Phillies take 2-1 advantage on Cardinals
ST. LOUIS – Charlie Manuel guessed right, twice.
Tony La Russa, well, he wound up getting second-guessed. And on his 67th birthday.
Pinch-hitter Ben Francisco and closer Ryan Madson made their manager’s moves look smart, and the Philadelphia Phillies held off the St. Louis Cardinals 3-2 Tuesday for a 2-1 lead in their N.L. playoff series.
“To steal a game here, if worse comes to worst, we come back home and we’ve got another game with Doc (Halladay) on the mound,” Phillies slugger Ryan Howard said. “We put ourselves in a great situation.”
Francisco batted for Cole Hamels and broke open a scoreless game with a two-out, three-run homer off Jaime Garcia in the seventh inning. The Cardinals stuck with Garcia instead of opting for a pinch-hitter with two on and two outs in the sixth. Garcia struck out, then lost his pitching touch.
“Well, it didn’t work, so that’s bad managing,” La Russa said. “I’m watching him pitch and was really pleased. I thought he was the guy to continue pitching and I knew the matchups were in our favor. … It didn’t work.”
Madson earned his first multi-inning save of the year. He got Allen Craig to ground sharply into a double play with the bases loaded to escape in the eighth, then worked around Yadier Molina’s RBI single in the ninth.
“I figured the game was on the line, and we had to stop them,” Manuel said.
The Phillies, favored to win it all after a franchise-record 102-win season, can finish off the wild-card Cardinals in Game 4 today, with Roy Oswalt opposing Edwin Jackson.
The Cardinals are all too familiar with the win-or-else proposition. They won the N.L. wild card on the final day of the season, erasing a 101/2-game deficit on Aug. 25 to overtake the Braves.
“Listen, we flip the page and come back ready to play with the same energy we’ve been having the last six weeks,” said Albert Pujols, who had four hits. “We’ve been in this situation before.”
Francisco’s shot on a 1-0 fastball from Garcia was his second hit in 19 postseason at-bats. He hit six homers this season, the last on May 25 against the Reds.
Francisco had been preparing for that moment against a lefty, and Manuel said after the game that he might have stuck with Francisco even if the Cardinals had changed pitchers.
“I didn’t know it was a homer, I knew I hit it good,” Francisco said. “I saw it bounce over the fence and just pure excitement, pure joy.”
Hamels struck out eight in six scoreless innings and reversed a disturbing trend after allowing nine homers in September, with a pair of doubles by Pujols the only extra-base hits. He’s a franchise-best 7-4 in the postseason with a 3.09 ERA.
“You don’t want to make mistakes, you don’t want to leave the ball over the plate,” Hamels said. “Every pitch mattered, every inning mattered. I knew I couldn’t let it get out of hand.”