MILWAUKEE _ For a club spiraling through a road trip that thudded Thursday with a heinous, mistake-strewn loss, the Cardinals returned to Miller Park with a chance to still stake a claim to this series if they found a spark of something, anything.
Jack Flaherty did even better.
He held Milwaukee to nothing.
It still wasn't enough.
Jesus Aguilar hit one home to fracture Flaherty's near-perfect game in the seventh and another homer in the ninth inning to win the game, 2-1, for the Brewers at Miller Park. Aguilar's game winner _ a blast to right field _ came off Bud Norris and shoved the Cardinals to a third consecutive loss, their eighth in their previous 10 games.
Flaherty took a no-hitter through 100 pitches and into the seventh inning Friday night against the first-place Brewers. He had 12 strikeouts and was closing in on tying a career high with 13 when the Brewers finally solved him and tied the game. On Flaherty's 101st pitch, Aguilar hit a home run into Milwaukee's bullpen. That tied the game, 1-1, and shifted the focus from the hits Flaherty had not allowed to the hits the Cardinals had not gotten. At the time of Aguilar's homer, the Cardinals were 1-for-8 with runners in scoring position, and the Brewers' bullpen was about to complete one perfect turn through the Cardinals' lineup.
The relievers struck out seven of the first nine Cardinals they faced.
The Cardinals, who struck out 15 times in the game and had only three hits, did not get a runner on base after the Brewers' bullpen entered the game. Aguilar took advantage with his 16th home run of the season and his fourth career multi-homer game.
With seven strong innings and one hit allowed, Flaherty gave the Cardinals their first quality start in nine games and allowed the bullpen to be used by design, not by ad-hoc, for the first time on the road trip.
The game got off to an inauspicious start for the Cardinals who lost their center fielder almost as quickly as Milwaukee got its first out. These were related. Tommy Pham took such issue with home-plate umpire Tim Timmons' strike three call that he continued to complain several batters later. In the middle of cleanup hitter Marcell Ozuna's at-bat, Timmons signaled for time, and tossed Pham from the game. Manager Mike Matheny came out from the dugout to talk with Timmons about that decision.
He remained. Pham did not.
Another flashpoint in the game happened in the eighth inning as Eric Sogard slid into shortstop Yairo Munoz at the bag. Both of them had issues with the play. Sogard slid into Munoz, not the bag, and Sogard had a beef with Munoz. The dugouts cleared. The bullpens did, too. The meeting at second remained calm until Carlos Martinez rushed in _ and had to be pulled out from the mix by catcher Francisco Pena. Reliever Jordan Hicks got between Sogard and Munoz, and it was Hicks that made the throw to Munoz for the out. The game resumed. The fire waned.
By the time the Cardinals left the ballpark Thursday night, Matheny had already addressed the club about what he admitted was "an ugly game." By the time the team reported to the ballpark Friday afternoon, the talk about the loss had not dissipated but the manager and players insisted the smog had.
First step, acknowledgement.
Second, work.
"I think you definitely have to address that especially the way the game went," second baseman Kolten Wong said. "He brought us together after the game and said, 'Understand this isn't us.' That game was not the way we've been playing all year. Last night just seemed like down-spiraling, and we just backed off. It's just bad on our part. It shows the fans who paid to come watch this game that it was not our best showing."
Matheny declined to go into detail about what he said to the team and when following the 11-3 loss to the Brewers. He did not lack for material. The team committed four errors. Six of the runs allowed were unearned, and another two scored when left fielder Ozuna misjudged a ball so poorly that he jumped at the wall only to have a double land near his feet. Martinez lost track of Yadier Molina's signs and let loose a pitch in mid-deliver. That allowed another run to score. Late the debacle, the Cardinals loaded the bases with no outs and did not score a run.
It was a sour sampler of all the Cardinals' struggles, stuffed in the same box score.
Matheny isn't one to advertise team meetings or describe individual discussions with players because he fells making such talks public undermine their purpose. He has said in the past that confirming a team meeting to the media or funs would make it seem to the clubhouse like it was all for show, not substance. In the hours after the loss, however, Matheny not only talked to the team, he held the standard post-ops with his coaches. He also, he said, "relived" the game before falling asleep reading a book.
It wasn't any better the second time.
"You're going to have the physical mistakes. You're going to have the mental mistakes," Matheny said Friday afternoon. "It's going to happen just because there are people involve. You're going to have games that just don't look right even on the very best teams. Just have to figure out how to keep it from happening again, and (you) put the throttle down for the next opportunity.
"Carrying it is the absolutely worst thing," he added. "So many people think that's what we're supposed to do. Can't let it happen. Fix it. Do what you can to fix it. And you move."
For many Cardinals, that meant arriving to Miller Park early and getting work on the field early and being there as Matheny pitched some batting practice to a few players, early.
It also meant establishing something in Friday's game, early.
Matt Carpenter opened Thursday's game with a home run on its first pitch, and he gave the Cardinals an early jolt Friday with a leadoff double. When that didn't manifest a run, Carpenter tried another ignition in the third inning. Leading off the inning against Junior Guerra, Carpenter walked. He took second on Bader's bunt, and that allowed Carpenter to score from second on Ozuna's hard groundball single up the middle.
Through seven innings that was the Cardinals' lone hit with a runner in scoring position. They were 1-for-8, and six of those at-bats had ended in a strikeout.
Two belonged to Flaherty.
But three happened in a pivotal sixth inning.
Guerra, who has not won a game since May 14, piloted Milwaukee into the sixth and then allowed a single to Yadier Molina and was undone by a 10-pitch walk by Dexter Fowler. The Cardinals had an inviting chance to add to their slim lead, build some kind of cushion for Flaherty as his no-no progressed. The Brewers had an excuse to go to their Hicks. A potential All-Star for his work in late relief _ no matter the inning _ lefty Josh Hader entered with two runners on, Molina in scoring position, and a one-run deficit. He buzz-sawed through the three Cardinals he faced.
Hader fell behind 2-0 to rookie Yairo Munoz before getting him swinging on a full-count, 96-mph fastball. Wong couldn't catch a 94-mph fastball, and Flaherty ended the inning by watching a 96-mph fastball for strike three.
