It took 11 months, a few round trips to the minors and back, more than 1,400 pitches, and, almost improbably, 17 starts for Johan Oviedo to get within one inning of the career first he’s been chasing the entire time.
It all came apart with him watching from the dugout.
Closer Alex Reyes entered a tenuous ninth and could not douse the bases-loaded kindling left behind by reliever Luis Garcia. The Cubs trailed by five entering the final inning Tuesday at Busch Stadium and turned a series of walks and Javier Baez's two-run single into a tighter game than it had been in hours. Ian Happ’s double into the right-field corner flipped the game into a Cubs 7-6 victory and gave Reyes the first blown save of his career after going 24-for-24 to start. He was 22-for-22 this season. Three of the Cubs’ runs came as a result of the two walks and two hits All-Star Reyes allowed while collecting only one out.
Craig Kimbrel, one of the current Cubs who could be former Cubs by the trade deadline, retired the Cardinals in order in the ninth to cement his team's last-inning reversal.
The rupture in the ninth cost Oviedo the first win of his major-league career, something he'll try to get in his 18th career start.
It also meant the Cardinals, tied with their rivals at 47-48, did not peek above .500 for the first time since the afternoon of June 20 between halves of a doubleheader in Atlanta.
The Cardinals saw this series as a chance to get traction in the standings and have used the listing and sometimes listless Cubs as a stepstool back into contention. The four-game visit from the rivals has two more games, but neither of the first two has been the packed-house bonanza of previous years or the usual weekend visit. Despite being cleared for full capacity, the Cardinals have sold fewer than 40,000 tickets in each of the first two games, and Tuesday’s game, despite pleasant temps, had a paid attendance of 35,402.
For those who found their seats for the start of the first inning, Oviedo established a tone and an approach quickly.
He was going to throw strikes.
He was going to work with some alacrity.
Promoted on Tuesday morning for a third look in the rotation and a 12th start of the season, the Cardinals’ rookie righthander seized the opportunity to audition for another start in the week ahead. Oviedo contributed an RBI single to a score that grew with home runs from Nolan Arenado, Tommy Edman and, for his first time as a Cardinals, Jose Rondon. He left the game with a 4-1 lead, and it was swell to 6-1 by the end of the sixth inning.
The 23-year-old righthander, thrust into a larger role than planned this season due to injuries on the pitching staff, has had starts complicated by walks and a few unforced errors of his own. Through the first 53 innings of this season he allowed 87 baserunners, 30 of them on walks. Any path that led to that first win was going to have to be paved with strikes, and Oviedo did that. Of the 74 pitches he threw Tuesday, 50 were strikes.
“He’s a hungry young man,” manager Mike Shildt said. “He’s embraced the challenge.”
And he announced support for something personal. Oviedo, who is from Cuba, took the mound with a message written on his cap. On the side, he wrote “SOS CUBA,” and on the front, near the interlocking STL, he had written, “Patria Y Vida,” the hashtag and rallying phrase of support for protestors in Cuba who decrying the country’s lack of food, supplies, and medicine and conditions caused by government actions. Arenado, whose father is from Cuba, has had the same phrase – for my homeland, my life – written on his cap in recent games.
Oviedo allowed one run in the second inning and other than that one flicker of a threat the Cubs against him did not get a runner to second base against him. He struck out four of the final six batters he faced. The only walk he allowed was an intentional one to draw a better matchup against the opposing pitcher.
Oviedo got a groundout.
He took it at first base himself.
He did as much as he could on his own. He collected his second career RBI. In his final four innings he allowed only two balls out of the infield, and one of them was a routine fly ball to center field. If the All-Star break offered him an infusion of confidence by overwhelming Class AAA hitters with a win and eight strikeouts for Memphis, it was a break of a different sort that allowed the Cardinals’ No. 3 hitter to take a deep breath and try not too do so much on his own.
While Shildt said he didn’t “check the footwear” Arenado wore in the dugout Monday as the series opened against the Cubs, the goal was to keep him out of his cleats, if possible.
“A day is a day,” Shildt said.
The purpose of the day was to give the Cardinals’ third baseman a break after playing throughout the 10-game road trip and then U-turning to Colorado to participate in the All-Star Game. The trip started with Arenado’s return to Colorado for the first time as a visiting player, and he spoke later about how that was more emotional, more draining than he expected, and on the field during BP at the All-Star Game he joked that how he played in San Francisco showed the relief he felt after the reunion.
At the same time, Arenado has seen his average shrink in July, falling from .270 through a stretch of 13 games where he’s hit .189 (10-for-53) with only six strikeouts.
Shildt allowed the breather was not just to give Arenado’s body a rest.
It was a mental break.
“I, candidly, think that was more the day off – the genesis of that – than it was physical,” the manager said before Tuesday’s game. “I can’t minimize the physical work that these guys do and the toll it takes. From a mental standpoint, he’s a special guy. He likes to compete. Go to Colorado, three for four days, and you observed the pull. A lot of mixed emotions. You’re going to place that raised you. He wants to be gracious for everything. I just saw him getting pulled, pulled, pulled. Ten days later he’s going back … for a more heightened experience that now is national.”
Arenado was back in cleats and going through his fielding drills and batting practice before Tuesday’s game, and landing baseballs into the opposing team’s bullpen.
That’s where his tiebreaking solo homer went, too.
The Cubs grabbed a 1-0 lead in the second inning by turning a hit batter, a single, and a groundout into a brief rally. The Cardinals answered with a pair of doubles by Dylan Carlson and Harrison Bader in the third to the game, 1-1, going into the fourth. Arenado’s second homer of the month traveled an estimated 406 feet to put the Cardinals ahead and begin the rally that made it possible for Oviedo to snag that first win.
Arenado’s team-leading 18th homer of the season was the first of a three-run inning. Molina followed with a single, and after Trevor Williams walked Paul DeJong, Bader had his second hit in as many at-bats for an RBI single. That brought Oviedo up with two runners on base and a chance to contribute to his quest.
He threaded a groundball up the middle, past two Cubs, and into center field to score DeJong and widen the lead to 4-1.
That’s where it remained when he yielded the ball.
With that lead and a chance to secure the rookie his first win, the goal of the dugout was clearly to get Oviedo as far as his effectiveness and pitch count could get him – as long as it was nowhere near being involved in a potential loss. Oviedo breezed through the fifth inning with all three outs coming on strikeouts. He plunged a curveball into the dirt to get Cubs first baseman Anthony Rizzo offering at it for the final out of the inning. The previous two strikeouts came on called strike threes.
The completion of that inning qualified Oviedo for the win.
The expediency of it earned him another inning.
He got one batter into it, and when Baez flipped a single to center to lead off the inning the Cardinals went immediately to the bullpen, never putting Oviedo close to the brink of getting a loss. Genesis Cabrera overpowered Jason Heyward with a 99-mph fastball and got a popup up from pinch-hitter Jake Marisnick to leave the bases loaded and freeze Oviedo’s line with the one run allowed by him.
The rest came later to undo it all.
