Cardinals Suffer Frustrating Loss on Infield Chopper, Fall Five Games Out of Playoff Race

Maybe for the first time in his 47 years, Tony Vitello actually hoped that the St. Louis Cardinals lost a baseball game on Monday night. Unlike most of the close games in his first rocky MLB season as manager of the San Francisco Giants, Vitello came out a winner this time around.

Vitello, a native of St. Louis who grew up idolizing Ozzie Smith and rooting on the Cardinals, faced off against his boyhood team for the first time on Monday night and saw his Giants come through in the 11th inning for a rare victory in a one-run game.

After the Cardinals failed to score with runners at second and third in the top of the 11th, the Giants moved extra runner Nate Furman to third with a sacrifice bunt and scored him on an infield chopper by Shay Whitcomb for a 5-4 victory at Oracle Park.

The Cardinals (72-73) fell five games behind the Arizona Diamondbacks for the final Wild Card spot in the National League playoff chase. Arizona also holds the tiebreaker over the Cardinals by virtue of its 5-2 record in the head-to-head meetings.

The Cardinals moved extra runner Joshua Baez to third in the top of the 11th, but they failed to score when Nathan Church tapped out and Jose Fermin grounded out to shortstop. Church had an RBI double earlier in the game, and Fermin knotted the score at 3 in the ninth inning on a clutch sacrifice fly. 

Cardinals' rookie catcher Leo Bernal delivered run-scoring single in the top of the 10th inning to give his team its first lead of the night. Then, after the Giants had tied the game against closer Riley O'Brien in the bottom of the inning, Bernal made a heads up play by bouncing out from behind home plate to field Drew Gilbert's ground ball while touching the plate and firing the ball to first for a double play to get the Cards out of a bases loaded jam. 

The Cardinals (73-72) fell behind 3-0 before mounting several late rallies and putting pressure on a Vitello-led Giants team that came into the night with MLB’s worst record in one-run games (12-25). 

Alec Burleson smoked a 431-foot homer that left the bat at 109.5 mph in the sixth inning and Church doubled in another run in the seventh inning.

The Cardinals put the potential tying run in scoring position in the seventh and eighth innings, before finally breaking through in the ninth to get the game tied. After Baez and Thomas Saggese reached on infield singles to open the ninth inning, Church’s attempt for a sacrifice bunt was lined to Whitcomb at third base. Bryan Torres walked to load the bases and Fermin followed by drilling a high pitch into the outfield for the game-tying sacrifice fly.

In the bottom of the ninth, veteran reliever Ryne Stanek had to work out of a tense jam after loading the bases with two singles and a walk.

The Cardinals had no success against veteran right-hander Brandon Webb in the early going as he allowed just two singles and a walk over the game’s first five innings. Webb ended the first and second innings with strikeouts of Jordan Walker and Baez and he struck out Burleson, Walker and Lo Bernal in the fourth inning.

The Cards’ first solid swing against the sinker-ball specialist came in the sixth inning when Burleson turned on a letter-high sinker and smashed it 431 feet and into McCovey Cove beyond the right field seats. The homer was Burleson’s 22nd on the season and it pushed his RBI total to a career-best 104.

The Giants gave Webb a lead two batters into the game when Turner Hill led off the bottom of the first inning with a walk and the red-hot Devers doubled high off the wall in right field.

San Francisco made it 2-0 in the third inning when the usually calm and cool McGreevy panicked on a liner hit back at him. When Christian Koss’ liner hit off McGreevy’s glove, the pitcher bobbled it twice and tried flipping the ball to first base only to throw it high over Burleson’s head for an error. Three batters later, Koss came around to score on a sacrifice fly by Bryce Eldridge.

McGreevy, who limited the Giants to two earned runs and six hits while pitching 6 2/3 innings, made up for his earlier error with a dazzling bare-handed play to retire Osleivis Basabe to open the fourth inning. 

Devers and Eldridge were in the middle of the next rally with them smashing back-to-back doubles in the fifth inning to push San Francisco’s lead to 3-0. Devers became the seventh player in the storied history of the Giants to have 35 homers and 35 doubles in the same season.