At what cost will the St. Louis Cardinals' National League Championship Series-evening win Sunday night prove to have come? As great as it looked when Kolten Wong ended the game with a leadoff homer in the bottom of the ninth, that's about how horrible it looked when another swing earlier in the game sent Yadier Molina out of the game — and out of who who knew what else — with an oblique strain.
And at a time when the Cardinals are alarmed over Adam Wainwright and whether an elbow issue is eroding his effectiveness, and just a day after they were manhandled by Madison Bumgarner in Game 1, the absolute last thing they need is losing the backbone of their team, the man who shepherds their pitching through all kinds of waters, and who also hits with authority when needed.
Think of the 1950s Yankees losing Yogi Berra or the 1970s Reds losing Johnny Bench and you get the idea. Molina isn't in their league as an all-around catcher, and nobody pretends he (or anybody else) is. But he handles pitchers as adeptly as Berra and Bench did and the Cardinals consider him the club's heart and soul.
He's not exactly perfect — he's known to bump the occasional ump and get a little too big for his britches in the middle of scrums involving Cardinal brushbacks and knockdowns — but Molina is invaluable to them in the short, long, and all points between hauls.
He took a ferocious swing in the sixth and whacked a grounder that bent him over like a folding chair two steps out of the batter's box, enabling the San Francisco Giants' infield to turn a double play they could have turned while sitting in such folding chairs to negate the leadoff walk Jeremy Affeldt handed Jhonny Peralta.
Wong himself struck out to end the inning. Molina's place was taken by Tony Cruz, whose comparative lack of experience became a rather bristling topic in and after the game when a wild pitch from Cardinals closer Trevor Rosenthal in the top of the ninth allowed Matt Duffy to score from second and tie it up at four each.
In the bottom, leading off against Giants reliever Sergio Romo, he squared up on a change-up after taking a sinker for a strike and drove it into the first rows of the right field seats not far from the foul pole. For the Giants it reminded people of what helped cost Romo his closing job during the regular season, a rising enough tendency this year to throw gophers.
Yet the fears linger that the Cardinals' somewhat wild Game 2 win could still end up costing them the series. No Cardinal showed anything less than confidence in Cruz — "That's Yadier, Jr. calling the game," third baseman Matt Carpenter said, somewhat hyperbolically — but no Cardinal in his heart of hearts wants to live without Molina if they don't have to.
The problem is, they might. Oblique strains don't heal in days, they heal in weeks, customarily. Keeping Molina on the roster leaves them playing a man short, but taking him off for the rest of the NLCS leaves them playing without him in the World Series — he wouldn't be eligible for the Series.
And behind Cruz is A.J. Pierzynski, the veteran agitator picked up during the season after the Red Sox cut him, who did step in when Molina went down with that second-half thumb injury, but who hit only .244 with a .600 OPS in 30 games during that stretch and has lost much of whatever behind-the-plate skill he once had. You know you've lost some crucial support when a career .227 hitter gets sent out in an NLCS game when number one is done.
“If we have to go short with an opportunity to have [Molina] back," Cardinals manager Mike Matheny said after the game, “we'd do that. But we will cross that bridge when we get to it." Beware that that bridge might be out when the Cardinals get there.
Which takes a lot of the fun out of Wong's achievement putting an end to a rather wild ninth in a rather wild game as it was. Wong's only the fourth Cardinal to end a postseason game with a home run. The company he joins includes Ozzie (“Go crazy, folks, go crazy!") Smith (1985 NLCS), Jim Edmonds (2004 NLCS), and David Freese (2011 World Series).
Then you get reminded of the other side of the dilemma. The Cardinals played 40 games without Molina in July and August, due to the thumb injury, and went 21-19 in those games. They can survive without him, but a two-game margin of error is survival too hard won.
If you're worried about jinxes other than the kind that can take a backbone catcher out of a series, be reminded that of the Cardinals' three prior postseason walkers-off only Freese's team went on to win a World Series. Smith's lost the 1985 Series in a bizarre trajectory from heart- and backbreaking umpire robbery in Game 6 to an unconscionable self-implosion in Game 7; Edmonds's Cardinals got swept right out by the curse-busting Red Sox.
Wong wasn't exactly the only Cardinal to turn into a bombardier in Game 2. Matt Adams, who did it to wreck Clayton Kershaw and the Dodgers to help get the Cardinals here in the first place, hit one solo off Hunter Strickland in the eighth to break a three-all tie; Oscar Taveras hit a knee-high splitter from Jean Machi into the seats an inning earlier, to tie it at three in the first place; and, Carpenter went long distance off San Francisco starter Jake Peavy to open the scoring at 1-0 in the third.
With Lance Lynn giving the Cardinals the solid start they needed after losing Game 1, Giants manager Bruce Bochy hooked Peavy after the fourth. They're still trying to figure out why Bochy didn't bring in left-hander Javier Lopez to face the left-handed Taveras with two more portside hitters coming up behind him, Carpenter and Jon Jay, instead of bringing in Lopez after Taveras cleared the right field fence.
Lopez struck out Carpenter and yielded a base hit to Jay. Bochy went to Strickland and got very lucky when Jay got picked off first and dead in a pitcher to first baseman to shortstop to pitcher rundown to end the inning. That luck ran out when Adams, fooled badly on Strickland's backdoor slider, saw a fastball coming up onto the table and drove it into the seats.
It almost erased the strange pleasures in watching the Giants stay in the game playing pages you might have thought stolen from the Kansas City Royals' briefing books. The wild pitch sending Duffy home was just the end of the Giants' odd small ball exercise.
They scored their first run on an infield out by Joaquin Arias, who'd merely been 0-for-postseason approaching that plate appearance. They got their second run driven in by a Hunter Pence who hadn't driven anything in all month. They got their third on a base hit by a Gregor Blanco who'd had 3 hits in 30 trips to the plate thus far.
What the hey, if the roaching Royals could do it against the big bad Orioles anything was possible, right? Not quite, but it was a helluva lot of fun to watch if you didn't count the wreck the Cardinals made out of their bullpen.
There was a reason why Wong came down the third base line completing his round trip looking like he'd blown a hamstring into a skippety-step, which he didn't. "Almost missed second, and I almost missed third," he said after the game, probably because even he was staggered by what he'd just done. “So I knew I had to touch home plate. And I made sure I touched it."
Wong is also one of only four second basemen ever to end a postseason contest with a bomb. Say hello again to Bill Mazeroski (1960 World Series), Alfonso Soriano (2001), and Jeff Kent (2004). With one swing he also put the Cardinals into another slot in the record books: no team, ever, hit homers in the seventh, eighth, and ninth of any postseason game before the Cardinals brought that off Sunday night.
Screw the record books, though. The Cardinals had enough on their minds going into the game and have a lot worse on them going to San Francisco.
“That was a really emotional game, for a lot of reasons," Carpenter said after the game. “The ups and downs consisted of losing leads, getting leads and losing key players. I mean, there was a lot of things that happened that could have made this group quit or get deflated."
Unfortunately, something happened in the bottom of the sixth that may yet deflate this group.
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