In what was a very windy day in San Francisco, the Cardinals and the Giants faced off in game 3 of the NLCS. The pitching match-up featured a couple of seasoned vets in Tim Hudson and John Lackey.
The Giants struck quickly in the bottom of the first inning as they put a nice crooked number on the board after scoring 4 runs. The big blast in the inning was a bases clearing double by Travis Ishikawa which the wind played some tricks with and ended up hitting the right center field fence.
The Cardinals were bound to respond though, and they did in the top of the 4th inning when game 2 hero Kolten Wong hit a two run triple that hit high of the fence in right center field, cutting San Francisco’s lead in half to 4-2. The similarity of Wong’s hit compared with Ishikawa’s is quite impressive, the wind that was blowing straight out was making the outfielders look a little foolish.
The Giants were shutdown the rest of the way by Lackey and company as they couldn’t tack on any more runs to make things tougher on the Cardinals. After giving up 4 runs in the first inning, Lackey did a fantastic job to settle in and give his team a chance to make up the deficit. Lackey gave the red birds 6 innings of 4 run baseball.
With a score of 4-3, the Cardinals came back from four runs down to tie the game in the top of the 7th inning. Randal Grichuk came up big when he crushed a ball down the left field line that just stayed fair and hit the foul pole to tie the game at 4-4.
This game would eventually go into extra innings, and it was in the bottom of the 10th when things went wrong for St. Louis. Randy Choate came in to pitch, he walked the leadoff man in that inning, Brandon Crawford. Then came what was a key moment in the inning, Juan Perez came up to the plate looking to put down a sacrifice bunt to move Crawford into scoring position. After failing in his first two attempts, he fell way behind in the count (0-2).
The bunt sign was removed and Perez was able to swing away and come up with a two strike hit to left field.
Finally, with runners on first and second, Gregor Blanco stepped to the plate also looking to sacrifice himself and move the runners over, but the result of his bunt did much more than that. Choate picked up the bunted baseball and threw wide of first base throwing it into right field. This allowed Brandon Crawford to easily score and the Giants walked off in the bottom of the 10th to take a 2-1 lead in the NLCS best of 7 series.
Game 4 is slated to start tomorrow, October 15 at 8 PM ET.
Pitching matchup: STL Shelby Miller vs SF Ryan Vogelsong
Photo Credit: Ed Szczepanski, USA TODAY Sports