LOS ANGELES — Before the puddles in the infield could dry, it turned out the most unusual part of the evening was not a rain delay at Dodger Stadium.
And the most familiar part was not the Cardinals having to overcome a blown save.
The Cardinals, one of the league leaders in leads lost a year ago, misplaced one in the ninth inning late Saturday night only to seize it back in extra innings. Paul Goldschmidt's RBI groundout and Giovanny Gallegos' 10th-inning tightrope walk lifted the Cardinals to a 6-5 victory and their first win of the young season.
All it took was a couple of groundouts to produce the game's most important run, its winning run. Rookie Victor Scott II was the Cardinals' spontaneously generated runner at second base for extra innings, and that meant two bounders to shortstop were enough to move the speedy outfielder 180 feet for the one-run lead they took into the bottom of the inning. Goldschmidt had the bouncer to shortstop that did it.
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In the bottom of the inning, with the tying run starting the inning in scoring position, Gallegos struck out two batters. The Dodgers then loaded the bases before Gallegos got a popup from Shohei Ohtani to end the game.
The win nearly hinged on a groundball to shortstop Brandon Crawford with rookie Masyn Winn in the dugout. That kept the inning alive.
A game that already featured a bases-loaded escape act in the first inning and the first rain stoppage of a home Dodgers game in eight years got weirder when the Cardinals found their first gush of offense this season. All it took to prime that faucet was an unusual series of events that included a hit batter, a catcher’s interference, and a balk that sent a batter back to the box after he appeared to lineout to left field.
It all made sense.
Eventually.
Matt Carpenter reached base with a catcher’s interference and after moving around the bases with two singles, he scored on a bases-loaded balk by former teammate Joe Kelly. Carpenter curious tour of the bases was part of a five-run inning for the Cardinals that tied the game and put them ahead. They could not hold the lead, not against another force of nature — Mookie Betts and his .611 average through five games this season.
Betts doubled and scored in the seventh to eat into the Cardinals’ lead and he hit his fourth homer of the season in the ninth to begin the unraveling of Ryan Helsley's ninth inning. Freddie Freeman, on his bobblehead night, singled to put the tying run on base, and he came around to score the tying run on Max Muncy's two-out single.
Helsley struck out Teoscar Hernandez to keep the game tied, 5-5, and send it into the first extra-inning game of the Cardinals' season.
Cue the Manfred man to start the inning at second base.Â
Lance Lynn shoved his way out of trouble in the first inning and through four innings before the rain delay ended his evening. Yoshinobu Yamamoto was vastly improved from his major-league debut, which lasted only one inning for the Dodgers, and held the Cardinals two two hits through his five scoreless innings.
It wasn’t until the seventh that the Cardinals’ lineup stirred.
And it got help from a familiar face.
Cardinals turn HBP, CI into R-A-L-L-Y
There have probably been more unusual rallies in baseball and perhaps a few odder, too, but for a club groping for any semblance of offense at the start of the season, why be choosy.
Former Cardinals right-hander Kelly entered the game for the Dodgers at the start of the seventh inning. He promptly walked the first batter he faced. He misplaced a fastball up an in on Nolan Arenado that plunked the third baseman on his let shoulder. Then catcher Will Smith got his glove in the way of Carpenter’s swing for a catcher’s interference.
Held to two hits by Yamamoto, the Cardinals loaded the bases on Kelly without a hit.
It would get messier for the right-hander.
Ivan Herrera's fly ball to deep center field brough home the Cardinals’ first run, and Alec Burleson followed with an RBI single to tie the game, 2-2. A single by Brandon Crawford in his Cardinals debut reloaded the bases and put Carpenter at third base. He was there when No. 9 hitter Scott II appeared to line out to right field.
Carpenter strayed off third and had to rush back to the base, but his path was blocked.
Not that it mattered.
Carpenter was moving off third because he heard a balk call.
Kelly had failed to come set before delivering a pitch to Scott. A balk was called during his delivery, and Scott swung. The balk had precedent to push all the runners ahead a base and bring home Carpenter as the go-ahead run. But because the ball was in play, the initial announcement in the press box was that obstruction had been called. Carpenter’s path back to the base was blocked. Eventually the actual called was sorted out. Kelly was dinged with a bases-loaded balk, and Carpenter had the most unusual trip around the bases in awhile.
He reached on the interference. He scored on a balk.
Scott went back to the plate after appearing to line out.
Brendan Donovan widened the lead for the Cardinals with a two-run double that hopped into the right-field corner. The Cardinals sent 10 batters to the plate in the decisive seventh inning and they scored more runs in that inning than they had in their previous 24 of the season. They didn’t have a hit until the fifth batter of the inning, and did not need one to score two of the five runs of the inning.
Lynn pulls of immediate ‘Houdini’
Both starting pitchers struck out the side in the first inning.
They took wildly different routes to do so.
Yamamoto muscled through the first three Cardinals he faced with strikeouts, two of them on that plunging splitter that made him one of the best pitchers in Japan’s top league. Lynn decided for a less linear inning, preferring to ratchet up the degree of difficulty first. The top of the Dodgers’ order – it has three former MVPs, as you may have heard – skipped three consecutive singles against Lynn to load the bases before he could get an out.
When a pitcher faces a bases-loaded jam with no outs in an inning and is able to escape it, that pitcher is credited, unofficially, with a “Houdini†for the great escape.
Presto, Lynn had created one for himself.
He got out of it the same way Yamamoto got through the top of the inning. Lynn struck out three consecutive Dodgers to leave the bases loaded. All three of the Dodgers went down swinging, each of them undone by one of Lynn’s fastballs. Cleanup hitter Will Smith, Max Muncy, and new addition Hernandez struck out in order to give Lynn the Houdini and, for awhile, what seemed to be the most important escape of the Cardinals’ young season.
Yes, Dodger Stadium has a tarp
And then the rain came.
Lynn pitched through a downpour in the bottom of the fourth inning. Both dugouts appeared irritated with the situation as pools of rain started to form on the infield and the umpires let Lynn keep on chugging. Managers Dave Roberts and Oliver Marmol both shouted from at crew chief Alan Porter as the rain intensified. Between innings, Porter paused play, but the field was already soggy with water – and the tarp took a bit to fit right.
Yes, there’s a tarp at Dodger Stadium.
No, it’s not used much.
The rain delay was the first at Dodger Stadium since April 7, 2015.
When the tarp was removed, the foul lines had to be redrawn and some of the standing water sopped up. The infield still had a puddle-gloss to it when play resumed. Yamamoto, who had held the Cardinals to one hit through four when the rain started, was back on the mound to pitch the top of the fifth inning.
Lynn would not be.
That’s where the game first pivoted
After safecracking the bases-loaded jam in the first inning, Lynn pushed through three more innings, and by the time the fourth ended he had retired eight consecutive Dodgers. When he did not return to the mound after the rain delay, the Dodgers capitalized.
They had some help.
Reliever Matthew Liberatore walked two of the first three batters he faced, and both of those walks became runs. That same trio of former MVPs that Lynn put on base in the first inning only to leave them there got on base against Liberatore – and did not stay. Betts walked and scored on Freeman’s RBI groundball single. Shohei Ohtani followed Betts’ walk with a walk of his own, and when Smith skipped a grounder past a diving Donovan, Ohtani scored for a 2-0 lead.
It took a throw from right fielder Burleson not a pitch from Liberatore to get the Cardinals out of the inning. Burleson caught a fly ball, and he threw a strike home so that catcher Ivan Herrera could tap Freeman for the inning-ending double play.