Entering the 8th inning against the Chicago Cubs on Friday afternoon, St. Louis was down 3-2 and looking for some offense to lift them over the Cubbies and net the team a much-needed win.
St. Louis scored 9 runs in the 8th inning without recording an out
They entered the inning down a run to the Cubs, and won by a whole lot.
Photo by Joe Sargent/Getty Images
They’re sitting at 47-49 and although the playoffs might be out of reach for a .500 team, they’re only four games back of the division lead despite the fact that they are sitting in fourth place. It’s a tight race and since they’ll need to pass the Cubs at some point, a win on Friday against that team is exactly what they needed.
And boy did they get exactly what they needed.
St. Louis managed to send every one of their players across the plate in the 8th before recording a single out, absolutely crushing Chicago in the end.
It all started innocently enough, with the Cubs walking in a run and offering up the slightest of hints that the bullpen might be bending but not yet breaking. Then the bending stopped and the breaking started. And kept going, and going, and going.
Paul DeJong truly set it off with a ground-rule double that brought two more runs in, a single from Randal Grichuk brought to bring Jedd Gyorko home, recent call-up Carson Kelly double to add two more to the tally, and the Cubs were officially bleeding without being able to staunch it in any way.
Things ended with a two singles from Matt Carpenter and Tommy Pham respectively, which netted two more runs, before the trauma ended with a line-out, a fly-out, a walk, and a strikeout to finally get the Cubs out of the inning.
Um, ouch.
The silver lining fro Cubs pitching is that those run didn’t all get hung on one person, as Carl Edwards, Jr. and Hector Rondon split the responsibility for the majority of the runs before Justin Grimm took over for the last six outs, letting up only two runs in the process.
Which looks like an expert performance compared to the rest of the bullpen staff.
Tomorrow is another day for Chicago’s pitching to bounce back, but on this day the Cardinals jumped on them for a crazy amount of runs and didn’t look back. The loss ended the Cubs’ six-game win streak and was a pretty convincing response from the Cards in the face of recent criticism.
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