TORONTO — With a road trip threatening to head south regardless of the direction their plane headed Wednesday night, the Cardinals got a lift from the usual veterans and a necessary jolt from a few youngsters.
Adam Wainwright and Albert Pujols, as they’ve done many times before, combined to hoist the Cardinals out of the doldrums and into a series split with Toronto.
The Cardinals got home runs from the oldest (Pujols) and youngest (Nolan Gorman) members of the lineup to catapult them to a 6-1 victory Wednesday at Rogers Centre. Pujols singled, doubled, and homered in his first three at-bats, and did not take a run at a triple. Wainwright pitched seven superb innings and struck out eight for his first win of the second half. The tight turnaround from Tuesday’s blowout loss to the Blue Jays gave the Cardinals a split of the two-game series in Toronto and a split of the four-game season series.
The Cardinals had lost three of their first four games out of the break and arrived in Toronto with a lineup lightened of its two leading hitters, Paul Goldschmidt and Nolan Arenado. Both were unable to travel to Toronto due to their COVID-19 vaccination status and policies that exist on both sides of the border. Into that middle-order absence came center fielder Dylan Carlson, who had the RBI on three of the Cardinals’ first four runs of the series, and Pujols.
The three-time MVP, in his final games at Toronto, had four hits in the series and reached base five times. His three-run homer widened the lead for the Cardinals. And along the way to filling up the box score he leapfrogged some Cardinals luminaries in the club’s record books.
