St. Louis snaps skid with 'Cardinals baseball'

SAN FRANCISCO -- At long last, a Cardinals squad staggered and stunned by its worst 25-game start to a season in 50 years found a way to bunch together strong starting pitching, spectacular defense and some timely hitting in the same game on Thursday.

The result was a resounding 6-0 defeat of the Giants at Oracle Park that kept the Cardinals from being swept over a four-game series by San Francisco for the first time in 36 years. More importantly, one of the best all-around victories restored the Cards’ collective faith that they have many days of better baseball ahead of them.

“That’s what Cardinals baseball is supposed to look like,” manager Oliver Marmol said after his squad snapped a three-game losing skid. “You think of some of the small details and nuances of the game … there’s a lot of positive things that came out of today. But that’s the style of baseball we need to play.”

The Cardinals hobbled into Thursday’s series finale having lost nine of their last 13 to drop eight games behind the NL Central-leading Pirates. Even more uncharacteristic of the Cards -- the 2022 winner of the Rawlings Team Gold Glove Award -- was that they committed seven errors in their previous 10 games, including four in the three games against the Giants.

That sort of sloppiness was nowhere in sight on Thursday, as left fielder Tyler O’Neill covered 91 feet, per Statcast, and made a sliding grab of a foul ball near the wall.

Miles Mikolas notched both his first quality start and his first victory of the season in his sixth outing. And in the fifth inning of a scoreless game, catcher Andrew Knizner made the kind of alert and hustling defensive play that sent a charge into the Cardinals. He scrambled after a squibber hit by Thairo Estrada, retreated to the plate and dived to tag David Villar on the forearm to keep the game scoreless.

“Miles said it best when I listened to him talk [to the media], that those are the types of plays when things aren’t going right, when it rains it pours,” said Knizner. “Today, it seemed like the ball kind of bounced our way. Their hard hits went right at our guys, and we made the weird plays. So maybe that’s our turn of luck and it will get back in our favor.”

Mikolas came into Thursday having surrendered MLB’s worst batting average (.366) to opposing hitters. He had a 10.05 ERA through his first three starts of the season, but he recently started to turn things around in his last two starts (4.09 ERA).

On Thursday, Mikolas said he benefited greatly from being able to study the Giants’ hitters from the first three games of the series. He used his sinker to strike out three of the first five left-handed hitters he faced. With the defensive assist from Knizner, Mikolas was able to keep the Giants scoreless over 6 1/3 innings, while allowing just four hits and two walks.

“I mean, I was about to field that ball and [Knizner] could have just stayed put and I would have flipped it to him,” Mikolas said of Knizner’s brazen decision to leave the plate even with a runner bearing down on him. “Catchers might be the second-best athletes on the field after pitchers, so that definitely was a great play for him to make right there.”

Said Marmol of Mikolas' best performance of the season: “That’s the guy we’re used to seeing. He was pounding the zone with literally everything and he got a lot of swing-and-miss with the slider. He did a really good job and gave us exactly what we needed.”

As it turns out, Alec Burleson gave Mikolas all the run support he needed by clobbering a chest-high pitch from Giants ace Logan Webb over the wall in right field for a solo home run. Burleson’s smash, which left the bat at 102.3 mph, broke a scoreless tie in the seventh and broke things open for a Cardinals offense that tacked on five more runs over the final three innings.

“It was great to put everything together and kind of see our potential,” said Burleson, who snared a Joc Pederson liner to end a bases-loaded threat in the fifth inning. “We knew [their potential] was to the roof, but to finally see it all come together for us was really fun.”