TORONTO — With the only big-league team he’s known down big on the scoreboard, tumbling down in the standings, and down a few players from the roster, Adam Wainwright could empathize coming off a sour start that he didn’t downplay, calling it “embarrassing.”
The tilting Cardinals had just lost 10-3 to the Blue Jays. They lost the third of four games out of the break, and they were going to be without their best two hitters for another day in what two teammates independently called “a real tough week.” Those were the things on Wainwright’s mind as he left Rogers Centre on Tuesday, the night before his start. They sharpened his mind as he watched video into the midnight hours.
The Cardinals had an obvious need.
Wainwright had a familiar purpose.
“I went into it looking at it as a great opportunity to prove that I still had what it takes to be a great pitcher in this game,” Wainwright said. “Great pitcher. Great team over there. Great offense. There was a lot of stuff I went into with today for motivation. This was awesome. This is what I want as a competitor.”
At one of the most difficult points of this season, the Cardinals turned again to the players who have lifted them through so many seasons. Wainwright, 40, and his frigid curveball doused the hottest lineup in baseball through seven exceptional innings Wednesday. He struck out eight. Albert Pujols singled, doubled, surpassed Rogers Hornsby on the all-time Cardinals hits list, and homered in his first three at-bats to drive the Cardinals to a 6-1 victory against Toronto.
At 42, Pujols became the oldest player to hit a home run at the ballpark formerly known as SkyDome — and his bolt traveled 439 feet.
Stash the dad jokes.
These middle-aged fathers still pop.
“He might be old — but he can still hit,” Wainwright said, trying to get Pujols to smile from across the clubhouse late Wednesday night. “That’s why we still play the game. We feel like we can contribute. I don’t think he’s out there, and I’m not out there, to be mascots.”
More like constants.
Wainwright (7-8) got a game in Toronto due to the turn of the rotation, so it was welcome timing that his start came after a series of sinking losses. No one has been a better stopper for the Cardinals in the past 20 years than Wainwright. Pujols started at cleanup each day by design, not entirely by data. The Cardinals knew they would be without their leading hitters, All-Stars Paul Goldschmidt and Nolan Arenado, for two games in Toronto because travel restrictions require COVID-19 vaccinations for travel into Canada. (The United States has a similar policy for international visitors.)
Manager Oliver Marmol needed a brief rewrite for the middle of the order and could have sided with matchups, but given the circumstances he counted on the steady pulse of Pujols.
“You could easily look at the numbers and say, ‘That’s not the play against two righties,’” Marmol said. “You’re hoping that veteran presence and his overall makeup — that’s what you’re counting on, that he’s going to step up and deliver, and he did that.
“At the end of the day, you sit down, you don’t have your two main guys here, and you’re trying to figure out who can slow the game down enough to give you that at-bat and quality at-bat,” Marmol continued. “There still is a human side to this game. That’s part of it.”
At cleanup, Pujols had four hits in the series, reached base four times, and combined with two of the youngest members of the roster to produce most of the Cardinals’ runs. Dylan Carlson had the RBI on three of the Cardinals’ first four runs of the series. Nolan Gorman, the youngest member of the roster, led off the fifth inning with a solo homer, and that inning climaxed with Pujols’ three-run homer to widen the Cardinals’ lead.
Pujols’ 686th career homer left swiftly, traveled farther.
“That was a tank bomb,” Wainwright said.
Pujols’ homer concluded the Cardinals’ scoring, and six runs would seem like a lot — except against a thunder-packed lineup like Toronto. In the four previous games, the Blue Jays scored 50 runs. The entered Wednesday with the highest team average in baseball (.268). They also had the highest slugging percentage (.466) at home of any team in the majors, including Colorado. That number did not include their 51 hits in three days at Fenway Park this past weekend.
The Cardinals entered the series a contact-oriented team facing one of the hardest-hitting contact lineups in baseball.
If they pitched poorly, well — bouncy ball meet trampoline.
“It feels good when you stop them in their tracks as opposed to when they’re struggling and you beat them when they’re down,” said Tuesday starter Andre Pallante, who could not slow Toronto.
“Those guys probably scored 70 runs over their past five games,” Pujols said. “It’s pretty crazy. Dangerous lineup. Adam did a great job to keep it off balance.”
Wainwright did what a pitcher must against Toronto.
He missed bats.
He didn’t walk Jays.
He spun them with his curveball.
Wainwright got help with an outfield assist in the first inning to pitch around a double, the only extra-base hit he allowed. The other four hit were all singles, and paired in innings that Wainwright never lost a grip on. Wainwright struck out three batters his first time through the order, and he neutralized a rally in the fifth inning with a strikeout of George Springer. In the sixth, he retired Vladimir Guerrero Jr. for the first time in the game by snapping a curveball past him. Wainwright had a deft feel for his cutter, and his final pitch was a cutter that Matt Chapman couldn’t touch.
“He really shoved,” Gorman said. “He made them look pretty silly.”
Two of the five hits Wainwright allowed came from Guerrero, whose father Wainwright never faced in the regular season. Two of the eight strikeouts Wainwright collected in his first win outside of the United States came from Cavan Biggio, Toronto’s infielder. Those two are twice as many as the times Wainwright struck out Cavan’s dad, Hall of Famer Craig.
“Cavan was probably,” Wainwright said, pausing to ask his age (24). “He’s probably the bat boy when I was playing against Craig before.”
While Wainwright faced and bested the second generation Biggio, so many of his teammates are going through their first turbulence in the majors. That could be Gorman, who started the day with early batting practice because of a zero-for-13 funk and a .150 average in July. That could be Brendan Donovan, who played a superb third base Wednesday in Arenado’s absence but has seen his batting average and production slip to a .197 and .593 OPS over the past month of games. That could be any of the number of rookie pitchers, or it could be center Dylan Carlson, who finds his name linked to potential trades for the first time.
Or, it could be all of them — shorthanded for two days and also experiencing the pressure to contend that comes with the uniform.
It surprised no one that at an unsteady moment, two seasoned hands took hold.
“You get these veteran guys, Albert and Waino, and they know what’s on the line, they sniff what’s possible, and what we set out to do,” Marmol said. “With some of these guys, this is their last run. Some of these veteran guys, you’re going to see in these last games here — they’re meaningful. We’re setting out to do something that their story ends well. Talked about it a ton. That’s with a championship.
“And they’re going to go hard.”
