Without Wain, It Pours

The disappointment last night was tangible in Cardinal Nation.  If you weren’t at the ballpark, just looking through Twitter would have clued you in on that. It wasn’t so much the loss.  With the division clinched and the likelihood of being anything more than the third-best record among division leaders, the loss didn’t really effect much.   The way the game was lost , though, and what it meant to Adam Wainwright, was much more of a gut-wrenching end.

We all know that wins have been overrated for a long time.  Heck, last night was the perfect example of that as Braden Looper gets a mark in the win column even though he left trailing 6-1. In what rational world does he deserve a win?  Yet that’s the way baseball goes.

So wins are overrated.  We know that.  I’m not sure that even a 20th win would have gotten Wainwright a Cy Young, though it very well might have.  (With the writers, I expect that 20 might have been a clincher, especially when Tim Lincecum only has 15.  Among the voters of the Baseball Bloggers Alliance, I’m guessing deeper digging will be done.)  It’s not rational, really, to care more about that game than any of the other bullpen collapses we’ve seen this season.

Emotion is rarely logical, though,  To have a 20th win sitting there for Wainwright, who has done so much for this team this year, and then to see it taken away with a meltdown of epic proportions is really tough to take, especially when it was his last chance to get one.  Maybe when my son is my age, things will have advanced to where we’ll be more interested in the fact that someone has 21 support neutral wins  (HT Fungoes ), but right now the traditional marks are still what fire the public imagination and get us worked up.

Wainwright did his part, at least, limiting the Brewers to one run over six and getting into the offense by legging out a triple and scoring on a Colby Rasmus single.  (Seriously, the pitchers seem to be doing their best to show up the hitters lately!)  With the use of Chris Carpenter still fresh in memory, I expected Wainwright to be pulled then, especially with his spot in the lineup coming up.

He batted, though, and all I could figure is that LaRussa wanted to make sure he got the standing ovation as he walked off the mound, so he’d send him out there and pull him off after a few warmup tosses.  Then, as he started the inning, I figured he’d get pulled as soon as a batter reached.  To me, Wainwright really seemed tired, stepping off and taking deep breaths, like he was digging deep.

So instead of a reliever coming into a fresh inning, Kyle McClellangets summoned with two on and nobody out.  And for all the grief McClellan is going to get today, for all he’s beating himself up about things, he almost had a decent outing.  He got two strikes on Jason Kendall, but Kendall’s veteran restraint served him well.  He had Kendall flinching on every pitch, but Kendall was always able to hold the bat back far enough.  If he’d gotten one in the strike zone, it’d have been better, but if Kendall goes for one of them and strike out, then Gamel afterwards Ks, maybe the results are better.

That said, McClellan imploded big time after the walk to Kendall and the strikeout of Gamel.  It’s one thing to let a run score, it’s even understandable that you let both of Wainwright’s runs score.  To allow the Brewers to tie the game when they are down 5?  That’s just wrong.  No matter how you slice it.

A lot of the blame is also headed Tony LaRussa’s way , and there’s definitely an argument there.  There were a lot of questionable decisions last night, especially to leave Yadier Molina in there where he was clearly not his best.

Six runs was nice for the Cards as well, but noticeably they stopped hitting after the fourth.  Albert Pujols had three hits, getting that average up to .331, but also made an error as the team completed the collapse in the eighth.  All in all, it was a great first half of the game, but other than that, not one you want to talk about.  Which is why I’ve rambled on so long on a Saturday morning, I guess.  Maybe you do want to talk about it, for closure purposes.

The Cards look to get that taste out of their mouths with an early start today against the Brewers.  Kyle Lohse goes for the Cards, Carlos Villanueva for the Brewers.  Lohse has his last chance to impress for the postseason.  Lohse has one start against the Brewers this year and didn’t fare well, though he did get an outing out of the bullpen against them that went much better.  The Brewers haven’t been fooled by him too much in the past , so a strong outing might mean more than it normally would.

Villanueva has gone back and forth from being a starter to a reliever, with limited success in either role.  He’s appeared in six games against the Redbirds this year and done well (1-1, 2.25 ERA) but all those games were out of the pen.  He has a 6.38 ERA as a starter this year, so we’ll see if the Cards can get to him after seeing him more than once.  Pujols has two home runs off of him in his career  and Milwaukee was the last team he went deep on, so hopefully we can see him launch one today.  I can’t find out if it’s today or tomorrow that’s Buddy Walk, but whenever that is, you know one ball is getting lost.

This is probably my last entry for the regular season, a season that’s been much more than most of us expected.  We’ll have time to reflect later, but thanks, Cardinals, for some great memories.

Daniel Shoptaw is the founder of “C70 At The Bat,” where he regularly writes about his beloved St. Louis Cardinals.  You can find more of his work here .