The way that Royals’ rookie Danny Duffy started Sunday’s game, the Cardinals were fortunate to escape with a win. That’s because Duffy, who struck out an incredible nine of the 18 batters he faced, pitched one of the most dominant starts of a game of all-time; since 1919, only nine other pitchers have struck out that many of the the first 18 batters in a game:

Other notes from Sunday’s 5-4 Cardinal win:

• Although second baseman Pete Kozma threw wide to first base on Wilson Betemit’s sixth-inning groundball on which Albert Pujols injured his wrist, the injury was Pujols’s own fault. Pujols was not in good position to make the play — you might even say it was a demonstration of how not to play first base. First, he put his left leg on the base (as a righty, the correct trail leg is the right), with his toe on top of the bag, two positional no-nos. Then he reached to his left — into the baseline — and not toward the ball, which was why Betemit ran into him. It was a clean play by Betemit, who had the right to his bath path. It wasn’t the first time that Pujols has taken a non-standard approach, and honestly, it was only a matter of time before he got injured. What’s surprising is that it didn’t happen sooner.
• Coming off the bench, Skip Schumaker knocked an RBI single and of course the walk-off home run for a total win-probability added of .573, making it the second-biggest game of his career. His previous season-high game WPA was .151, and his career-high game was .632 on 6/28/10 vs. Arizona.
• As unappealing as Pujols’s stand-and-stare homerun trot was, we liked less that he didn’t join his teammates in the high-sock spirit. Even the unflamboyant Matt Holliday participated. Where’s the team spirit?
• We heard something like this line from the KMOX post-game show: “Salas blew the save but got the win.” Dave Letterman used to have a bit called “Hal Gurnee’s Network Time Killers.” KMOX is apparently carrying on the tradition.

Notes:

• Why did the Pirates have Ryan Doumit, their #6 hitter, sacrifice bunt? The play lowered their win probability (-.002).
• Albert Pujols cost the Cardinals a run with his overreaching play in the fourth, in which he tried to do too much and fielded a grounder in front of Skip Schumaker. His wild throw allowed Lyle Overbay to reach and later score. There’s a fine line between being aggressive and being irresponsibly rangy, and Pujols has developed over the years a bad habit of the latter. It was all the more egregious because it came just an inning after Schumaker made a diving stop even farther toward first base.
• On the positive side, Daniel Descalso made several fine plays at third. The Cardinals now have two very solid defenders at the hot corner. The difference between the last couple months of 2010 and this season is that they may also be able to hit.

Notes:

• Kyle McClellan looked like the pitcher he was while auditioning for the rotation during spring training. It was the second time in as many years that a darkhorse candidate pitched his way into the starting five in spring, leading us to wonder whether spring-training performances do matter in certain situations, like good ones for starting pitchers trying to win a spot on the team.
• Albert Pujols may have picked up two RBI, but that doesn’t mean he’s stinging the ball. One came on a sac fly; the other on a ground ball.
• Colby Rasmus continues to be the team’s key offensive player, pumping in a couple more hits and walking once.
• Ryan Franklin picked up the Save, but Trever Miller got an out in the most crucial moment of the game (leverage index of 4.13) when he struck out Pedro Alvarez with runners on first and second in the top of the eighth. Granted, he had walked Lyle Overbay to help create the situation.
• Franklin struck out two of the three batters he faced.

The Cardinals spent a long, quiet evening kissing the game — and their season — goodnight, losing 5-1 to the Cubs as the Reds effectively — if the Cardinals’ pantomimes Monday were any indication — clinched the division with a win over the Diamondbacks. The Cardinal loss, which puts them seven games behind the Reds again, included much of what has characterized the team’s demise this year: Some strong individual performances punctuated by hapless team play, like erratic fielding and syncopated hitting, as well as some old-fashioned bad luck.

Rookie of the Year hopeful Jaime Garcia bounced back from his last start by pitching well, if unluckily, striking out four and walking one while inducing 12 ground balls. Unfortunately for him, and probably his RoY chances, his defense — namely Skip Schumaker — let him down. Schumaker failed to throw on-target after making a clean stop on Xavier Nady’s grounder, leading to a two-run inning, then dropping a surefire double play toss from Brendan Ryan that led to two more runs in the third. Ryan had fielded a one-hopper, and the speed at which the play started may have thrown off Schumaker’s timing just enough, though Ryan’s throw was right in Schumaker’s breadbasket. After the game, Tony La Russa defended his second baseman, saying "That’s not Skip’s error, no way," and blamed the botched play on Brendan Ryan. We appreciate wanting to defend a guy, but how is Ryan supposed to feel there? As Abe Lincoln said, you can’t build one man up by tearing another down. As for El Gato, it didn’t help matters that three of the Cubs’ first four runs came on two-out broken-bat singles that barely got out of the infield.

