Giants down Cardinals 9-0, win N.L. pennant

For Tom S. of Viva El Birdos, as disappointing as Monday night’s Game 7 loss was, it doesn’t come close to spoiling what has been a “stunning” and successful season for the Cardinals:

“We’re nine runs up, ninth inning, Game Seven, so much stuff going through my head,” Scutaro said. “It’s just unbelievable.”

Fittingly, the lineup’s leading hitter caught the series’ final out. As rain pounded down on San Francisco’s celebration and Scutaro received his MVP trophy, he credited his teammates and the fans for their help.

The Cardinals have not advanced, and the Giants have not not advanced. Because after evening the NLCS by winning Games 5 and 6, the Giants won Game 7 going away, 9-0, before a rabid home crowd in San Francisco. And the Cardinals can only wonder what happened to their hitting, as they scored just one run in the series’ last three games.

Or maybe not. The memory of 2011 is not doubt fresher than those of 1996 and 1985; it’s not likely that many Cardinals fans, just a few days ago, figured the season would end like this. But it did end like this, with the Giants somehow winning, for the first time in their franchise’s ancient history, the seventh game of a postseason series.

In the third inning of NLCS Game 7, the Giants loaded the bases with no one out. The Cardinals wanted a strikeout. They wanted to make a pitching change to get the strikeout. Cardinals manager Mike Matheny went to reliever Joe Kelly.

The second guessing on Twitter was swift and immediate. There were a lot of would-be managers asking where rookie sensation Trevor Rosenthal and his 100-m.p.h. fastball was.

And this isn’t something suggesting the Cardinals are being weird, or that they’re in dire straits. No, they’re right to trust Lohse like this. We’re now 400 innings into the New Kyle Lohse Era, and he’s been fantastic in the playoffs this season. Here’s a quick and dirty look at the raw numbers for the batters hitting against Lohse over his career:

Pretend those average/on-base/slugging marks belonged to a hitter. That would be a consistent hitter who might have received an All-Star nod or two. Even when Lohse’s walk rate dipped, he still allowed a good number of extra-base hits.

Jenifer Langosch of MLB.com adds that things seem to be getting worse for Holliday, not better:

When: Monday, October 22 at 8 p.m. ET on FOX