MILWAUKEE _ What began with all of the trace elements of a compelling, playoff-tinged game before veering into the absurd with a rain delay at a roofed ballpark, eventually brought the Cardinals back to where so many games go in this era.
Yadier Molina was in the middle of all it.
The iconic catcher hit a home run to tie the game, a home run to break the tie, and then doubled as the Cardinals pulled away for a 6-3 victory against Milwaukee Tuesday night at Miller Park. The 10 total bases tied Molina's career high as he also moved into the top 10 all-time for game's caught with his 1,919th and surpassed Ted Simmons' total for multi-homer gamers. Molina finished the win with three RBIs and three runs scored, and the Cardinals had their fifth consecutive win, their 15th in their past 18 games.
The first-place Cardinals, now 15 games better than .500, have the chance to sweep the Brewers on Wednesday afternoon and move the third-place club 7 { games back with 30 to play.
The Cardinals' lead, provided by Molina's two-run homer before the rain delay in the seventh inning, teetered in the eighth. Yasmani Grandal mashed a two-run homer off reliever Andrew Miller to move the Brewers within a run of the Cardinals, 4-3. Miller walked the next batter, Christian Yelich, to force closer Carlos Martinez into the game ahead of schedule. Martinez quickly got a double play to end the inning and start a five-out save.
The Brewers got the tying run to the plate in the ninth before Martinez secured the save � with a little help from Dexter Fowler. The Cardinals' right fielder caught the final out at the wall. That made a winner of Miles Mikolas (8-13), who unfurled his curveball early and often on his way to 10 strikeouts in six innings. He allowed one run on four hits.
Shortly after Molina's second home run buzzed the foul pole and broke the tie, something far more unlikely than a homer at Miller Park halted the game. A rain storm rolled into the area swifter than the ballpark's Pac-Man roof could be closed, leaving the teams to play briefly during the downpour before the umpires surrendered to the absurdity and paused the game during Harrison Bader's at-bat.
The Brewers do have a tarp at the ready at their retractable-roof ballpark, but it wasn't deployed at all � let alone fast enough to cover the field.
This was not the first rain delay at Miller Park. A game in August 2012 was interrupted for seven minutes when the roof didn't close quicker than the rains came. In at least one previous visit by the Cardinals, the roof leaked over the mound before a game. On Tuesday afternoon, several Cardinals described how there was a small but persistent leak throughout Monday's game, which started with a daylong storm outside and continued under the closed roof. The delay Tuesday lasted 9 minutes, and once the grounds crew finished scattering some Diamond Dry around the batter's boxes and on the mound, the Cardinals got back to what they were doing.
Bader singled.
Off the bench, Kolten Wong made his first appearance since severely bruising the big toe on his right foot and lashed a pinch-hit double to left field. Bader raced from first all the way to the Diamond Dry-dotted home plate for what became the Cardinals' essential fourth run. Wong added a second hit and a second RBI as the Cardinals pulled away again in the ninth.
When Molina first returned from his injured hand, he did so rapidly and the results revealed a player trying to make the most of a grip that wasn't its strongest.
In the first 21 games he played, Molina did well to hit .250 and he got 18 hits to go with his 18 starts in that stretch. But only three of the hits went for extra bases, none were homers, and for a player who has earned a reputation throughout his career as a contact hitter it was unusual that he had 17 strikeouts to go with those 18 hits. His slugging percentage was .292. As the soreness and some weakness persisted, the Cardinals and Molina opted for another approach, one that would put him back on the injured list and set a calendar for his return.
They held to it.
The results are in the box score.
Molina had a three-hit game this past weekend against Colorado. He hit his first home run since returning from the IL on Monday, and then followed with the two homers Tuesday. Molina's first home run tied the game, 1-1, and two innings later he snapped that tie with a two-run homer that scored Paul DeJong. The multi-homer game was Molina' seventh of his career, moving him past Ted Simmons' six for the most all-time by a Cardinals catcher. It was also Molina's first multi-homer game since June 2018, at Miller Park.
Four of his seven multi-homer games have been vs. the Brewers.
The game had an edge to it throughout Mikolas' appearance, especially as it appeared every base he mistakenly allowed put the Brewers in position to take advantage. He balked to put Eric Thames into scoring position in the fourth inning. He had two wild pitches in his sixth and final inning to put what would have been the go-ahead run in scoring position. The one run the Brewers did score against him came after Keston Huira stole second base on Mikolas. The wild pitches were a risk of the approach Mikolas and Molina adopted.
This season, according to FanGraphs.com, about one out of every five pitches Mikolas has thrown is a curveball. On Tuesday, he threw more curves than any other pitch.
The Pitch F/x tech counted 28.
In the third inning, against reigning National League MVP Yelich, Mikolas showed him slow and then slower with the curveball. He got a called strike on a 78-mph curve that bent into the strike zone. The breaking pitch guided the whole at-bat until, on the last pitch, Mikolas froze Yelich with a 93-mph fastball for a called strike 3. Again and again, Mikolas turned to the curveball. He got six swings and misses on it, and 21 of the 28 curves were strikes, though not all were in the strike zone. He befuddled shortstop Corey Spangenberg with it enough to coax a check-swing strikeout to end the fourth inning with a runner at third.
Brewers starter Adrian Houser kept the pace of his start peppy, and drew two double plays from the Cardinals in his five innings.
It wasn't until the fifth that Molina connected for his homer, and that was only the third ball that Houser allowed out of the infield.
The deluge of runs really came when, like the roof, Milwaukee's relievers were slow to provide cover.
