Art Reinhart Falls Short In Effort Against Robins.

ST. LOUIS, May 9 — The Cardinals let another one slip through their hands yesterday, Brooklyn taking a 5 to 3 decision at Sportsman’s Park and making it two straight over Mothers Day weekend.

This one a tighter, meaner affair that turned on missed chances as much as anything the Robins did right.

Where the day before had been a rout, this one was a grind from the start.

The figures read closer — five runs on Brooklyn’s side, three for St. Louis — but the feeling of the game told a sharper story. The Cardinals had their chances and did not take them. Brooklyn had fewer and made them count.

The Robins went to work early enough to set the tone, picking up their first runs before the Cardinals could settle into the afternoon. It was not a flood, but it was enough to put St. Louis on its heels and force them to play uphill again.

The Cardinals answered in kind, and for a stretch the thing looked like a proper ballgame. They put men on, pushed runs across, and kept the crowd alive. For the first time in two days, there was something like a fight in it.

But the difference lay in the middle innings.

Brooklyn struck there with the sort of work that wins games in this league — not loud, not reckless, but clean and placed. A base hit when it mattered, a runner moved when he needed to be, and another hit to bring him home. That was the shape of it. No wasted motion.

St. Louis, on the other hand, could not gather its blows.

They managed six hits across the afternoon, enough to do damage if they had come together. They did not. A single here, an out there, a man stranded. The pattern repeated itself inning after inning until the chances ran thin.

Brooklyn’s pitching did not overpower so much as outlast.

After the trouble of the previous day, the Robins worked more carefully, keeping the ball down and forcing the Cardinals to earn everything. There were no free innings. Every out came with a man watching from the bases or waiting to move, and still St. Louis could not land the one swing that changes a game.

Zack Wheat again moved through the Brooklyn order with his usual calm, helping keep the attack steady and without panic. Robinson’s club does not beat itself, and it did not do so here.

The Cardinals’ pitching was not poor, but it was not enough.

They gave up five runs, and in a contest like this that is the whole story. There was no inning that got entirely away, but there were too many small breaks that went Brooklyn’s way and none that went St. Louis’.

By the late innings the Cardinals were chasing again.

The crowd leaned with them, hoping for one clean blow to even it, but the same trouble remained — no string to the hits, no single inning where the work came together. The Robins guarded their lead and did not give it back.

The final outs came without a turn.

Two straight defeats now sit on the Cardinals, and this one will sit harder than the last. The rout could be written off as a bad afternoon. This one cannot. This was a winnable game that was not won.

That is the sort that follows a club.

St. Louis now finds itself working from behind in both the series and the early season mark, and with Brooklyn showing both steady pitching and cleaner hitting, the path does not get easier.

If the Cardinals are to turn this stand, it will not come from waiting.

They will have to take it.

— Mike Allen, Bird Chatter Post