ST. LOUIS _ The Cardinals cleaned up their act _ for the most part _ after two sloppy losses and avoided a sweep by the Miami Marlins with a 4-1 win on Thursday afternoon.
"It looked much more like our club," manager Mike Matheny said. "Clean and guys making plays for the most part defensively. It was great seeing Yairo (Munoz, who made three errors at shortstop on Wednesday) getting some opportunities. He's a pretty tough kid. I knew he would respond well there. Takes a good at-bat late against a guy throwing hard. A nice bounce back day for him. Much better rhythm and all the way around."
Miles Mikolas did most of the heavy lifting, improving to 7-1 with seven effective innings in which the Marlins scored only once, thanks to Dexter Fowler's drop of a fly ball. That error ended a run of 13 consecutive batters retired by Mikolas, who gave up just three hits and struck out five in seven innings.
"He goes out there with a great attitude," said first baseman Jose Martinez. "He knows he can make some pitches, he knows how he can control the game and knows how to get the hitters out of balance. He's going to be good for a long time for us."
The Cardinals scored twice in the first on a home run by Martinez, his sixth of the season. They scored again in the sixth on consecutive singles by Tommy Pham, Martinez and Marcell Ozuna and then again in the seventh on a pinch home run by Luke Voit, who has two hits in three at-bats this season.
"(We needed this) going into a road trip with a division rival," Voit said. "I'm hoping we can take this and keep it going. Miles was huge for us today. He's been our workhorse and for him to go seven innings strong, it's been pretty impressive what he's done."
"Every win is big," said Martinez, who has upped his batting average to .311, making him the only Cardinals' regular hitting over .300. "I think we lost those games, it's baseball. We went out there trying to do our best, stuff happened in the field. We came out today with the same mentality, to win some games, and we did it. Our plan was to get some runs early and set the tone through the whole game and we did it and everything went well."
The only thing that didn't go right was Fowler's error. He had a decent-sized run to get to Starlin Castro's fly ball into the right field corner, but he got there and had the ball bounce off his glove. Castro scored two hitters later on a double by Justin Bour.
The Cardinals had lost the first two games to the Marlins by scores of 7-4 and 11-3. They made three errors on Wednesday and two the night before. The pitching also stepped up. Mikolas got them deep into the game before handing it over to Jordan Hicks and Bud Norris, who got his 12th save.
Martinez is in another of his streaks. Over the previous four games, he had seven hits in 15 at-bats and was hitting .467. With two hits on Thursday, he had his sixth multi-hit/multi-RBI game of the season.
