NEW YORK — Riddled by the unpredictable nature of R.A. Dickey's power knuckleball, the Cardinals continued a predictable trend on the road.
Dickey pitched a season-best 8 1/3 scoreless innings as he and closer Francisco Rodriguez shut out the Cardinals 4-0 at Citi Field on Thursday afternoon. The loss concluded a 2-4 trip for the Cardinals and sent them back to Busch Stadium having needed extra innings to collect those two wins. The shutout was the Cardinals' 10th of the season; nine of them have come as visitors.
Manager Tony La Russa declined to describe his team as road-weary, characterizing them instead as threadbare.
"I think we're a little short," La Russa said, after the game and two days before the non-waiver trade deadline. "We've done a good job of surviving. It's tough to thrive when you're missing a couple of edges. It happens to everybody, so I'm not making excuses. We haven't gotten buried. We've survived.
"That's a good sign."
Rookie Ike Davis raked a change-up from Blake Hawksworth for a three-run homer that proved to be all the Mets needed to win the game and the series. Hawksworth (4-7) allowed four runs on seven hits through six innings but pitched without any offensive help. That has been typical of the inconsistent Cardinals. They had 31 innings against the Mets in this series and managed a rally of more than one run in only one of them.
The Cardinals dropped to 22-30 on the road this season. They've won just one series in their previous eight on the road.
"I think that's something that we can get better at obviously is playing on the road," outfielder Ryan Ludwick said. "We're playing really well at home. It feels like from here on, bear down and try to get some wins on the road."
La Russa said a lot of his players were pushing it Thursday, including first baseman Albert Pujols. First pitch for Thursday's game came about 12 1/2 hours after Wednesday's 13-inning win. Pujols played cautiously late in that game after feeling his left calf tighten. Skip Schumaker has a tender wrist, and catcher Yadier Molina is still limping with a bruised shin. One player called them the usual bumps and bruises of a long season, but they come with a bench thinned by injury and some slumps, and a rotation still down two starters.
Not that the Mets were the picture of health.
Left fielder Jason Bay has been slowed by a concussion, and All-Star third baseman David Wright got a day off. But the Mets had Dickey. He has been a godsend, blossoming from a spring training unknown to perhaps the most consistent pitcher on their staff.
Armed with a knuckleball he can throw from around 70 mph to around 80 mph, Dickey (7-4) struck out two batters in the first inning and pushed his scoreless-innings streak to 17. Only twice did the Cardinals get two runners on base in the same inning against Dickey, and that was the disturbance in the ninth that brought in Rodriguez for his third appearance in the three-game series.
Ludwick, a teammate of Dickey's in the minor leagues before the righthander had discovered the knuckleball that revamped his career, said there's a common saying when facing a knuckleball: "If it's high, let it fly."
Dickey rarely left it high.
Dickey got 17 groundball outs from the Cardinals, including one stretch where he retired 13 of 15 Cardinals batters that way. His only walk in the first eight innings of the game was erased with a double play, and Ludwick's leadoff single in the fifth fizzled as a rally-starter with another double play. Rookie Jon Jay was the only Cardinal to reach base twice, and he was the only Cardinal to get as far as second base until Colby Rasmus in the ninth.
"By the time you started getting the timing down on his knuckleball, it was like the fifth or sixth inning," Schumaker said. "He'd get strike one on you and then it didn't come with the same speed or the same movement or even the same direction again. It cut sometimes. It dropped sometimes. It stayed in the same plane a few times. It's a different kind of knuckleball than I've ever seen."
What hitters see from Hawksworth has circulated through the league as the first-year starter made his eighth start of the season. The righthander has an advantageous change-up, a high-velocity fastball and a curveball he admits is "definitely third on the list." Hawksworth got Davis to ground out on the change-up in his first at-bat of the game, and he went back to it again in the third inning. Davis hit with runners at the corners after Jose Reyes' leadoff double and Angel Pagan's bunt single. Hawksworth hung a first-pitch change-up to Davis and the rookie deposited it in the center-field seats.
Hawksworth didn't think Davis was looking for that pitch but rather waiting for any pitch in that location.
The Mets added a run in the fifth when Pagan tripled and scored on Carlos Beltran's single. The inning could have deteriorated for Hawksworth had Jay not thrown hard from center a few batters later to get Beltran at the plate for the third out.
"It turned on one swing of the bat (by) Davis, and that was the difference," La Russa said. "We lost a game. Give the pitcher credit. And, one big at-bat. ... (Hawksworth) gave us a chance to win. It's just the other guy had a lot working, and we couldn't do anything with him."
