A one man hitting show from Buster Posey with 3 RBIs led the San Francisco Giants to a 6-4 win over the St. Louis Cardinals in game 4, taking a 3-1 lead in the NLCS and now are just one win away from making the World Series.
According to the two-year rule, it’s a done deal. The Giants got there in 2010 and won, and the same thing happened in 2012. For three innings it looked like it wasn’t going to be that kind of day for the Giants, who found themselves behind 4-1 after a disastrous start for Ryan Vogelsong, usually one of the more reliable pitchers to have in a postseason game. But Posey got hot, Shelby Miller couldn’t get his start to last much longer and the game was lost when Marco Gonzales had his awful relief attempt which lasted less than an inning.
Posey finished the game with 3 RBIs, his first three of the series. One was a sacrifice fly in the first inning to give the Giants their first run of the game, and the others came in the form of singles to put the Giants closer to winning and seal the victory eventually in the sixth. A two-time World Series champion, Posey is hitting a .333 this postseason, which is pretty similar to what the Giants were hitting as a team in the win with 11 hits.
The game started with everyone getting contact with their bats. This was the first time in postseason history where each of the first five leadoff batters (top 1st through top 3rd) all got a base hit. All the hits by the Cardinals players were doubles, which makes them the first team to hit leadoff doubles in the first, second and third innings since the San Diego Padres back in 2007. The problem for the Giants was that their hitting stopped working after the third inning.
Matt Adams began the game with an RBI double that allowed the Cardinals to take the lead, but he made two terrible throws – once to home plate and the other time to first base, which allowed the Giants to score run and keep their comeback going after falling behind by three runs. Kolten Wong had two hits for the Cardinals in that early feverish stretch, both of them extra base hits. He has now had seven extra base hits in the postseason, and he has now tied the record of most consecutive extra base hits in a postseason set by Greg Gagne in 1987.
Vogelsong lasted just three innings but Yusmeiro Petit came on to slow the bleeding and allowed just one hit while striking out four in three innings. The rest of the bullpen did just as well, including the typical strong finish from Sergio Romo and Santiago Casilla, this time Casilla picking up the save, his second of the series. The Cardinals took off Shelby Miller before the end of the 4th, and things went good for a short while until it fell apart while Gonzales was the mound.
We might find some weird ways to score runs, but we’re getting people on base first. That’s the main thing. I think any time you can put pressure on the defense, you’ve got the opportunity for good things to happen. We’re able to come up with some big two-out RBIs to get back in the game. That’s kind of fitting of how our postseason’s been. It might not be the prettiest way of scoring runs.