The Cardinals beat the Rockies 7-4 on Sunday, and they did it the way good August teams do it: they waited, they took the late innings, and they left town with the series. JJ Wetherholt's tiebreaking double was the swing that mattered. Alec Burleson's home run was the one that got the loudest.

The whole afternoon turned on a three-run eighth. Tied ballgame, everything still in front of both dugouts, and then St. Louis strung together the one big inning that Colorado could not answer. That is the entire story of the day in one paragraph, and it is also the entire story of a lot of Sundays in this sport.

How the Cardinals beat the Rockies and took the series

What I liked here was the shape of it. A 7-4 final with a three-run eighth means St. Louis did not get out to a comfortable lead and coast. They sat in a tie game deep, which is the exact spot where young teams tighten up and veteran teams shrug. The Cardinals shrugged.

And it was the kid who did the shrugging. Wetherholt, the West Virginia infielder St. Louis took in the first round of the 2024 draft, is the piece of this rebuild everyone in that clubhouse has been waiting on, and a go-ahead double in a tie game in the eighth is not a stat line, it is an audition passed. Burleson has been the reliable bat in that lineup for a while now, and he supplied the thump. But the swing that decided it came off the bat of the guy with the least service time in the story.

from the almanac: st. louis has eleven world series titles, second only to the yankees, and nearly every one of those runs started with some kid nobody outside missouri could pronounce showing up in august and immediately looking like he belonged. that is the franchise's actual tradition. not the birds on the bat. the pipeline.

What it means for the Rockies

Colorado scored four and lost, which is its own kind of afternoon. The Rockies got enough offense to win a lot of ballgames, and they still handed over the series because the eighth inning got away. That has been the recurring theme of their season in the broadest sense: the bats show up in bursts, the late innings decide otherwise.

I am not going to pile on. Every organization has years like this, and the ones that get out of them do it by finding their own version of the guy who hit the double. Colorado's job between now and October is identifying which of their young players can be that.

What comes next for St. Louis

The Phillies come into St. Louis on Monday night, first pitch 7:46 ET. That is a real step up in weight class from what the Cardinals just handled, and Philadelphia arrives off its own Sunday theatrics, a 7-6 win in twelve innings over Toronto with Kyle Schwarber putting two in the seats to avoid a sweep. Two teams that both just proved they can win the game that goes long.

What I am watching is whether Wetherholt keeps hitting in leverage spots against a rotation that will attack him differently than Colorado did. The book on a young hitter gets written fast in this league, and the next few weeks are when he finds out what page he is on. Burleson's power stretch is the other one. If those two bats are the middle of this order in September, the rest of the summer looks a whole lot more interesting in St. Louis than it did in June.

A three-run eighth and a series in the pocket. That will do for a Sunday.