Strasburg, Corbin, Sanchez, and Nats Nation whole if anyone but Hudson and Doolittle get the call. They’ll be forgiven for donning hazmat head masks. This NLCS could well come down to which bullpen fights fires with the least full gasoline tanks.

The Nats may have discovered a secret weapon, however: rookie Tanner Rainey. He got the job of getting rid of a pair of righthanded Dodger hitters in Game Five. He got a harmless popup to shortstop and an even more harmless fly out to right. Side retired. Leaving Rainey with a division series jacket of five hitters faced and nothing worse than one base hit. Plus fastball, wipeout slider in the making. One less arsonist for Nats Nation to fear. Maybe.

“To win these type of games against this type of teams, the Los Angeles Dodgers, your stars have to be stars,” said Nats general manager Mike Rizzo in the middle of a celebratory champagne flood. “Our stars were stars tonight, and I think that’s what carried us through.”

These Cardinals aren’t those Dodgers. These Cardinals didn’t just post the single best winning season in franchise history only to be destroyed in the end by a swarm of Nats whose franchise-best season, including their Montreal years, was 2012’s 98-winner. And these Nats don’t have a manager who made them look like sore winners after their arguable finest hour.

Forget life, John Lennon, wherever you are. Baseball is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. Neither the Braves nor the Dodgers planned to be imploded out of this postseason. The Rays just didn’t have enough to finish pushing the Astros through the wall up against which they pushed them; the thumping Twins went limp against the Yankees far sooner.

The Yankees vs. the Astros will combine a duel of the titans with a rivalry for who gets baseball’s version of the Nobel Prize for Medicine. The Nats vs. the Cardinals didn’t exactly get through their seasons unscathed, but their overseers aren’t likely to discover that many missing players in the nearest emergency rooms, either.

This nation’s taken enough on the chin (not to mention the gut and the heart) from Washington ever since the Nats first arrived for 2005. From Washington, not the Nats. The lowest moments in Nats history don’t approach to within even two national borders of the lowest in Washington’s.

And there’d be few things more fun, for a nation that too often seems to have forgotten how to have it, than the prospect of the Nats making it “Washington—First in war, first in peace, and first in the National League” by washing Shildt’s mouth out with soap. If not an appropriately named box of Tide.

Sore winners

Posted on October 10, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

The Cardinals earned their coming NLCS berth . . . and their skipper earned them an image as unsportsmanlike winners with a postgame rant.

Until he was out-boxed and out-thought by Muhammad Ali in 1964, Sonny Liston was so brutal in the ring he inspired gags about knocking his opponents out before the weighing-in was finished. Forgive the Braves if they think they were stink bombed, pistol whipped, and machine-gunned before “Play ball!” finished escaping the umpire’s mouth.

In avian terms cardinals are seed-eaters by nature, not birds of prey. Don’t tell that to the Braves at any time from now until spring training. Because baseball’s Cardinals turned into glandular enough birds of prey in the top of the first Wednesday afternoon. Leaving no carrion behind.

The 13-1 final score almost didn’t matter. What the Braves incurred from the Cardinals not even Alfred Hitchcock could have conjured. Losing a tenth consecutive postseason set was bad enough. How the Braves were destroyed in Game Five of this National League division series was precedent setting.

No team in the history of division series play ever scored ten runs in a single inning until the Cardinals did it to open Game Five. They did it without one batter in Cardinals feathers hitting one into the seats. It went from small ball to medium ball. Not that the Braves cared, particularly. It hurt just as deep as if they’d been nuked.

Especially after they were four measly outs from going to the National League Championship Series themselves on Monday night. Before Yadier Molina singled home the tying run in the eighth and hit the game-ending sacrifice fly in the tenth in Game Four. Before the trip back to Atlanta. Before the early burial.

Before Cardinals center fielder Dexter Fowler, once a World Series-winning Cub whose St. Louis tenure hasn’t always been a joyful noise, got thatclose to striking out before wringing a game-opening seven-pitch walk out of Braves starter Mike Foltynewicz. Before the Cardinals sent ten runs across the plate without one single soul hitting one into the seats.

