With top 2 teams out, stage set for battle of underdogs
With the top teams out of the mix, it’s on to a most unlikely matchup in the NL Championship Series.
The St. Louis Cardinals are back in the NLCS for the first time since 2014 after a stunner of an inning in Atlanta. They’ll face the Washington Nationals, who dispatched their playoff demons with an upset of the 106win Dodgers.
“We know we can beat anyone at this point,” St. Louis second baseman Kolten Wong said.
The bestofseven series begins Friday night at Busch Stadium. This was the first time since 2015 that both of a league’s top seeds were eliminated in the division series.
St. Louis was within four outs of elimination against the Braves in Game 4, but bounced back for a 10thinning victory.
The deciding game in Atlanta was over not long after it started. The Cardinals became the first team in baseball history to score 10 runs in the opening inning of a postseason game and went on to a 131 victory.
“It felt like we blinked and the next thing you know, it’s 100,” third baseman Matt Carpenter said.
Washington’s run to the NLCS has been truly improbable, especially for a franchise that had won only one playoff series, in 1981 during its previous incarnation as the Montreal Expos. In four postseason appearances since moving to the nation’s capital in 2005, the Nats came up short every time — usually in excruciating fashion.
Just making the playoffs didn’t seem likely after Washington lost star slugger Bryce Harper in free agency and then got off to a 1931 start.
But the Nationals went 7438 the rest of the way to claim a playoff spot, rallied from three runs down to beat Milwaukee 43 in the wildcard game, and then pulled off another escape job against the mighty Dodgers in the NLDS.
After again falling behind 30, Anthony Rendon and Juan Soto tied it with backtoback homers off Clayton Kershaw. The Nationals won it in the 10th on Howie Kendrick’s grand slam, becoming the first team to rally from threerun deficits in a pair of deciding games during the same postseason.
The year of the comeback, indeed.
“Oh, man, keep fighting,” Rendon said. “We just wanted to keep believing in ourselves and not worry about what people outside of our locker room were saying, that maybe we might not make it or maybe we need to trade everybody away. We kept on believing in ourselves and just kept on playing ball.”
Some things to watch for in the NLCS:
The Cardinals got huge production out of their third and fourth hitters in the victory over the Braves.
Paul Goldschmidt and Marcell Ozuna both batted .429 (9 of 21) in the series, each hitting a pair of homers and driving in a total of seven runs.
Washington has its own big bopper, MVP candidate Rendon. The third baseman put up huge numbers during the regular season, batting .319 with 34 home runs and 126 RBIs. He kept up his torrid pace in the NLDS by hitting .412 (7 of 17) with one homer and five RBIs.
Most teams are content to have one ace. The Nationals have three.
Stephen Strasburg (186, 3.22), Patrick Corbin (147, 3.25) and Max Scherzer (117, 2.92) give Washington a formidable trio for a possible sevengame series.
So far in the postseason, Washington’s regular relievers have allowed eight runs and 15 hits in 13 innings, an ERA of 5.54 that is pretty much right in line with their struggles over 162 games.
Washington is trying to become only the third wildcard team to reach the World Series since MLB went to a 10team playoff format in 2012.
In 2014, San Francisco and Kansas City both made it through after starting the postseason with victories in the wildcard game. The Giants beat the Royals for the title in a sevengame thriller.