ST. LOUIS – Their six-game winning streak a thing of the past even though they continued to contain Shohei Ohtani and kept the back-to-back champion Dodgers in the park a third straight game, the Cardinals greeted their latest rebound test with a collective shrug on Sunday.

The Cardinals missed out on a chance to sweep the star-studded Dodgers when their offense hit a snag in a 4-1 Los Angeles victory before 36,423 fans at Busch Stadium.

The Cards were able to treat their first defeat in a week with malaise because they had 14 hard-hit balls – exit velocities of 95 mph or more – off Dodgers’ lefty starter Justin Wrobleski and reliever Will Klein over the first 7 2/3 innings of play on Sunday.

“We hit the ball hard today, up and down (the lineup), but right at people,” said Alec Burleson, whose eighth-inning single plated Jordan Walker for the team’s only run of the day. “We did the same thing we’ve done the last six games – hit the ball hard, but they were all right at people. So, there’s not much to it and I don’t want our guys to read too much into it. We did what we wanted to do, and it didn’t work out.”

What did work out was the Cardinals strategy against Ohtani, the four-time MVP widely regarded as the game’s greatest player. The sweet-swinging lefty was 0 for 3 with a walk and a hit by pitch on Sunday, dropping him to 0 for 12 with three strikeouts in the series against the Cardinals. Combined with his 0 for 2 against the Marlins on April 29, Ohtani went hitless over a four-game stretch for the first time since May 24-28, 2022.

“That’s tough to do and I glad we did that,” Cardinals’ manager Oliver Marmol said of shutting down Ohtani. “That’s a dude, no matter who is on the mound, he is one of the best in the game. So, when you can get through a series and limit his damage, that’s a big deal. I’m glad our guys were able to do that.”

The Cardinals did not allow a home run in the series, extending a Dodgers’ drought without a homer to six games. That’s their longest power outage since an eight-game skid in 2014 that the Cardinals were also a part of for three games.

Ohtani’s lack of success on Sunday mostly came against former teammate Dustin May, a Dodgers pitcher for the first 5 ½ years of his career before he was dealt to the Red Sox last July. May, who signed a one-year, $12 million free-agent deal with the Cardinals in December, was presented with his World Series ring and commemorative jersey by the Dodgers around the batting cage on Friday.

May, who did not speak to the media following Sunday’s outing, pitched well for the most part over six innings, but he was hurt by some untimely pitches in the heart of the plate.

After Kyle Tucker led off the second inning with a double, May hung a curveball to Pages, who slapped it into the left-center gap for an RBI. A batter later Hyeseong Kim snuck a single up the middle to plate Max Muncy, who had walked.

In the fifth inning, May left a curveball up in the zone on an 0-2 pitch and superstar first baseman Freddie Freeman laced it into right-center to score Kim, who had reached on an infield single.

“I think there are just two pitches that we have to go back and look at, but other than that he did a great job,” catcher Pedro Pages said of May, who saw his own personal three-game winning streak end. “He was able to mix well, all his stuff was there and it’s just something where we want to keep building and building on to get better.”

Burleson, who tallied an RBI in a sixth straight game to tie a career-best mark, thinks the Cardinals will be better and proving to themselves that they can stand toe to toe with the champion Dodgers.

“Win, lose or whatever, we’re going to play the game hard,” Burleson said. “It may be like today where it wasn’t (pretty). As a fan, today’s game probably wasn’t as interesting because we weren’t getting hits and stuff, but we knew we were doing what we wanted to do.

“We’re going to play the game hard and whether we make mistakes or not, we’re going to play our brand of baseball,” Burleson continued. “We’re going to lay it all out there and it doesn’t matter who is in the other dugout or on the mound. Sometimes, it might not be pretty and we’re young and make mistakes, but it’s not going to be for a lack of effort or preparation. It was fun to play in front of three big crowds in this series, and I think they contributed a little to the series win.”   

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