The Cardinals mounted a couple of rallies, but couldn’t break through against a pitcher in Jeff Samarzdija who began the evening with an 18.90 ERA. With runners on base in the third and fifth, two of their big boppers — Colby Rasmus and Matt Holliday, respectively — hit 400-foot blasts. The only problem was that they had mostly vertical distance, and the rallies died at the warning track, a symbol of a season that the Cardinals haven’t been able to square up on and on which they’ve fallen short of expectations.

Other notes:

• Felipe Lopez pinch hit for Pedro Feliz in the eighth inning. We like it better when TLR used his defensive specialists as late-inning replacements, rather than the other way around — another reflection of a team that’s a bit backward.
• Running from first base in the fourth inning, Yadier Molina didn’t even make it halfway down the line before peeling out of the baseline on Feliz’s second double-play groundout. It’s been a long season, and Molina showed it.
• Mike "Grim Reaper" MacDougal made yet another appearance in a losing effort. His appearance in a game is a surefire sign of loss: He is 12th in the league in lowest initial leverage index (i.e., pressure situations), and the team has lost nine of the 13 games in which he has pitched. Of those 13, he has pitched in only two that were decided by less than three runs (and one was an extra-inning affair).
• Speaking of harbingers of defeat, Jeff Suppan, who preceded MacDougal last night, is fifth among relievers in lowest initial LI.
• You know your confidence is broken when you throw more pickoff attempts down by four runs in the eighth than pitches to the opposing pitcher batting, as Dennys Reyes did. And as it turned out, Cub relief pitcher Andrew Cashner laid down a beautiful bunt — with two strikes. This team is ready to say goodbye and reset for next year.
• The team sound people greeted Cub reliever Scott Maine with "Ironman. Or was it a coda for the Cardinals? Some of the lyrics:
  

  Is he live or dead?
  Has he thoughts within his head?
  We’ll just pass him there
  Why should we even care?

  Hopefully this winter the team can plan its vengeance on a season that left them unwanted and just staring at the world.

Like The Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t, the Cardinals aren’t dead (yet). They combined a lot of pluck with a little luck Friday night to take the first game of the series with the Reds, surely a bellwether match for a team hoping to prove to itself that its wounds of the last couple of weeks haven’t been mortal.

The Cardinals got just enough hitting, just enough starting pitching and just enough relief to endure the first brush with death. After striking quickly with two runs in the first, the Cardinals created only 1.9 runs for the game. Starting pitcher Jaime Garcia struck out six but walked three and yielded a home run to no.-8 hitter Paul Janish, finishing with a mediocre 43 FIGS (compare to Bronson Arroyo’s 56). The Cardinals exclusively used righthanded relieving to finish up, escaping jams in the seventh and eighth, with the help of a line drive hit right at Jon Jay. In the seventh, Dusty Baker, mistakenly in our opinion, commissioned Janish to bunt after Chris Heisey led off with a ringing double. El Gato was on the ropes, and Baker’s conservative play backfired as Janish fouled off two bunts and eventually struck out. After experiencing some bad luck on the road, the Cardinals had the pendulum swing back their way, and in a close game, sometimes that makes the difference.

Some other notes:

• In retrospect, La Russa should’ve summoned a LOOGy to face Joey Votto in the eighth.
• Aaron Miles looked bad in his three-pitch plate appearance against might-have-been-Cardinal Arthur Rhodes. Why didn’t TLR turn to Felipe Lopez, who has four hits in 11 plate appearances?
• Scott Rolen’s at-bat in the eighth with Votto on first and one out was the crisis moment of the game. Kyle McClellan ultimately walked Rolen, but that was after Rolen fouled off three straight pitches with Votto running. It’s hard to consider a pitcher who walks two of the five batters he faces "in control," but K-Mac pitched carefully — on ball four to Votto, Molina demanded a curveball low, and that’s what McClellan threw.
• We haven’t seen a replay, but we thought Jay’s first-inning hit was a double and an error.
• The Cardinal fans had a lightning rod in Brandon Phillips, whom they booed heartily before, during and after each of his plate appearances. And the hometowners wanted so little to do with the Reds’ trash-talking second basemen that they even encouraged each other to throw back foul balls that Phillips hit into the crowd, something we’ve never witnessed. We do think too much was made of the impropriety of throwing balls back. Technically, it’s against the rules of the game (fans are ejected), but we appreciated the spontaneous display of emotion, heathily expressed. No one was trying to injure anyone and no one on the field appeared to be in danger — in fact, Albert Pujols appeared to be ready to catch the returned ball. It was a refreshing show of spirit in a game that has often been sterilized of rivalrous fervor.
• The Busch Stadium scoreboard flashed a message that “Section 142 wins a free Hunter hot dog.” We’re not sure how many people were in section 142, but that must be some hot dog.