And before Cardinals manager Mike Shildt—who looks so prototypically like a nerd you’d think he knew no expletive stronger than deleted at first glance—delivered a postgame rant of the kind that usually comes when a team’s been battered, not the other way around.

Tommy Lasorda and Lee Elia, you’ve been upstaged. Meet Shildt, in one fateful moment he’d surely love to walk back now. Meet Shildt, the sorest winner on the planet.

Once upon a time another generation of Cardinals collapsed so thoroughly in Game Seven of the 1985 World Series after being jobbed by a blown call near the end of Game Six that they looked like unsportsmanlike chokers. Shildt made his 2019 Cardinals look like unsportsmanlike winners.

“They [the Braves] started some (excrement). We finished the (excrement),” Shildt growled. “And that’s how we roll. No one (fornicates) with us ever. Now, I don’t give a (feces) who we play. We’re gonna (fornicate) them up. We’re gonna take it right to them the whole (fornicating) way. We’re gonna kick their (fornicating) ass.”

Rookie Cardinals outfielder Randy Arozarena, a ninth-inning pinch hitter who finished Game Five playing right field, filmed Shildt’s rant and posted it to Instagram. That’ll teach him. He couldn’t delete the post or apologise fast enough once it hit the Internet flying. Too late. Way to soil your own achievement, boys.

Fowler may or may not have been lucky to survive long enough to wring that game-opening walk; on 1-2 he foul ticked a pitch by less than a hair. “Did I?” he cracked after the game. “That was so long ago I can’t even remember.”

Foltynewicz hadn’t walked a single soul in his Game Two start. Little did he know. And little did anyone in the joint know Cardinals second baseman Kolten Wong would even think about sacrificing Fowler to second, never mind doing it almost immediately. “After a good at-bat by Dex,” he’d say, “I told myself, ‘Just get him scoring position’.”

The Cardinals had one goal going in: take the Braves’ home audience out of the game as soon as possible. During the National Anthem if need be. They got close enough. After that, knowing they were sending Jack Flaherty to the mound, they figured a single run might be enough for the kid who pitched the National League’s ears off in the season’s second half.

“We know what kind of a pitcher Foltynewicz is and what he did to us last time and the way this series has been,” said first baseman Paul Goldschmidt, who beat out an infield hit right after Wong’s sacrifice. “We wanted to get on the board early.”

He forgot to mention the “often” part. And after left fielder Marcell Ozuna lofted a pitch that arrived around his toes into right to send Fowler home, Braves first baseman Freddie Freeman—as close to Old Reliable as the Braves have had since the retirement of Hall of Famer Chipper Jones—mishandled Yadier Molina’s hard grounder to load the bases.

Having the arguable worst week of his career as it was, en route a .200 NLDS batting average on four hits (including one homer and one double), six strikeouts, and one walk in 21 plate appearances, Freeman didn’t flinch after the massacre. “They got nine more runs,” he said. “That was pretty much the game right there.”

Matt Carpenter, penciled in to start at third base for the Cardinals, walked in a run. Tommy Edman, who’d taken Carpenter’s job during the season but was penciled in to start in the Game Five outfield, tore a two-run double down the right field line and chased Foltynewicz in favour of Max Fried. The Braves ordered a free pass to Cardinals shortstop Paul DeJong.

And Flaherty had the strange distinction of becoming the rarest breed of pitcher: one who gets to hit before he’s even thrown a single pitch. Not to mention facing his high school buddy and teammate Fried. And he walked Carpenter home.

“I’m laughing because Max is up there,” the righthanded boy wonder remembered after the game about approaching the plate. “I’m trying to keep a straight face. I looked up into the stands and saw my mom, which was great. She was smiling and all excited. I didn’t expect Max.” That’s nothing compared to what Fried didn’t expect.

He didn’t expect Fowler and Wong to hit back-to-back RBI doubles. He didn’t expect to throw a wild pitch to Ozuna for strike three enabling Wong to come home after Goldschmidt left Wong room enough to take third on a line out to right. You almost swore Molina grounded out to end the flood at last because he took pity on the Braves for one brief, shining moment.

Adam Wainwright, who pitched heroically enough in Game Three only to see it laid to waste late, could barely believe what he saw from his seat in the Cardinal dugout. “Have you seen anything like that?” he asked before answering after the game. “We just kept the pedal to the metal . . . I was just trying to stay in the moment, but after that inning I came in to the guys and said, ‘I’ve never seen anything like that’.”

The rest of the game seemed almost ceremonial even if Flaherty didn’t exactly have an untroubled outing. He shook of first and second and one out in the first, shrugged off Josh Donaldson’s solo home run in the fourth, and survived a bases-loaded jam in the fifth when he lost control momentarily and hit Ronald Acuna, Jr. with a pitch.

Considering the testiness between Acuna and the Cardinals most of the series the easiest thought to indulge was Flaherty trying to send the Braves’ youthful center field star a message. Considering everything else by that time, there was no way Flaherty would send a message pitch with what was then a twelve-run cushion that should have felt more like a hot tub, especially since Flaherty faced Acuna in the first and walked him without so much as a thought of inside and tight.

Pitching coach Mike Maddux went out to the mound at once to settle Flaherty. He didn’t want his lad making the same mistake Foltynewicz made in that first-inning flood, crossing the line between pitching with emotion and emotionally pitching. Flaherty got the message and got rid of Freeman on a ground out to second for the side.

After the flood, the Cardinals flipped from opening with offense on the brain to pure defense. They moved Edman to third and Fowler to right and sent Harrison Bader out to center field immediately after they’d finished the ten-run opening act. As if to remind his team he knew good and bloody well he had more than a glove working for him, Edman tore one off the top of the right field wall for a one-out triple in the top of the second.

Paul DeJong didn’t give Fried a moment to breathe before he ripped the next pitch off the wall for an RBI double. And after Flaherty zipped through the Braves in order in the bottom, Luke Jackson relieved Fried. He walked Wong on a full count, struck out Goldschmidt, plunked Ozuna on the first pitch, and got a sharp grounder out of Molina.

A grounder Braves shortstop Dansby Swanson picked and shoveled to second baseman Ozzie Albies, and the ball hit Albies’s bare hand leaving all hands safe. Then Bader lined one up the middle to score Wong and, after Edman struck out, DeJong hit another first pitch right through the left side to score Ozuna.

Thirteen runs in three innings. The rest of the game felt like a plain formality. The Braves bullpen from Josh Tomlin forward kept the Cardinals so quiet the rest of the way you began to feel tempted toward asking Braves manager Brian Snitker whether he’d think about trying a purely bullpen game if he could get a Game Five do-over.

“I don’t know that I’ve seen that many guys hit in the first inning that quick in my entire life,” Snitker said. “I don’t know. It wasn’t how we drew it up, I know that. I don’t know. That thing just kept rolling and we couldn’t stop it.”

“Everyone had sky high confidence going into that game and them scoring ten runs, it’s hard to swallow,” said Freeman after the game. “Everything went wrong from the get-go.”

“You don’t expect something like that to happen,” Donaldson lamented, “especially with how well we played all season.”

Any more than you expected Shildt’s post-mortem potty-mouth.

Tony La Russa’s Cardinals beat the Dodgers in a 2004 division series and, after it ended, led his players across the field for a handshake-and-hug line with the Dodgers after the 3-1 triumph. (Effervescent Jose Lima’s Game Three shutout was the only Dodgers win.) It was a grand and entirely endearing gesture. And baseball’s then-chief of discipline Bob Watson reprimanded the Cardinals for it.

La Russa may have had his flaws, but ranting like a drunken sailor over the freshly vanquished wasn’t one of them. Where’s Joe Torre, fellow Hall of Fame manager who now has Watson’s job among his other duties out of the commissioner’s office, to reprimand Shildt?

Letting the kids play is one thing. Letting them enjoy the living daylights out of the moment when they do big things without being broiled by baseball’s Fun Police for it is another thing. But letting a manager get away with a Shildt-like rant after a win at all, never mind one as lopsided as the Cardinals’ on Wednesday? That’s [fornicating] something else entirely.

