Wainwright’s pursuit of 200th win upended by Cardinals’ lack of timely hitting
The hope may not have officially evaporated until Andre Pallante came jogging in from the Cardinals bullpen with St. Louis trailing the Padres 1-0 before the top of the seventh, but it certainly felt like it went up and smoke somewhere around the bottom of the fourth inning.
That’s when television cameras captured Adam Wainwright sitting on the dugout bench with his hands alternately gripping the wood and supporting his head, staring into his own lap, seemingly bending all his will toward his teammates’ ability to scratch across even one run in what was then a scoreless game.
With one out and the bases loaded, both Andrew Knizner and Jordan Walker were mowed down swinging by Blake Snell, and with them, the air came nearly all the way out of the balloon supporting Wainwright’s potential 199th career victory.
“I think probably what you saw was me praying for us to get a hit there with the bases loaded,” Wainwright said with a smile before putting on an exaggerated tone. “‘Come on baby, please, please,’ something like that might’ve been what you saw.”
Instead, Wainwright surrendered an RBI single to dear friend and long-time former teammate Matt Carpenter in the top of the sixth inning that would represent his only run allowed on the evening, sufficient to tag him with his 10th loss.
The Cardinals, plumbing new depths, enter play Tuesday having lost four straight games and having scored only four runs in those games. They’ve won just two of their last 10 and reached 20 games below .500 for the first time since the last week of September 1995. Wainwright, who turns 42 on Wednesday, had been a teenager for just less than a month.
Now he has perhaps six starts left in a storybook career that’s ending on an almost unfathomably dreary note. Entering the season just five wins short of 200, Wainwright instead talked about the challenge of perhaps 210 or 215, pushing his way further up the franchise leaderboard and giving devoted Cardinal fans one more summer in the sun to enjoy a string of improbable victories.
He has not recorded a win since June 17, a stretch covering 10 starts over which he is 0-9. Other than a 10-6 win in Arizona on July 24 in which he exited in line to be the victor of record only to see the bullpen temporarily surrender a lead, he has had to spend two and a half months standing up, night after night, explaining yet again the various things that went wrong in a loss.
It doesn’t feel fair, but very little about baseball often does.
“Each game is different,” Wainwright said when asked about his approach to Monday’s start. “Each plan is different, execution is different, stuff is different. So, you go with what you’ve got.”
After a nightmarish start in Kansas City earlier this month, the question of whether Wainwright would be able to finish the season based on his performance was a topic of conversation not only among the public but also inside the team’s offices. The decision makers were blunt – they would trust Wainwright to figure it out, and if he didn’t, they would be put in a difficult position with only one clear way forward.
In three starts since, he’s largely rallied. Two of the three have been quality starts, and Monday’s single run allowed represents the fewest he’s given up in any start this season. Even the bad start sandwiched in the middle, in Pittsburgh, looked fairly stable through the game’s first four innings.
He may not be the version of himself that he envisioned when the season started, but for the last three weeks, he hasn’t been a liability. The string of losses speak for themselves, but he is, at a minimum, posting as a competitor and going out on his shield.
The starts, frankly, have not been embarrassing, as he emotionally acknowledged his appearance in Kansas City had been.
“My mindset was wrong for a few weeks there,” he said. “I just wasn’t competing like I could. I know I don’t have the best stuff that I’ve ever had right now, but I sure can compete with it.
“If anybody’s watching at home, you youngsters out there, you don’t have to throw a million [miles per hour] to be a good pitcher. You can still be a good pitcher with lesser stuff, and that’s what I’m doing now.”
Having now climbed back to being competitive, Wainwright has a month remaining in his career to find two more victories. The difference between winning 198 and 200 games is of course negligible, but it matters to Wainwright, and it matters to his teammates. His legacy in St. Louis is cemented; his legacy in the game at large seems likely to be tied to his broadcasting future.
The next month is not the end of Adam Wainwright’s baseball story, but it wraps up the most substantial chapter. As time passes and reflection sets in, his last three starts at least provide hope that the end of that chapter won’t be too painful to re-read.
