Cards rally past Philly's Lee, win Game 2

PHILADELPHIA -- If any team is capable of a comeback, it is the Cardinals, who rallied from a 10½-game deficit in a month's time to claim a wild-card berth on the season's final day.

Make up four runs? Against Cliff Lee? No problem.

Showing the resiliency that got them to the playoffs, the Cardinals overcame an early exit by their ace, Chris Carpenter, and Albert Pujols provided the tiebreaking RBI single off Lee in the seventh inning to deliver a 5-4 victory over the Phillies Sunday night in NLDS Game 2.

"We keep things real simple," Cardinals manager Tony La Russa said. "We just are going to play nine come hell or high water. If you watch us play a lot, we're not perfect, but we try perfect."

Carpenter, pitching on three days' rest, left after three innings with St. Louis in a 4-0 hole. But the Cardinals chipped away at Lee, scoring three runs in the fourth, tying it in the sixth and then getting the game-winner from Pujols to even the series at 1-1, with Game 3 tomorrow at Busch Stadium.

Lee was 3-0 with a 1.11 ERA in four previous NLDS starts, but he couldn't hold a 4-0 lead in Game 2 as the Cardinals peppered him for 12 hits and five runs in six-plus innings. It was his worst postseason start since Game 1 of the 2010 World Series, when the Giants smacked around Lee -- then with Texas -- for eight hits and seven runs in 42/3 innings.

"They got 12 hits. Any time you do that, you're hitting good pitches, you're hitting bad pitches," Lee said. "Any time I get a four-run lead, I think I should win the game. I didn't do that."

The Cardinals used six pitchers in relief of Carpenter -- four to get through the eighth inning alone, in typical La Russa style. It may have been tedious to watch, but La Russa got the job done. His bullpen combined for six scoreless innings and allowed only one hit, a two-out single in the seventh by Jimmy Rollins, who was subsequently picked off.

"This is a players' game," La Russa said. "The guys are put in tough situations because Carp left early. Any one of those guys does not do the job and we're not going to win the game. There were heroes all the way through the bullpen."

In the seventh, Allen Craig led off with a 400-foot fly ball toward the triangle in left-centerfield that Shane Victorino somehow got his glove on before it skipped off for a triple. Next up was Pujols, who clearly is favoring a sore left ankle, and he lined the tiebreaking single over the head of Rollins.

Once the Phillies built Lee a 4-0 lead after two innings, the expectation was that he would go into shutdown mode, just as Roy Halladay did in Game 1, when he retired his final 21 batters. But the Cardinals didn't plan on rolling over so easily.

Lee struck out four through three scoreless innings, but in the fourth, Ryan Theriot drove in a run with the first of his two doubles off Lee and John Jay and Rafael Furcal added RBI singles. In the sixth inning, back-to-back doubles by Theriot and Jay -- the No. 7 and 8 hitters -- tied the score.

"We're not going to quit, and that's something the team has done all year," Jay said. "We played hard and fought hard."

La Russa made the fateful decision to start Carpenter on three days' rest -- for the first time in his career -- and that move turned out to have negative consequences.

Despite leading the National League with 2371/3 innings during the regular season and averaging nearly seven per start, Carpenter stuck around for only three innings in his shortest outing since April 12, when he went four innings in a loss to the Diamondbacks.

La Russa blamed plate umpire Jerry Meals during an in-game TBS interview, saying there were "two different strike zones" for Carpenter and Lee. La Russa also said he figured he'd get in trouble for saying so.

"It's not a great comment to make, but I was upset," La Russa said after the game. "I've never had a problem with Jerry before. The only thing I had a problem with -- whatever the strike zone is, it makes no difference to us. We'll adjust to it. That was my only point -- he had to figure out what the strike zone was."