This wasn’t Yankee manager Aaron Boone going on his now-famous “savages” rant in support of his players after a couple of nasty arguments with a couple of questionable umpires. This was a manager whose team had just humiliated a worthy opponent but who couldn’t resist grinding his heel on their fallen necks.

Arozarena owned up to making a rookie mistake posting his manager’s postgame potty mouth. Shildt made his team look so juvenile that most other fan bases in baseball will forget how surreal their first inning achievement was and hope the Cardinals go down hard in the National League Championship Series.

And if they do, they’ll probably find Braves fans leading the anti-charge. With no jury in the land prepared to rule them unjustified. It’s the least they can be allowed now.

Sunday, bloody Sunday

Posted on October 7, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

2019 NLDS Game 3 - Atlanta Braves v. St. Louis Cardinals

Adam Wainwright’s Sunday virtuosity ended up going for naught.

Adam Wainwright had every reason on earth to feel nothing but a powerful desire to arrange Carlos Martinez’s necktie party Sunday. So did every citizen of Cardinal Country. So did every last baseball fan who prayed for and got an impeccable pitchers’ duel, with the Braves’ Mike Soroka playing Dickey Betts to Wainwright’s Duane Allman for virtuosity.

The duel that ended with Martinez’s Spike Jones sneaking explosives into the drums and the Braves standing one win from a National League Championship Series engagement. It’s a good thing for Martinez that Wainwright is a forgiving soul. He had no intention after the staggering 3-1 Braves win in Busch Stadium of doing anything but giving Martinez a big hug.

“And Carlos will be ready tomorrow,” the 38-year-old righthander who may be approaching the end of a solid if injury-compromised career. “Let’s hope one moment doesn’t define his season, because I’d like to see him get another chance.”

Unfortunately, Wainwright and Cardinals manager Mike Schildt may be the only one with that wish. “He’ll be in that spot [Monday],” the skipper said, “and I’ll have full confidence in him.” He says that now, but . . .

Even Braves closer Mark Melancon had Martinez’s back after the game. “You’re not looking to see guys fail,” he told a reporter. “You want to do it the right way, big on big and beat somebody. We’ve all been there. I can’t say that I didn’t want to win, but Carlos is an incredible pitcher. We’ve got to come back strong tomorrow because he’s going to come back, I’m sure.”

After opening with a leadoff double but two straight strikeouts Sunday afternoon, Martinez surrendering back-to-back RBI hits that broke the Cardinals’ backs and Cardinal Country’s hearts for the bottom of the ninth means nobody’s really sure. “There were some pitches that didn’t go where they were supposed to go,” the righthander said afterward. “I didn’t have the best grip on the slider. I tried to get that pitch to do what it was supposed to do and I didn’t get to it.”

The single greatest exhibition of pressure pitching of Wainwright’s life was laid to waste right there.

With an enviable enough postseason pitching record as it is—he has a lifetime 2.79 ERA and 1.03 walks/hits per inning pitched rate in October—Wainwright for seven innings couldn’t be stopped with a subpoena, never mind a S.W.A.T. team. Especially throwing the curve ball he calls King Charles, the way Mets legend Dwight Gooden’s curve was once known as Lord Charles.

If Wainwright wasn’t quite as masterly as the Astros’ Gerrit Cole the day before, he was close enough and too much so for the Braves’ discomfort. He nailed eight strikeouts, trusted his defenders just enough, didn’t let plate umpire Sam Holbrook’s microscopic strike zone faze him any more than Soroka did, didn’t let his own club’s lack of cash-in offense bother him, and made a 1-0 lead—acquired on a Marcell Ozuna double, a Yadier Molina ground out pushing Ozuna to third, and a Matt Carpenter sacrifice fly in the second inning—feel almost like a 10-0 lead.

Then, after Brian McCann popped out to the third base side near the plate to open the top of the eighth, Wainwright’s tank ran past E. Dansby Swanson shot one through the hole at short for a single. Soroka’s pinch hitter Adam Duvall lined out to third but Ronald Acuna, Jr. worked himself to a full-count walk, Wainwright’s first of the day. And Ozzie Albies walked on 3-1 to load the pads for Freddie Freeman.

