2014 NLCS: Giants walk-off Cardinals in Game 5, advance to World Series

Ventura has worked around three walks to shut down the Giants thanks in part to four strikeouts and seven ground-ball outs. The 23-year-old right-hander has given up just two runs in 10⅓ innings this series. He owns a 2.74 ERA in four starts this postseason.

Prior to Tuesday, home teams were 15-2 when starting a rookie pitcher in the World Series, per the FOX broadcast.

If you’ve been reading anything I’ve written for a while, you’ll know that I’m a painful centrist. Nothing but lukewarm takes for me, no sir. I like to assume that everything would make sense with more context. I can’t write about politics because I assume on the first day in the White House, the new president is briefed about the lizard people who live under Iraq and want to take over the world. That’s the basis of our geopolitical strategy. Hey, if you have a better explanation ...

It spills over into baseball, too. This manager didn’t use that player because he could smell the alcohol on his breath or the singed ligaments in his knee. It’s never as simple as it looks. Every player is hurting in some capacity by October, but some hurt more or inspire confidence less than others. It makes for wishy-washy writing. But fair, I hope. With this in mind, let’s look at Mike Matheny’s decision to use Michael Wacha in the ninth inning, as his third reliever of the night, even though he hadn’t pitched in nearly a month, and was ineffective since returning from the disabled list.

St. Louis will look to become the 12th team to come back from a 3-1 deficit in the NLCS, with the last team do so being the Giants against ... the Cardinals, in 2012.

Here are some other things we learned along the way:

Ordinarily, I’d give the guy the benefit of the doubt in this case and assume he just slipped:

... but that’s A.J. Pierzynski, and A.J. Pierzynski gets no benefit of the doubt. Getting clipped sucks, but it doesn’t make you get hit by an invisible cannonball half a second later.

Vogelsong has clearly mastered the art of navigating through the irregular schedule that playoff baseball presents.

“You’ve just got to know yourself, really,” Vogelsong told reporters before the Giants’ Game 3 victory. “You’ve got to know when to back off a little bit and get some rest. You’ve got to know when it’s time to grind a little bit and get some more work.”

Game 3 of the NLCS was a demonstration of the price the Cardinals pay for making Mike Matheny their manager. Whatever his strengths, and undoubtedly they are bountiful and manifold, the postseason has been a showcase of his obsessions and limitations.

First, it was die by the Grichuk, live by the Grichuk. Throughout the postseason, Matheny’s devotion to outfield prospect Randal Grichuk has been repeatedly questioned. Grichuk had played well in Game 2, but in the bottom of the first inning, it seemed as if the Grichuk pendulum (note that we are going for a record for most Grichuk-mentions in the second paragraph of a postgame story) had swung the other way, with the right fielder misjudging Travis Ishikawa’s bases-loaded fly to right field, allowing it to drop at the base of the wall and score three runs. With one run already in off of John Lackey, the Cardinals were down 4-0 and the game had barely begun.

It had been 13 years since Choate had thrown double-digit pitches in an inning during the postseason, according to ESPN’s Jayson Stark. The veteran left-hander had 15 playoff outings under his belt since then and topped out at eight pitches on two occasions. The largest reason for that is Choate’s designation as a lefty specialist, but he was allowed to face Perez anyway, and the reserve outfielder’s single played a large part in the outcome. The throwing error, of course, didn’t help.

St. Louis has now scored 15 of its 27 runs this postseason in the seventh inning after Grichuk’s game-tying homer. Ten of those 15 runs have come on five round trippers, and before Tuesday, the Cardinals had won all four games in which they scored in the seventh.

The Giants are somehow in the National League Championship Series, even though they’ve hit like an especially unclutch utility infielder throughout the playoffs. Before the start of Game 3, they’d hit 10 extra-base hits in eight postseason games. Against John Lackey, though, they matched their best team mark for extra-base hits, and they did it in the first inning, jumping out to a 4-0 lead.

With two outs and no one on, Buster Posey took an errant Lackey fastball to the opposite field. With an 0-2 count, Pablo Sandoval did the same, tying Barry Bonds’ Giants postseason record of reaching base in 21 consecutive postseason games. Because when you think about players getting on base by any means necessary, you think of Bonds and Sandoval.

Tim Hudson will take the mound for the Giants today in San Francisco, while John Lackey opposes him in just the kind of game the Cardinals acquired him for. The lineups for Game 3 won’t be exactly like they’ve been in the National League Championship Series’ first two games, however, thanks to a strained oblique suffered by Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina.

Instead, A.J. Pierzynski will get his first action behind the plate since September 11 as he catches Lackey -- coincidentally, both players began the year on the Red Sox, with Pierzynski catching Lackey’s first start of the season. Pierzynski isn’t the backstop Molina is, as he’s a poor pitch framer who stabs at the ball with his glove, but for one game, the Cardinals can certainly survive.

Hit a walk-off home run, get your jersey ruined. Those are the rules, kid.

The greatest temptation every manager needs to face and defeat in the postseason is the need to impose himself on the action. The roster of 30 managers will always compose a spectrum of “activist” to “inert” in terms of how many buttons they try to push during the 162 regular-season games, but it does seem as if there is a greater understanding today that the bulk of their job is done in setting expectations (clubhouse management) and filling out the lineup card (distributing playing time) and all the “strategies” that the old-time skippers so relied upon have been de-emphasized due to being counterproductive.

Don’t worry, bunting fans. We’ll always have Ned Yost.

However, Rosenthal faltered by throwing a wild pitch with men on and two outs, allowing San Francisco to tie the game on the unfortunate mistake. One imagines Rosenthal is thanking his lucky stars after being bailed out on Wong’s game-winning hit.

It was just one of those innings for the guys at the plate -- the Giants also got an impressive catch of their own from outfielder Hunter Pence. As usual, he made sure to look super smooth and cool while making the play:

...The “it” being the “aggravated... backside” of his elbow. Thus we have a Wainwright who is simultaneously “fine,” dealing with an injury that has nothing to do with Tommy John surgery but was still a “factor” in his getting pounded. And that makes total sense. Well, not the “fine” part, but the rest -- there are problems well short of a shredded ligament that can influence a pitcher’s performance. The logic here is akin to saying, “Yeah, I got run over by a car, but I don’t have lung cancer.” You can also have “no doubts,” as Wainwright said, and be totally wrong.

This is all speculative, of course. There are six games left in which anything can happen. What will definitely happen is another Bumgarner start, and that should be troubling given that he has pitched 23.2 innings this postseason and allowed but 14 hits and just three runs, two earned. Sure, one of those games ended in a loss, but it seems unlikely that the big lefty will attempt another 50-yard pass down the left-field line. Even if we pencil that in as another Cardinals’ loss, though, that still leaves a lot of room for the Cardinals to get back into the series.

When Sandoval is off, he’s really off. When he’s on, he hits pitches like this in the air. What a freak.

Here are the lineups for Game 1:

That’s not a question.

Still not a question.