ST. LOUIS _ With an offense that, other than Matt Carpenter, produced nothing in the first seven innings and Jaime Garcia not finding his stuff until he had allowed five runs, the Cardinals closed out another minimalist home stand with a 7-4 loss to the Athletics on Sunday.
The loss meant the Cardinals took just one game out of three in each of the series on this home stand, going a combined 2-4 against the Mets and Athletics. With a win by the Pirates, the Cardinals have a half-game lead on Pittsburgh for the final wild-card spot. The Cardinals finished the season 1-9 at home against American League teams.
Carpenter had three hits, a home run and two doubles, and scored the first three Cardinals runs. In fact, after he scored in the sixth, he had three of the Cardinals' four hits and all three of their runs. The rest of the team had gone one for 21 until back-to-back hits by Greg Garcia and Alberto Rosario in the seventh produced a run. Rosario, however, cost the team when, as the potential tying run, he was thrown out trying to go from second to third.
Jaime Garcia gave up five runs in the first three innings, all of them on two-out homers: a two-run shot in the first by Khris Davis and a three-run blast in the third by Stephen Vogt. After that, Garcia settled down and faced just three hitters in each of the next four innings, helped along by two double plays. When he finally left the game after seven innings, he had allowed seven hits, struck out six and walked one.
"Things seemed to snowball," manager Mike Matheny said. "It's a shame because he had really good stuff today and should have had a better result."
It's the second straight game were a bad start got him in trouble. In his other start in this homestand, he gave up three runs in the first and then, after the Cardinals tied the game, he gave up two more in the second.
"I think we've seen it a few times when he gets a few quick outs and then something happens it kind of rolls out of control for a little while," Matheny said. "A strikeout, then a barely made contact ball back to him and then another that goes maybe 30 feet. You can tell he has the movement at that point. He just has to continue to trust it. It throws him into the stretch at that point, maybe that made a difference. We've talked about it with a couple of our pitchers, to be able to stop it when it gets rolling and his stuff was good enough to stop it in a hurry."
Carpenter was largely self-reliant in his offense. In the first he doubled, went to second on a wild pitch and scored on a bloop single by Stephen Piscotty, the only non-Carpenter hit in the first six innings. He hit his 17th home run of the season, and extended the Cardinals streak of games with a home run to 17, in the third. In the sixth, he doubled, moved up a base on a fly out and scored on a sacrifice fly.
After the Cardinals cut the lead to 5-4 in the seventh to make a game of it, the bullpen punted in the eighth. Jonathan Broxton came in and allowed a single and a double to score a run, with Danny Valencia taking third on the throw to the plate. After Broxton struck out Khris Davis, Zach Duke came on. He got Ryon Healy to hit a roller back to the mound, but with a play at the plate, Duke failed three times to come up with the ball and Valencia scored.
The Cardinals brought the tying run to the plate in the ninth with singles by Brandon Moss and Jhonny Peralta but Randal Grichuk lined out to third and Greg Garcia flew out to end the game.