Exit Wainwright, enter Andrew Miller, who hasn’t been the same as he was with the Indians thanks to their overworking him while he was hot and a couple of injuries to follow that have sapped his once-formidable repertoire if not his heart. The Cardinals needed it to be classic Miller Time in the worst way possible now.

And after a swinging strike to open, Miller got Freeman to fly out to Dexter Fowler in center field and strand the ducks on the pond.

The problem was, the Cardinals weren’t any better after pushing Soroka’s relief Max Fried in the bottom of the eighth. Fried walked Carpenter to open, with Schildt sending swift Harrison Bader out to run for the veteran. Bader distracted Fried enough to compel a walk to Tommy Edman before Paul DeJong flied out toward the right field line. Exit Fried, enter Darren O’Day.

Also enter Jose Martinez pinch hitting in Miller’s lineup slot. O’Day faked a throw over and Bader took off, only to get hung up between second and third before O’Day threw him out at third. Then Martinez hit a sinking liner to left that Duvall on his horse could only reach and trap. You could taste the RBI that wasn’t on a plate dipped in A-1 sauce.

Bader’s arrest for attempted grand theft loomed even larger after Sean Newcomb relieved Day and got Fowler to fly out to his center field counterpart Acuna for the side. Then Schildt put Bader into center field, moved Edman from right field to third base, shifted Fowler to right field, and called on Carlos Martinez.

Josh Donaldson might have ripped a double past the diving Edman at third and down the left field line into the corner for a leadoff double, but Martinez bagged Nick Markakis and pinch hitter Adeiny Hechevarria—who’d been 4-for-6 in that role since joining the Braves—back to back on swinging strikeouts.

The bad news was Donaldson’s pinch runner Billy Hamilton, whose road running on the bases is almost his only ability that enables him to play major league baseball, getting too much into Martinez’s head. So much so that when Hechevarria swung strike three Hamilton stole third without so much as a beat cop hollering “Stop, thief!”

“At the time you want to get to third with one out, so that was a bad break,” Hamilton told reporters after the game. “But getting to third even with two outs, what if Martinez bounces one in the dirt? I could score. And maybe he has to pitch the next guy differently.”

Then, after Molina and Martinez confabbed at the mound with Molina obviously upset and Schildt joining them to settle them down and get back to business, McCann—the potential go-ahead run—was awarded first on the house and Rafael Ortega assigned to pinch run for the prodigal Braves’ catcher.

Swanson checked in at the plate 0-for-6 lifetime against Martinez. Every star aligned in Martinez’s favour. “The Cardinals start doing game management,” said McCann after the game, “and then Dansby came up clutch.”

Clutch enough to send one off the left field fence and send Hamilton home to tie it at one. “God blessed me with good hand-eye coordination,” the Braves’ shortstop said after the game. “In those situations, you just try and breathe and relax. It’s easier said than done.”

And Duvall dumped a quail into short center down for a base hit, scoring Ortega readily with Bader throwing home but well off and over the third base line, enabling Swanson to score the third run.

Only after walking Acuna did Martinez escape, getting Albies to line out to right. And after Freeman made a sensational extension to hold a wide throw from shortstop and keep his toe on first base to nail Kolten Wong opening, Paul Goldschmidt banked a double off the right field side wall off Melancon. But Ozuna looked at strike three on the inside corner and Molina flied out to center.

It gave the Braves their first postseason series lead in seventeen years and gave the Cardinals a reminder of what they might have really lost when Jordan Hicks, their originally assigned closer, having a solid season to that point, went down with Tommy John surgery in late June. Might.

Maybe a healthy Hicks keeps the Braves pinned in the ninth Sunday. Maybe he doesn’t. Two days after Martinez barely survived to keep a Cardinal win a win, he didn’t survive. And the Cardinals get to host the Braves for Game Four on the fiftieth anniversary of making the trade that helped change baseball.

It was 7 October 1969 when they traded center field mainstay Curt Flood to the Phillies. The trade Flood rejected for the reserve clause challenge that went all the way to the Supreme Court before losing—yet pushing open the door through which Hall of Famer Catfish Hunter and then Andy Messersmith would escort free agency’s advent.

