NEW YORK • More than four hours after one of the hardest hit balls of his career failed to break the game open Wednesday, a limping Albert Pujols skipped a sharp grounder to left field that saved a win for the Cardinals.
Pujols, slowed in extra innings by an ornery left calf muscle, scalded an RBI single in the 13th inning to rescue the Cardinals from disaster and deliver an 8-7 victory against the New York Mets at Citi Field. Twelve innings after the Cardinals took a 6-0 lead on Cy Young-winning lefty Johan Santana, Skip Schumaker scored with two outs on Pujols' third single of the game.
What the Cardinals did with a six-run first inning against Santana, the Mets answered with a game-tying rally in the eighth inning against four Cardinals relievers. The Cardinals used all of their position players, and they even had to dispatch newcomer Mike MacDougal into his Cardinals debut with a tie game in the 12th inning on foreign soil.
He got the win as a reward for his perfect inning.
"It was more working ball than playing ball," manager Tony La Russa said. "We showed a lot of guts hanging in there. We had some thises and thats that we could have backed off. But we didn't."
The game hinged, as games often do, on Pujols.
The Cardinals' three-time MVP entered the game with a .296 average and that creeping frustration that he wasn't being rewarded for his swings. The first inning confirmed that. As the Cardinals laced Santana with eight hits and sent 12 batters to the plate, Pujols made two of the outs in the inning - none louder or longer than in his second at-bat. With the bases loaded, Pujols pulped Santana's pitch nearly 400 feet to dead center at big Citi Field. Center fielder Carlos Beltran tracked it down for the final out of the worst first inning in Santana's career.
"I've been struggling to get a hit here or there and you smoke a ball like that," Pujols said. "That is to me, one of the hardest balls I can say that I've hit this year and in my career. To be able to hit it 400-some feet and have them catch it ... it's tough. But I still go out there and battle and I'm glad that I came through in that (13th) inning. That's why you ... don't take anything for granted.
"If I would have thought about that line drive or about the way I'm swinging the bat," he continued, "it would have probably affected me right there in the last at-bat."
He said the funk wasn't getting to him "mentally."
He was already ailing physically.
Pujols pulled up awkwardly in the 11th inning when legging out a potential double play. And given the chance to break up a double play moments later, Pujols trotted and veered away from the play. He said he felt a tug in his left calf and decided not to push. He moved gingerly to his position and played cautiously at his position because, he said, he didn't want to force "a pitcher to play your position."
Pujols insisted after the game that he would be OK for today's series finale at 11:10 a.m. (St. Louis time), but the calf meant he had two different physical concerns on two consecutive days. He felt his left side stiffen up during Tuesday's game.
Before Pujols' winner, the game appeared to hinge on an at-bat taken by starter Jaime Garcia well before he threw a pitch. Santana intentionally walked .201-hitting shortstop Brendan Ryan to load the bases and face Garcia, a lefthanded hitter, with two outs in the first inning. Garcia fouled off four pitches. He did not miss with a single swing. And on the ninth pitch of the at-bat, he threaded a full-count fastball up the middle to score two runs and spur the inning.
The six runs and eight hits allowed in the first inning by Santana were the most of any first inning in the two-time Cy Young Award-winner's career.
"I felt like I needed a big at-bat right there," Garcia said. "I was like this is going to be huge. Usually in the first inning you're focused on the first inning of your pitching, not hitting. But I was there and I was not going to just strike out swinging the bat. He's going to have to throw me pitches."
With a six-run lead, built in part by a two-run homer from Matt Holliday, Garcia gave two back in the first. After outdueling Santana from there for six innings to the Mets' lefties 52⁄3 innings, Garcia left the game to the bullpen with a four-run lead and three innings to cover. Though it featured the same two starters, Wednesday seemed far different than the 20-inning game the two teams played in April - until the eighth.
Angel Pagan opened the scoring with a two-run shot off Mitchell Boggs, the first of four relievers the Cardinals used to get three outs. La Russa went to Dennys Reyes to face back-to-back lefties at the bottom of the Mets' lineup only to see his lefty walk the first batter to load the bases. Rookie Ike Davis followed with a two-run single to right field that knotted the score, 7-7.
The Cardinals tagged Santana for a career-high 13 hits, yet for four hours after bombarding him in the first they managed just one run from a Holliday double. That is, until reliever Pedro Feliciano hit Schumaker with a pitch and walked leadoff hitter Felipe Lopez. That set the bases for Pujols, who got to do what the Mets wouldn't let him do in the 20-inning game by walking him repeatedly.
He got to impact the game.
"Yes, that went through my mind and I thought, ‘Not again,'" Pujols said. "I'm always ready to go out there and hit. ... I expect myself to come through for my ballclub every time I'm at the plate. It doesn't happen all the time."
