ST. LOUIS — Jon Lester will seek a fourth chance to make a better first impression.
The lefty who bested the Cardinals twice in the 2013 World Series for Boston only to relocate to the north side of Chicago and help hoist the Cubs to a title had trouble getting through his debut inning as a member of the home team at Busch Stadium. By the time he found some footing on the formerly foreign mound, Atlanta had opened a lead the Cardinals’ pedestrian lineup could not catch.
The first five hitters of the game scored and rocketed Atlanta to a 6-1 victory Tuesday night at Busch. The game continued two trends that have gained their own momentum.
The Cardinals sank back to .500 for the seventh time in 14 games.
Atlanta has altered wins and losses every game since the All-Star break, going 17 games without consecutive wins or consecutive losses.
The three-game visit from Atlanta is more than a start of several weeks against losing teams for the Cardinals to find some traction in the standings, it has also become the series to introduce a left-leaning but potentially short-lived rotation. The first two starters in the series for the Cardinals, Lester and J.A. Happ, were acquired at last week’s trade deadline in moves the front office said were designed to help the team “get through” this season. Both are veterans. Both know their way around even the rockiest starts. Both know how to provide innings.
Both have done it without their best stuff.
Lester had to show that Tuesday.
The lefty did not get his first out until he got two on his 26th pitch of the first inning. The first seven batters of the game reached base against Lester and the fifth run of the inning scored on the double play. Atlanta outfielder Jorge Soler hit his first homer for his new team on Lester’s eighth pitch for his new team. Lester’s 20th pitch was on the edge of the strike zone and called a ball to further illustrate how the inning had gone sideways on him. By the 22nd pitch of the inning, the Braves led 4-0, Lester did not have an out, and boos bloomed throughout the scattered crowd at Busch.
With a solo homer by Freddie Freeman in the second inning, the Braves had six runs before Lester had a sixth out.
Only two active pitchers, including former Cubs teammate Kyle Hendricks, have more starts against the Cardinals, and Lester is the lefty with the most career starts, many of them coming as a rival with the Cubs. Including October, Lester has 24 starts against the Cardinals. Two of his 10 wins in those starts came in the 2013 World Series, which Boston won in six games. When Lester became a free agent after the 2014 season, the Cardinals spoke with the lefty about signing, he said, but the better offer, bigger bid, and more aggressive suitor was the Cubs — who saw the lefty as part of the championship pedigree needed to lead a young rising core.
On the same day the Cubs traded away a handful of those players signaling the end of the Bryzzo Era, Lester started with Washington and ended with St. Louis.
A leading reason why the Cardinals added two veteran lefties was to give them some reliable innings, even when bruised, and stop what happened during June — the cascade effect of innings covered one day by the bullpen leading to losses later. Eventually, somewhere in the second inning, Lester found that gear to get deeper into the game.
While the offense never did in the first eight innings, the Cardinals bullpen started to stir in the first inning. It wasn’t needed until the sixth inning, however.
Lester used 31 pitches to get through the first inning. He completed the next three on 39 pitches, and by the time he got through the fifth inning he had retired nine of his final 11 batters. If not for his spot coming up in the bottom of the fifth inning and the Cardinals aching for some offense, Lester might have plunged deeper into the game to 100 pitches and beyond. He stopped having throwing 88 and allowed the six runs on nine hits and two walks through five innings.
The veteran lefty was as efficient and effective in the closing innings as his pitches were tagged and thumped in the first.
By holding the Braves after the second, Lester bought time for an offense that failed to arrive en masse but saved the bullpen from shouldering some added innings in case that offense does in the coming days. Braves lefty Max Fried, a close friend and high school teammate of Cardinals’ starter Jack Flaherty, needed a few more pitches than Lester to get through four innings, but he did so without allowing a run — and he was rarely threatened.
The Cardinals got the first two batters of the second inning on base, and then the next three, including Lester in his first Cardinals at-bat, failed to advance either runner at all. Those were the first and only at-bats with a runner in scoring position as Fried otherwise sizzled through the evening. He caught Harrison Bader looking at a 95-mph fastball to find a way out of the second inning. He struck out two batters in the sixth inning around a groundout to add punctuation to his line.
In the ninth inning, the Cardinals added a fitting punctuation of their own with some fleeting production.
Tyler O'Neill singled for his third hit of the game, and the first three times a Cardinal reached second base in the game that Cardinal was always O'Neill. He scored on an RBI single from Yadier Molina before the inning and the game ended with the Cardinals' eighth strikeout of the evening.
