The Cardinals beat the Braves last night in a two-act play: The first act was a tragic, sad sequence of scenes that foreshadowed a damp, scuttling loss and the unexplained demise of its protagonist, Kyle Lohse. But the second act opened with a thrilling soliloquy by Colby Rasmus and climaxed with a bit actor upstaging the regular hero.

After missing their marks on the base paths — Albert Pujols got caught watching his first-inning clout that didn’t make it out and compounded his error by trying to reach second base, and an ill-fated double steal in the second killed off more win expectancy — and Lohse meandering around the strike zone, the Cardinals appeared destined for a long denouement, even as late as the sixth inning. It was almost as though the Braves, sensing the foregone conclusion, became complacent and started swinging earlier in the count, hoping for a quick finish to a rain-dotted 3-0 win. But their luck wouldn’t break for a big inning, and thus what seemed like an insurmountable deficit the Cardinals incrementally cut into, starting with Pujols’s groundout and then by a round-tripper by Rasmus, the team’s most-productive hitter, which awakened the team to the possibility of a win. Bryan Anderson, getting a pinch-hitting appearance (before extra innings!) picked up for the struggling Brendan Ryan with a two-out double to tie the game in the seventh.

Other notes:

• To his credit, Pujols didn’t make the same mistake twice and hustled out of the box each of his subsequent at-bats.
• On Hudson’s infield chopper up the middle in the third inning, Brendan Ryan appeared to yield to Skip Schumaker, who in addition to not having the range or arm of Ryan was moving away from first. Ryan needs to take some leadership on the infield and go for everything possible. He may be slumping at the plate, but he can make up for it in the field.
• Before Reyes got into trouble and ended up facing Heyward in the eighth, we wondered whether La Russa would leave him in to start the ninth (and face the Atlanta lefty). Despite his wildness (he allowed two walks), Reyes took the mound in the ninth, albeit only as a formality to force Bobby Cox to pinch hit for the lefthanded Nate McLouth.
• With a runner on third in the fourth inning, Martin Prado kept hustling to back up Hudson on throws back from catcher Brian McCann. Does McCann have a Mackey Sasser problem, or is Prado merely exceptionally diligent?
• The MLB.com dispatch included the phrase "The rally made a winner of reliever Dennys Reyes…" Seriously? What is forcing people to write like this these days?

This entry was posted by Pip on Tuesday, April 27th, 2010 at 5:41 pm and is filed under analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.