ST. LOUIS -- The Reds threatened, but didn’t score in the top of the fifth inning on Saturday afternoon at Busch Stadium.
Cardinals starter Matthew Liberatore gave way to the bullpen, and Gordon Graceffo secured a fly out and a strikeout to end the inning. It wasn’t nothing, but it didn’t seem like any grand turning point of the game when it happened.
The Reds already led 5-3 at that point, and there was plenty of baseball still to be played in a game that the Cardinals eventually won, 6-5, on the strength of a Lars Nootbaar homer.
As innocuous as the frame may have felt when it happened, the half inning would have contained one of the most pivotal moments of the game if not for Noot’s late heroics.
When Masyn Winn slapped a tag on Red center fielder Dane Myers, he thought he did so before Myers connected that first fingertip to the second base bag. The St. Louis dugout agreed, with Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol signaling that he wanted to challenge the call on the field that Myers had been safe on the stolen base attempt.
It was a bang-bang play, the type of replay review that, the longer it takes, the more it starts to feel like the call is going to stand. Even if you feel as a viewer like you know what happened, it requires a camera angle that definitively confirms it in order to change the call.
The call came back: they had no such confirmation that Winn got the tag down in a timely fashion. The Cardinals lost their challenge, which ended up being the crux of the conversation.
That decision from in the replay room in New York went under the microscope more heavily an inning later, when the Cardinals squandered a bases loaded, nobody out situation. Jimmy Crooks, pinch-hitting for Victor Scott, grounded one to first base to kick off a 3-2-4 double play, where the Reds secured an out at home before catching Crooks for the force out at first.
Except, they didn’t catch Crooks. Replay showed that Crooks, clearly, beat the play at the bag.
The problem was, the Cardinals already burned their challenge on that ill-fated spot in the fifth.
“I mean, John [Tumpane] does a really nice job behind the plate, on the bases," Marmol said. "That one was missed, but that’s part of the game. We used our challenge earlier, and we lost that, right? So, at that point, it stinks, but that’s baseball.”
The Cardinals were, arguably, right to use the challenge when they did. But the lack of an adequate camera angle made it look like the wrong call -- especially when it left them unable to do anything about it when an obvious missed call in the sixth contributed to squandering a key scoring chance.
The takeaway, of course, is that this sequence didn’t become the moment of the game on Saturday. The Cardinals’ ability to battle back was on display once again, even when the deck was stacked against them due to a moment of replay review-aided adversity.
“It’s helpful because it’s one of those games where you can easily, at the end of it, if we were on the wrong side of it, say we did a lot of things well, but we were on the wrong side of this game,” Marmol said. “It’s nice to be able to do some things well -- there are some growth moments there, as well -- but to still be able to shake hands at the end.”