If Darren Oliver and Scott Feldman had retired the Cardinals with only one run in the 10th inning, Rangers outfielder Josh Hamilton would have carved out a spot in baseball history with a game-winning two-run homer. Hamilton's groin has been a subject of attention throughout the postseason and, without his ability to draw strength from his lower body, he had not hit a homer in all three rounds of the playoffs.

Instead, his homer off Jason Motte is a footnote and an anomaly — he joins Dave Henderson of the 1986 Red Sox as the only players to hit an extra-inning homer and lose — though was a sign that despite the pain, he still can go deep.

"It's about time," Hamilton said after Game 6, "that was my first thought. But you've got to finish the game off and we didn't do that."

Hamilton told reporters that he had advance notice that he was going to hit the homer — from God.

"He said, you haven't hit one in a while and this is the time you're going to," Hamilton said, in an article on the Dallas Morning News' website. "But there was a period at the end of that. He didn't say, you're going to hit it and you're going to win."

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER GAME

Rangers manager Ron Washington said he didn't spend much time replaying Game 6 when he got back to his hotel Thursday night.

"Through everything that happened in that ballgame, I had the right people in the right place when we could have won the game," he said. "I don't second-guess myself for that. ... I got home last night, I packed up, I got into bed, and I slept until 10:30 this morning. I got up, I feel as good as I've ever felt."

Washington met briefly with his players after Game 6. "The mood was like they just took a blow to the gut," he said.

NUMBERS, NUMBERS AND MORE NUMBERS

A game as historic as the Cardinals' 10-9 win in Game 6 was bound to produce a number of seldom-seen events.

The Rangers lost five leads in Game 6: 1-0, 3-2, 4-3, 7-4 and 9-7. That's more lost leads than the combined total for any other game in World Series history. No team had ever lost more than three leads in a game.

How unusual was it for the Rangers to give up runs in the eighth, ninth, 10th and 11th innings? It has happened only twice in the past 25 years. The Padres did it in a 10-8 loss to Atlanta in 1994 and the Diamondbacks did it in an 8-7 win over Houston in 1999.

The Rangers' three blown saves, by Alexi Ogando, Neftali Feliz and Scott Feldman, mark the most in World Series history. Since the Rangers moved to Texas from Washington in 1972, they've had just one other game with three blown saves: a 14-13 loss to the Yankees on May 16, 2006, which ended with a two-run homer by Jorge Posada.

The last team to lose a World Series game while scoring nine or more runs was the Cardinals, who lost Game 1 of the 2004 World Series 11-9 to Boston.

PAIN AND SUFFERING

Catcher Mike Napoli and right fielder Nelson Cruz both got hurt in Game 6, but Washington had both in the lineup for Game 7. Napoli twisted his ankle Thursday sliding into second but stayed in the game. Cruz, whose misplay of David Freese's fly ball in the ninth kept the Cardinals alive, hurt his groin in his final at-bat.

Washington put Cruz in his starting lineup on condition that the team would look at how he did in batting practice and make a change if he was feeling pain.