Cardinal bats finally get to have ‘dessert’ in slump-busting win over Padres

ST. LOUIS — For their seventh game in a row, the St. Louis Cardinals weren’t the first team to score on Thursday night at Busch Stadium.

The series-opening matchup with the San Diego Padres began with consecutive hits by Fernando Tatis Jr. and Luis Arraez to plate the game’s first run, putting the Cardinals in yet another early deficit. 

Not since July 13, prior to the All-Star break, have the Cardinals scored a run before their opponent to start a game. But unlike the past week’s road trip that saw the Redbirds get outscored 28-1 across the first three innings of games, the Cardinals didn’t wait so long to get the bats going against Yu Darvish on Thursday.

Willson Contreras drove in Brendan Donovan for a quick answer in the bottom of the first inning before the St. Louis lineup truly took Darvish to task in the second. The pair that produced the first run played a hefty role in the next six, as both Donovan and Contreras belted three-run homers against a beleaguered Darvish in a six-run second inning that gave Sonny Gray plenty of cushion.

Though Gray ultimately used up nearly every stitch of that cushion, the Cardinals survived in a 9-7 win that brought St. Louis back to within 2.5 games of the Padres for the final NL wild card spot.

“It was nice to see, all-around as the team—with the exception of myself,” Gray said, acknowledging that it was truly a group effort that earned him his 10th win of the season. Gray gutted out five innings to qualify for the decision, but the 11 hits and seven runs (six earned) against him certainly soured his take on his individual outing.

“Personally, I’ve got some work to do,” Gray said. “I’ve got some things to figure out… I, personally, have to be better. But it makes it a lot easier, for me, when the rest of the guys pick me up like they did tonight.”

The nine runs spread across four different innings were a welcomed result for a Cardinal lineup that had been starving to put it all together in recent days.

“We had a meeting today,” Donovan said. “We talked about, let's just—you know, it's baseball. But let’s just try to find a way to get going early and see what happens. I feel like we responded right there and had some big swings and some really good at-bats all down the line.”

Donovan explained that the hitters meetings orchestrated by Cardinals hitting coach Brant Brown are a daily occurrence, with the meeting ahead of the beginning of a new series usually going into a bit more depth as the lineup prepares to face a new team with new tendencies and scouting reports.

Although the message from Thursday’s meeting happened to get carried out onto the field, the prep is consistent daily—even when it doesn’t show up in the game, it still happens all the same.

That paints the previous road trip in a pretty grueling light. The Cardinals showed up to the park, held their same meetings as usual. But when the games began, they constantly fell behind early, winning just once in six tries.

On the trip, the payoff for hard work rarely materialized.

“You kind of look at it like a three-course meal,” Donovan said, comparing a hitter’s gameday efforts to sitting down for a nice dinner. “The game is your dessert, right? Did you—you can’t have dessert without the first two. So, some nights, you don’t get dessert.”

After beginning last week in an actual desert, for the struggling Cardinals lineup, the road trip must have felt like a food desert all week—nothing sweet to be found.

But the Cardinal offense finally got to chow down on Thursday. And even as the trade winds swirl to seemingly point the team toward selling, if they don’t have to skip dessert for the rest of this weekend series, it would go a long way toward chasing down the Padres for a playoff spot.

“Nights like tonight, we understand that we have a goal," Victor Scott II said. "We have to take this day-by-day in order to achieve that."