DENVER — The last race left for the St. Louis Cardinals before the end of the regular season may have come to a sudden end Saturday night, too, as Adam Wainwright gained a hearty endorsement for his Cy Young candidacy.

It came from arguably his chief rival for the award: teammate Chris Carpenter.

“If that game right there doesn’t solidify him as the best pitcher in the league, then I’m can’t imagine what would,” Carpenter said, goggles perched on his forehead, sticky from the Cardinals’ clinching celebration. “I think that’s what it’s all about. That game, that eighth inning, and everything he did tonight. That’s what you want: Your big stud on the mound. Big game. Big situation. And he comes through.”

In a clear sign of his support of his most consistent starter and Wainwright’s place on the team, manager Tony La Russa left the righthander out to decide the game. Wainwright threw a career-high 130 pitches, and none bigger than a curveball to Jason Giambi that ended the threat in the eighth inning. Holding on to a one-run lead, Wainwright faced Giambi with the tying run at second base. The go-ahead run was at first base. The inning was sliding away from him — until it wasn’t.

He froze Clint Barmes for the second out of the inning, and on his 130th pitch of the game, he froze Giambi with a curve ball the former MVP would later argue was low. That was his 89th strike of the game. For perspective: Carpenter threw only 12 more pitches total Friday night than strikes Wainwright threw Saturday.

Third baseman Mark DeRosa and others likened it to Wainwright’s signature pitch: The curveball that froze New York back in 2006 when he K’d Carlos Beltran with the bases loaded to win the pennant.

Carpenter saw it as a clincher of another sort.

“He got 130 pitches into that game and he kept grinding and grinding and making big pitch after big pitch and then a bigger pitcher,” Carpenter said. “That is what it means to be the best pitcher in the league, and in a lot of ways that’s what his whole season has been like. He’s just been grinding out games like that all year.”

Wainwright held the Rockies 0-for-11 with runners in scoring position and he struck out 11 batters in his eight innings. The win gave him 19 for the season and gives him a chance to be the major leagues’ first (and likely only) 20-game winner in his final start of the regular season. He has a career-high 204 strikeouts to go with what will likely be a league-leading total in innings pitched, not to mention those lengthy streaks of starts he had with at least six innings and no more than two earned runs.

The Cy Young Award has been boiled down to a three-man race, with each having his say in the past three weeks or so. Just when San Francisco Giants ace Tim Lincecum would pull ahead, Carpenter would chase him down. Those two — both having won the award before — had been getting most of the press. Wainwright may have the better claim. As a scout recently told me about the three pitchers: “Consistency and being there for the team every five days has to count for something. Wainwright has done that.”

Sometime Saturday, a normal regular season game that really didn’t mean as much as it felt it did transcended its stature, and that probably had a lot to do with Wainwright staying in the game, staying in to close out his win and to clinch the NL Central title for the Cardinals.

That’s how La Russa saw it: “He might have won the award in the eighth inning.”

That’s how Carpenter sees it.

But not just because of the eighth.

“This is what he did all year for us,” Carpenter said. “Night after night, start after start, to do what he did and then did again tonight, 100 percent he should win it. One hundred percent he’s the one.”

***

Much more on this and the clinching in Sunday’s Post-Dispatch and online at StlToday.com

-30-