BOSTON — Mike Matheny was behind the plate at Fenway Park in the bottom of the first inning of the opening game of the 2004 World Series. By the time he returned to the St. Louis Cardinals' dugout, Boston had a 4-0 lead.
That series ended as the most emphatic sweep possible: the Red Sox never trailed in their four-game triumph. Still, Matheny took exception on Tuesday to the idea that the games were not competitive.
"I don't remember them not being competitive," Matheny said.
Matheny, now the Cardinals' manager, probably heard the term "noncompetitive" as a synonym for lack of effort. In any case, on Wednesday — nine years to the day later — in another Game 1 between the Cardinals and the Red Sox, his team somehow came through even worse.
In 2004, the Cardinals at least tied the game before losing on Mark Bellhorn's homer off the Pesky Pole in the eighth. This time, they fell behind by five runs in the second inning — making two errors and two more misplays — and never recovered in an 8-1 loss. Their star right fielder, Carlos Beltran, was at a hospital by the middle innings with a rib contusion.
"We had a wake-up call," Matheny said after the game. "That is not the kind of team that we've been all season. And they're frustrated. I'm sure embarrassed, to a point. We get an opportunity to show the kind of baseball we played all season long, and it didn't look anything like what we saw tonight."
Beltran hurt himself while robbing David Ortiz of a grand slam in the second inning, and he was whisked away for X-rays and a CT scan, leaving behind his first World Series in a dazzling 16-year career. Matheny said that the tests came back negative and that Beltran was day to day.
But even before Beltran left Fenway, there were ominous signs for the Cardinals. Their ace, the 6-foot-7 Adam Wainwright, bumped his head on the ceiling of the cramped visitors' dugout before the first inning. He said he forgot about the bump within seconds and did not blame it — or his defense — for the loss.
"I pitched terrible," said Wainwright, who gave up five runs (three earned) in five innings. "My delivery stunk, and I didn't make any adjustments. When your delivery stinks and you don't make adjustments, you're going to be in big trouble."
Wainwright's fastball was sailing. His cutter, he said, was spinning like a cement mixer. Even his signature curveball abandoned him at times. He said he could count on one hand the number of times he had felt so out of sync.
"I was making the wrong adjustments," Wainwright said. "I thought I was in one place, and I was in the other. I had no body awareness tonight, which is very uncharacteristic. Usually I have very good control of my body, and if I'm not, I can feel it really quick, and tonight I had sort of a disconnect between where I thought I was and where I actually was."
Where he was was in trouble, right away, after he walked Jacoby Ellsbury on seven pitches. By the time Mike Napoli cleared the bases with a three-run double, Wainwright had thrown 20 pitches to get one out.
This is the strategy of the Red Sox, who saw more pitches than any other team in the regular season. It worked to devastating effect in the American League Championship Series against the Detroit Tigers, helping the Red Sox win both games started by Max Scherzer, the likely A.L. Cy Young Award winner. They ran up Scherzer's pitch count, drove him from the games and flattened the Tigers' weak bullpen.
Wainwright departed after 95 pitches, and Matheny held out the possibility of using him on short rest in Game 4 on Sunday. The Cardinals cannot help but field better than they did for him on Wednesday.
Shortstop Pete Kozma starts strictly for his defense; he may be the worst-hitting everyday position player in the majors. Yet when Wainwright induced a ground ball from Ortiz that could have ended the first inning without a run, Kozma missed the flip from second baseman Matt Carpenter.
The umpire Dana DeMuth initially called Dustin Pedroia out at second, but he reversed the call after conferring with the rest of the crew. Kozma had no explanation for his mistake.
"He had a good feed; I just missed it," Kozma said. "I looked at it on tape. I had Pedroia by enough, and I didn't take time to Ortiz."
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