ATLANTA — After a pair of tense games won on their last swing, the Cardinals’ late-game suspense Thursday was not whether they would conjure a rally or steal a win, but whether they’d get a hit at all.
Atlanta starter Charlie Morton, a far different pitcher than when last the Cardinals saw him and the 2-12 record he had against them, carried a no-hitter into the seventh inning and seemed to have one at his fingertips until a full-count single interrupted his dominance. By then the Braves were well on their way to a 4-0 victory Thursday night at Truist Field.
For the Cardinals, fresh off a sweep of the Marlins, that winning feeling hit a familiar pothole.
It took the Cardinals two walk-off wins and seven runs total to wipeout Miami and obscured by the last at-bat theater was a serial lack of runs.
The Cardinals were shutout Thursday for the second time this week, and their only run in their last 18 innings was an unearned run in the ninth inning Wednesday against the Marlins. While pitching has found some stability in the past week, the offense remains a drag on generating a genuine winning stretch.
The Cardinals have scored three or fewer runs in 11 of their past 16 games.
They’re 3-8 in those 11 games.
Two of those wins came in the last at-bat vs. Marlins.
One of the largest crowds so far of the season greeted the Cardinals as they returned to Atlanta’s ballpark for the first time since leaving, soaked, having won a division series. The crowd of 33,412 was teeming with children, too, due to a nearby baseball tournament that featured youth teams, including one coached by former Cardinals infielder Mark Reynolds. The Battery, the suburban stadium’s answer to Ballpark Village, was bopping due to opening ceremonies, and then the fireworks started. Really, fireworks.
With every strikeout, pops of fireworks fire off the top of the scoreboard.
Morton got seven of them as he overwhelmed the Cardinals with his power mix of velocity and plunging curveball. The Cardinals got three hits against him, all singles, in his 7 2/3 innings. After the Braves expanded their lead to four runs for him, the Cardinals never got the tying run to the plate and had only one at-bat with a runner in scoring position.
Since his last start – an abbreviated doozy that included as many runs (five) and walks (five) as outs collected (five) – John Gant buzzed his hair and tightened his control.
Both his flowing locks and walks were missing Thursday.
The righthander, a draft pick of the Braves before being traded to the Cardinals as part of the Jaime Garcia deal, needed 25 pitches to get through the Braves’ lineup the first time and come away with nine outs. He walked the leadoff batter in the second inning and deftly got a double play groundout to end the inning. That was the first of his two walks, and it wasn’t until the second one that his start came undone. In his previous two starts, Gant had allowed 12 runs on eight hits and eight walks. He had not walked fewer than three in four consecutive appearances.
The walks were doing more than chancing runs, they were bloating his pitch count, leaving him to hopscotch around traffic on the bases and needing more pitches to do it.