Fifty years ago, too, the Miracle Mets shocked the world with their division, pennant, and World Series triumphs. Their golden anniversary team couldn’t stay the distance even toward a wild card game spot. The Cardinals have bigger stakes to play for on the Flood trade’s golden anniversary.

And a lot to make up for to Adam Wainwright, who’d love nothing more than one more postseason start at minimum. He won’t say he’ll retire after the Cardinals’ season ends; he won’t say he won’t, either.

“(I)n my mind, I’ve got two more series to pitch through, you know?” Wainwright said Sunday evening. “We got the NLCS (and) the World Series pitch through. But first we got to win (Monday). That’s where my head’s at right now. But no, I never once felt like today was it. Either we’ve got more games to win, or I’ve got more games to pitch.”

If his injuries over the years keep him from thinking about the Hall of Fame, Wainwright at least thinks the way a Hall of Famer does. Against a group of Braves who don’t know the meaning of the word surrender just yet, that attitude needs to rub off a lot more on the Cardinals now.

NLDS Game One: Fun cops vs. fun cops

Posted on October 4, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

Was Yadier Molina (left) reminding Carlos Martinez about throwing stones in glass houses Thursday afternoon?

Oh, brother. You knew going in that things between the Braves and the Cardinals in a division series would be interesting, to say the very least. Especially knowing the set pits one precinct of fun police against another. Then you got reminded soon enough about being very careful what you wish for.

The Cardinals and the Braves put on a few shows for the price of one, before the Cardinals hung in to finish a 7-6 win Thursday afternoon. The Comedy of Errors, starring one of this season’s most vaunted defenses. The Late Show, starring both sides’ bombardiers Paul Goldschmidt, Freddie Freeman, and Ronald Acuna, Jr. And Get Off My Lawn, starring Cardinals pitcher Carlos Martinez out of the ninth inning bullpen.

When the Show’s number three team for defense in terms of runs saved (95), the number five team for turning batted balls into outs (.705), and the number thirty team for allowing errors (a mere 66) allows three Game One runs on extremely playable grounders, you try to remind yourself the Elysian Field demigods do have a sense of humour, if you’re a Cardinals fan.

When your franchise youth settles for a long single in the seventh, after taking a leisurely stroll out of the batter’s box, and barely arrives at first when he might have pulled into second when the right fielder turned to throw in after playing the ball off the height of the fence, you try to see it from the youth’s perspective, if you’re a Braves fan.

When Cardinal fan’s relief ace—who’s renowned for making like Tarzan when he nails strikeouts or induces critical outs—calls out the same youth for having a ball when he does hit one that’s no questions asked out in the bottom of the ninth and has a blast running it out, demanding the boy wonder respect him, Cardinal fan has to remind himself or herself that Mama said there’d be moments and brain farts like that.

When Braves fan has to listen to venerable veteran Freddie Freeman call out Ronald Acuna, Jr.’s earlier stroll, he or she needs every ounce of restraint to keep from reminding Freeman—and any other Brave sharing Freeman’s thinking—that, all things considered, being at second where he belonged in the seventh might not have gotten them more in the end.

With all the foregoing and more it almost felt as though the Cardinals hanging tough, coming back, yanking far ahead with a four-run top of the ninth, and still beating the Braves, was a tough loss. And weren’t things weird enough without Braves reliever Chris Martin going down for the rest of the series after straining his oblique . . . while coming in from the pen assigned to work the eighth? Without throwing a single pitch?

“Every out, every pitch is important,” said the Cardinals’ Matt Carpenter, who didn’t start but who pinch hit in the eighth and dumped the quail off Braves reliever Mark Melancon in the eighth to tie things up at three. “There’s a lot of adrenaline involved, but that’s what you play for, that’s why you’re here.”

“We’ve played all season expecting to win those type games. You give up that kind of lead, it’s tough to swallow,” said Freeman, who shot one over the center field wall one out after Acuna yanked a two-run homer into the same real estate in the ninth, then watched Josh Donaldson ground out and Nick Markakis look at strike three to end the Braves’ afternoon a day late and a dollar short.

