Cardinal fans and first basemen were upset Tuesday night after third-base coach Jose Oquendo prevented Randy Winn from attempting to score the tying run in the ninth inning in a game they went on to lose to the Pirates, 4-3. But can they lefitimately blame Oquendo?

First, let’s reconstruct the play: Down by one run with runners on first and second with one out in the ninth, the visiting Cardinals had the heart of their lineup coming to bat. Albert Pujols grounded sharply toward third, where Pirate third baseman Pedro Alvarez dove and slowed down the ball, which rolled into shallow left field. Winn came racing from second looking to score, but, seeing Oquendo’s stop sign, put on the brakes as shortstop Ronny Cedeno retrieved the ball, giving the Cardinals bases loaded, one out and Matt Holliday stepping to the dish.

So now, some facts:

• Holliday hit a home run to give the team the lead earlier in the game.
• Holliday is the Cardinals’ second-best hitter after Pujols.
• Holliday runs well and doesn’t ground into many double plays.
• Winn runs well and is a good bet to score on a fly ball.
• Jon Jay, on second, runs well and is a decent bet to score on a single.
• The Cardinals’ win expectancy at that point was 46.3%.
• The Cardinals have been among the league’s worst baserunning teams, running into many unnecessary outs, for which Oquendo was often responsible.

Assuming that Winn had even odds of being thrown out or scoring– admittedly a big assumption — here are the win-expectancy numbers that Oquendo was dealing with, if unwittingly:

Given those numbers, the risk far outweighed the reward:

Not to mention, the team’s second-best hitter was coming to the plate. The replay seemed to show that Winn had a reasonable chance of scoring, but even so, the decision to preserve the tying run at third base was completely defensible. And that’s making a split-second call without the aid of Tango’s win-expectancy tables.

Pujols’s frustration was understandable but ultimately uninformed and yet another public insult to his coach. Oquendo has made some mistakes in judgment this year, but this wasn’t one of them.

Sunday afternoon Brandon Morrow nearly missed a no-hitter, but struck out the most batters in a single baseball game since 2007, when Johan Santana also fanned 17. Although Major League Baseball has has had five no-hitters so far in 2010, including two perfect games, Morrow’s was the best fielding-independently-pitched game of the year:

* perfect game

Cole Hamels couldn’t have begun Thursday’s game much more perfectly, striking out five of the first six batters he faced. He went on to strike out seven of the only 25 batters he faced over eight innings, with only a walk to mar his record.

Hamels tied Johan Santana for the third-best-pitched game against the Cardinals this season by Fielding-Independent Game Score:

(By the way, the Cardinals figure to miss Carlos Silva, who pitched the best game against them, in their upcoming weekend series with the Cubs.) Although Hamels’s mound counterpart, Adam Wainwright, yielded a few more hits than the Phillie southpaw, Wainwright was nearly as terrific, tossing a 67-FIGS game. His was the fourth-best among Cardinal starts in 2010:

Together, the Hamels-Wainwright tilt was the best pitching duel in which the Cardinals have been involved this year (defined as the top lower-pitcher FIGS):

We’ll have to see where it ranks among all games in major-league baseball this season.

The Cardinals as a team made dubious history in their Tuesday-night meltdown. And Ryan Franklin, the primary culprit in the arson, burnished his own mark in the history book. Entering the game with about a 98% win expectancy, he proceeded to get torched for six runs, a net -.981 in win-probability added. That’s hard to do.

All closers blow up at some point, but this one seemed exceptional. Indeed, though Franklin’s outing wasn’t the worst on record, it’s among the top 40 since 1954 and is the worst in the majors since Matt Capps was lit up last July:

In the proud history of the Cardinals, however, it ranks as the second-worst failure in at least the last half-century. It was, as Kevin Malone would say, "epic":

Of course, Franklin couldn’t have done it without his accomplice Tony La Russa, who inexplicably left his reliever in to face the quietus. So perhaps a Franklin-La Russa partnership is more appropriate for attributing the accomplishment. It might be interesting to see how many thick-headed managers were behind the pitcher failures — and how long their tenures were.

The Diamondbacks series featured three of the best-hitting pitchers in baseball, Dan Haren, Dontrelle Willis and Adam Wainwright. Willis, whom we suggested might have an Ankiel-like future as an outfielder, has the highest career wOBA among active pitchers: