Dodgers Fall to Cardinals in Wild Opener of Their Division Series
LOS ANGELES - Clayton Kershaw is unbeatable. Adam Wainwright shines whenever his team needs him. The St. Louis Cardinals have no power.
All three statements were grounded in fact in the regular season. All three were disproved in one wild playoff game at Dodger Stadium on Friday.
Kershaw came apart in the seventh inning of the Los Angeles Dodgers' 10-9 loss to the Cardinals in the opener of their division series. Wainwright, the St. Louis ace, was no better, and the Cardinals ripped three home runs.
Kershaw went 21-3 this season, with a 1.77 earned run average, and the fans chanted 'M-V-P!' as he entered the bullpen for his pregame warm-ups. But he blew a five-run lead, reverting to his discouraging form in last fall's National League Championship Series, when the Cardinals thrashed him for seven runs to win the pennant in Game 6.
Matt Carpenter started that rout with a double to finish an 11-pitch at-bat. He finished off Kershaw in the seventh inning Friday with another double, on the eighth pitch of his at-bat, to clear the bases and give the Cardinals a lead they never lost.
Wainwright, who won all his starts in September to lead the Cardinals to the Central division crown, had his own surprising failure. He needed 44 pitches to wade through the first two scoreless innings, and then hit Yasiel Puig with a 1-1 fastball leading off the third. Everything changed after that.
Last year's N.L.C.S. played out against a hackneyed backdrop: the staid, so-called Cardinal Way against the more freewheeling Dodgers. The real hostility, though, came from a single moment in Game 1, when Joe Kelly drilled Hanley Ramirez in the ribs, knocking him out of the next game and limiting his effectiveness. The Dodgers never retaliated.
'We protect our own guys, but we're not going to go after anybody,' Dodgers Manager Don Mattingly said on Thursday. 'Honestly, it's not something that I even really think about. The game tells you what to do and what you have to do.'
After Puig was hit and Adrian Gonzalez came to the plate, the game - or perhaps Gonzalez - told catcher Yadier Molina to do something rash. With his mask off, Molina barked angrily at Gonzalez, pointing at him and pushing the plate umpire, Jerry Meals, in the back as he tried to reach him. Matt Kemp intervened, and then Cardinals Manager Mike Matheny restrained Molina as the benches and bullpens cleared.
For his part, Puig did not seem irritated; as others scrapped and jawed, he patted Wainwright on the backside and took his base. But Molina's eruption enlivened the crowd, and the Dodgers soon sprang to life.
With two outs, Ramirez singled to right, scoring Puig to tie the game. Carl Crawford - who hit .403 from Aug. 4 through the end of the regular season - doubled to the right-field corner to score Ramirez, who had stolen second.
The Dodgers led, 2-1, and it was about to get worse for Wainwright. He gave up two in the fourth, and left in the fifth after a two-run homer by A. J. Ellis. It was the first start of Wainwright's career in which he gave up at least 11 hits in fewer than five innings. Yet, incredibly, that would not be the most improbably statistic nugget of the night.
This was: Kershaw was 67-0 in his career when given at least four runs of support. Now he had six, and through five innings had allowed only a solo homer by Randal Grichuk. But the seventh inning got away from him in a way he had rarely ever experienced.
Only twice in his career had Kershaw allowed eight earned runs in a game: once in 2009, and again (against St. Louis) in 2012. He did it again on Friday. The Cardinals smacked four singles to open the seventh before Kershaw fanned the overmatched Pete Kozma. Jon Jay singled to make it 6-4, and Mattingly let Kershaw face the rookie Oscar Taveras.
Kershaw used his slider to fan Taveras, and quickly got ahead of Carpenter, 0-2, with fastballs. Carpenter fouled them both, and just kept doing it, smacking three more fouls - with two balls mixed in - before Ellis set his target low and away for the eighth pitch of the at-bat.
Instead, Kershaw left a 95 mile-an-hour fastball up and over the middle. Carpenter did not miss it, crushing the mistake to deep right center. Kershaw turned and watched it fly, bending at the waist, his glove and his left hand on his knees. He had lost the lead, and his day was done.
The Dodgers' setup relief has been a mess, and two batters later, the rookie Pedro Baez made things worse, serving up a three-run homer to Matt Holliday to make it 10-6. The homer underscored yet another oddity of the game: the Cardinals, who hit the fewest home runs in the National League in the regular season, had started October with three.
They needed all of the runs, as their own shaky bullpen faltered in the late innings. Gonzalez smoked a two-run homer off Randy Choate in the eighth, and Ellis scored in the ninth after his fourth hit.
With the tying run on third and two outs, Trevor Rosenthal faced Puig. Like Bob Welch challenging Reggie Jackson in the 1978 World Series, Rosenthal pumped fastballs - at 99 and 100 miles an hour. Puig missed the last one, at 99 m.p.h., and the Cardinals escaped.
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