Those two homers were joined by Golschmidt in the top of the eighth. Off Luke Jackson, who had to go in after Martin’s in-from-the-pen oblique tweak and watch Goldschmidt send his second pitch over the left field wall. They were the only bombs on a day both teams seemed hell bent on proving small ball hadn’t yet gone the way of the Yugo. If you didn’t know better, you’d have sworn some things were supposed to have been outlawed in recent times.

Things like Cardinals center fielder Harrison Bader not just beating out an infield single in the fifth and moving to second on—the horror!—a sacrifice bunt by Cardinals starting pitcher Miles Mikolas, but stealing third for the first such theft in a measly two tries off Braves starter Dallas Keuchel all year long. Not to mention Bader tying the game at one when he scored on Dexter Fowler’s ground out to second.

Things like Donaldson pushing the first run of the game home on what should have been dialing Area Code 4-6-3 in the bottom of the first but for usually easy-handed Cardinals second baseman Kolten Wong blowing his backhand toss to first leaving all hands safe and enabling his Braves counterpart Ozzie Albies—who reached on a walk in the first place—to score.

Things like the Braves taking a 3-1 lead in the bottom of the sixth with only one hit—with Donaldson plunked with one out, Markakis doubling him to third, pinch hitter Adam Duvall handed first on the house, and, a pitching change and a strikeout later, Dansby Swanson motoring to beat an infield RBI single that turned into an extra run home when Cardinals shortstop Paul DeJong’s throw to second bounced off Wong’s glove.

Except that most of the conversation turned around Acuna’s eighth-inning trot. Some of it came from Freeman, who knew how frustrating it was to lose a potential run in a one-run loss with a mistake that wasn’t the first such.

“But I think you have that conversation once,” the well-respected first baseman continued. “It’s kind of beating a dead horse after that if you keep having the same conversation over and over again. You have to know that was a mistake.”

“It could have been a double, but things happen,” was Acuna’s way of explaining it. “I didn’t speak with the manager about it. I just went out to enjoy the game. I always try to give my best, but these are things that sometimes get away from me. They are not things I want to do. As players, we always try to give our best effort, but we make mistakes, we are human.”

He’s right about players being human and making mistakes, of course; in this instance, he’d been there before this year and been benched briefly for it. So is Braves manager Brian Snitker right when he says, “He should have been on second. And we’re kind of shorthanded to do anything about it right there. You hate to see that happen.”

But it’s open to debate whether Alibes is right saying, “He probably scores in that inning if he’s on second base. It’s a big deal. He knows he needs to do better there.” Albies is probably right in his second and third sentences there. About scoring from second, not quite.

Because Albies followed Acuna immediately with a grounder that pushed Acuna to third, but Freeman got hit by a pitch immediately to follow and Donaldson’s immediate bullet liner—with Acuna likely to run on contact—would have been the double play it became regardless.

Then Martinez had to make all that look like the mere warmup for the main attraction, when Acuna had what Martinez believed a little too much of a ball around the bases after depositing a meatball practically down the pipe over the center field wall. “I wanted him to respect the game and respect me as a veteran player,” Martinez fumed afterward. “Just play the game.”

Martinez even had ideas about chirping a lecture or three toward the Braves dugout before his veteran catcher Yadier Molina interceded and nudged him gently but firmly back to the mound. This was almost too rich for words in a game featuring a pair of teams only too notorious around the sport for being fun police units.

You almost can’t wait for the Braves to fume the next time Martinez goes into his Tarzan act if he ends a dicey inning with a nasty strikeout: “We want him to respect us as the National League East champions and not just a bunch of plug-ins who needed all 162 games to get here.”

If that’s the way the Cardinals and the Braves are going to be—as if playing a delicious Game One division series thriller and spiller just wasn’t quite enough—then let them suit up for Game Two in business suits, for crying out loud. Huffing “just play the game” after demanding “respect” tells me (and should tell you) that someone forgot about the “game” part. And, about throwing meatballs to power hitters.

Throneberry Fields Forever

. . . a calm review of baseball

Tag Archives: St. Louis Cardinals