Albert Pujols may have been favoring his troubled hamstring, but he barely had to drive off the leg in question in the bottom of the fourth, when he lined Tom Glavine's one-out service just past the top of the left field fence and onto what looked like a slim strip of grass between the fence-top and the stands.
All that liner did was pull the St. Louis Cardinals to within a run of the New York Mets in Busch Stadium Tuesday night. A few other Cardinal bats pulled them even and ahead, enough Cardinal arms kept the Mets from overthrowing the Cardinals' reclaimed lead, and the National League Championship Series is going back to New York with the Mets a game away from wait 'till next year.
That's what can happen when Glavine can't keep too many of his pitches from sailing up just enough to meet St. Louis lumber on the wrong side on a night Jeff Weaver can keep most of his pitches away and beneath the wrong side of New York's.
And it turned out that the extra day's rest the Monday rain-out afforded may have wounded the Mets' lineup, dissolving just enough of their Sunday blowout momentum, more than it did anything for the two Game 5 starting pitchers.
Neither pitcher was terribly overwhelming, and truth to tell, both looked just a little less than they'd looked in a jewel of a first-game pitching duel. But Weaver found his breaking pitches operating efficiently enough as the night went on, swapping three shutout innings with Glavine, while Glavine found his trademark change-ups losing their late descent by the time the fourth arrived.
That's the last thing the Mets expected after Shawn Green bounced one right off the right field chalk to set up second and third for Jose Valentin to line one over Pujols's leaping head to give the Mets the early 2-0 lead.
But if you didn't count Prince Albert's almost excuse-me line homer cutting that lead in half, the Cardinals didn't exactly have to think about muscling up at the plate. They could let Glavine's faltering pitches just about do the work for them so long as they could keep their bat heads on line and calibrated.
Juan Encarnacion may have obliged Glavine after the Pujols homer by flying out to left, but the redoubtable lefthander walked Scott Rolen and surrendered a clean enough single to Jim Edmonds before Ron Belliard bounced the game-tying RBI single the other way to right, the ball eluding first baseman Carlos Delgado when he had to compensate for breaking at first toward the pad.
David Eckstein — himself shaking off a left shoulder crunch on a diving stop of Paul Lo Duca's first-inning smash, off which he tossed out Jose Reyes (a game-opening infield hit) — sent a shuttlecock to short left center to open the fifth and gunned every one of his afterburners to score the tiebreaker on Preston Wilson's followup single. Glavine hung around to put Pujols on intentionally before yielding to the Mets bullpen.
Except for Chris Duncan (all .143 postseason hitting worth of him) and his pinch hit solo bomb off usually solid lefthander Pedro Feliciano in the bottom of the sixth, the Met 'pen performed in the manner to which the National League became accustomed this season. Chad Bradford, the lamppost-bending submariner, spelled Glavine, surrendered a bases-loading single to Encarnacion, and then tied Scott Rolen up in a nasty strikeout, before Feliciano came in, got Edmonds to force Wilson at the plate, and got Belliard to sky one to left for the side.
And Guillermo Mota, lifting a leaf from the book he'd learned in the Dodgers' organization, thwarted a one-out squeeze attempt magnificently in the bottom of the eighth. Made possible by a triple into the right field corner by Aaron Miles, inserted for Belliard at second in a double switch in the top of the inning, the squeeze was wrecked when Mota threw one inside and tight, ricocheting foul off Eckstein's bat for a second strike. (It almost wrecked Eckstein's night, too, since the ball hit wood and fingers simultaneously, Eckstein needing a few moments to shake it off before resuming.) The Cardinals' resident pest then popped out softly to second before Wilson grounded out cleanly to short for the side.
It was the second straight inning in which the Cardinals stranded three ducks on the pond, but their bullpen did just a little bit better keeping the Mets short the rest of the way, looking nothing like the bulls the Mets had pounded into Sunday night steaks.
Josh Kinney dispatched the side in order in the seventh, but after Carlos Delgado (a one-out single) and David Wright (a followup double off the fence in left) made it second and third early in the eighth, Green missed an RBI single when Edmonds, who'd misjudged the shuttlecock at first, hustled in to take it and hold the runners, before interim closer Adam Wainwright dropped a questionable enough third strike (the replay showed the otherwise nasty breaking ball crossing the plate just astride the outer edge of the black) on Valentin for the side.
Wainwright pitched just as tightly in the ninth, getting two grounders and a swishout (throwing an even nastier breaking ball just past the descending head of Reyes's bat) for the game.
Pujols sounded almost conciliatory toward Glavine, whom he was thought to have dissed as "not very good" after Glavine's NLCS-opening shutout innings that included keeping him 0-for-3 with a walk and a strikeout. "He doesn't give in too much," the first baseman said after the game. "I'm just glad it went out of the park."
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