The St. Louis Cardinals dropped game 3 to the Pittsburgh Pirates and the skies unleashed their fury

This is gonna be a quick one, friends. It is hailing, storming, tornado-ing, and all sort of unpleasant weather things outside in the St. Louis area. Please stay safe. There are tornado warnings through St. Louis County and St. Charles county until 10pm. Stay indoors.

The St. Louis Cardinals were able to squeeze an afternoon game in against the Pittsburgh Pirates, but maybe it would have been more fortuitous if it had been rained out since the Cardinals lost in 10 innings 6 runs to 3. Pirates third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes kicked off the game with a leadoff 440 foot home run to give his team a 1 run lead. Alec Burleson tied the game in the bottom half of the inning with a double to score Brendan Donovan. Burleson came around to score on a sacrifice fly from Nolan Gorman — his third RBI in the series — to give the Cardinals a 1-run lead.

Cardinals pitcher Steven Matz walked in a run in the top of the third and the score was tied again. It would stay that way until the bottom the of seventh inning when Pirates pitcher Robert Stephenson returned the favor by walking Paul Goldschmidt to walk in a run for the Cardinals.

The game was tied yet again in the top of the eighth when Pirates second baseman Rodolfo Castro doubled to score Connor Joe. The game stayed tied until the tenth inning when Pirates put up three runs on Jordan Hicks. Andrew McCutchen hit a 2-run homer to start the scoring and Castro scored Joe again on a single just past first baseman Donovan.

And that’s how the Cardinals lost.

Some good things to end on though:

Paul Goldschmidt hit another ball over 106 mph. Goldy is in the 97th percentile in the league in average exit velocity. He has hit 19 balls over 100 mph and 11 of those over 105 mph.

Ryan Helsey gave up a run, but threw a pitch over 102 mph in this game and had 5 swing and misses.

Steven Matz led the game with 11 wiffs. 7 of those were on his sinker, which is not a pitch that is normally seen a swing and miss pitch. Matz throws his sinker a lot though — over 47% of the time — so perhaps this is volume playing a factor. If I am reading this right (which is far from a guarantee) it looks like, per Baseball Savant, that today his sinker had 3 more inches of horizontal break than his yearly average. Hold up, I need to see some video...

Okay here is Saturday’s game for the first seven pitches and then Monday’s for the last three. What do you all think?

Anyway, he also had 14 called strikes on his sinker for a total of 21 non-contact strikes altogether. He also seems to be staying out of the middle of the plate more with his sinker according to the zone charts. But this was supposed to be a quick recap — someone else will have to analyze that later.

The Cardinals will go for a series split tomorrow at 1:15 pm CT with Miles Mikolas up against Mitch Keller. Again, everyone be safe and careful with the weather!