ST. LOUIS -- In between his Sept. 15 start against the Brewers and Friday's outing, Jack Flaherty enlisted the help of Adam Wainwright to scour film and see if Flaherty was tipping his pitches in that last meeting, when the Cardinals' right-hander allowed a career-high nine runs.

Wainwright said Flaherty’s out-of-sync delivery might have been the giveaway, allowing Milwaukee hitters to lay off Flaherty’s slider and wait for a fastball over the plate.

Flaherty had better command and conviction of his pitches -- especially his curveball -- on Friday, building on his Sunday start in which he struck out 11 Pirates in six innings, but the Brewers still got to him with a couple of well-timed hits in the Cardinals’ 3-0 loss in the first game of a seven-inning doubleheader at Busch Stadium.

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The first two runs Flaherty allowed came on a pair of singles and a soft grounder to third hit too slowly for the Cards to make a play at home plate. Then, on an 0-2 pitch to Christian Yelich in the third inning, Flaherty threw wildly and tumbled down on the mound, seemingly in pain and clutching his left ankle. Manager Mike Shildt and an athletic trainer rushed out, but Flaherty got up under his own power and stayed in the game. Flaherty said he slipped and landed on the side of his foot, which hurt but not enough that he needed to come out.

“My landing’s been weird this year, mechanically,” Flaherty said. “It just has never looked right. I haven’t been landing properly. My cleat kind of slipped -- I didn’t know what happened for a second, I just went down. It hurt. After a few seconds, it felt all right.”

After Flaherty got back up, Yelich crushed a slider a projected 425 feet out to straightaway center field. Flaherty settled down after that blast, and after walking the first two batters in the fifth, he escaped the frame with a double play and a strikeout.

“I felt good, it was just a matter of executing,” Flaherty said. “Sometimes you just get outpitched. That’s kind of what went on.”

Flaherty has yet to solve the Brewers completely in his young career, although Friday’s loss was not backed up at all by the St. Louis offense, which managed just five hits and did not have a runner reach second base until Paul Goldschmidt’s leadoff double in the seventh inning.

After John Gant left in the sixth inning with right groin tightness -- an injury that led the Cards to place him on the 10-day injured list between games -- the Cardinals' bullpen kept the Brewers in check, but the offense couldn’t string anything together.

Flaherty is 2-6 with a 5.72 ERA in 12 career starts against Milwaukee. He's allowed 14 home runs against the Crew, the most he’s allowed against any team. Of the 10 earned runs Flaherty allowed in his historic second half last season, half of them came from the Brewers over two starts.

“Baseball is so weird like that,” Wainwright said before Friday’s game, detailing some of the teams that have given him trouble at times over his career. “Some of it’s mental and some of it is just the way it works out. [Flaherty] is probably going to go on a four- or five-year run where the Brewers have absolutely no chance to get a hit off of him. And then he might have one or two years where they got his number. 

“Baseball is a really funny game like that. There’s usually no rhyme or reason why it happens. It only takes one start to ignite a couple of years' run that you can build off of. I wouldn’t worry about it too much, because I trust Jack Flaherty’s stuff and [him] as a competitor against just about anybody in the world at anytime.”

With the final weekend of the regular season here and the playoff race as tight as ever, the Cards’ loss in Game 1 on Friday was not ideal. They moved back to three games behind the first-place Cubs in the National League Central and back into a tie with the Reds for second place. The Cubs can clinch the division with a win over the White Sox on Friday and another Cardinals loss in the nightcap. If the Cardinals were to end the season in a tie with the Reds for second place -- which guarantees a postseason spot -- St. Louis own the tiebreaker, thanks to a 6-4 record against Cincinnati this season.