Two swings did most of the work. Rafael Flores Jr. hit a three-run home run, Brandon Lowe added a solo shot, and the Pittsburgh Pirates beat the St. Louis Cardinals 6-2 on Saturday in a game that turned on power rather than patience. Four of Pittsburgh's six runs came off the bat in two at-bats. That is the whole Pirates vs Cardinals story in one sentence, and it is the kind of afternoon that quietly tells you something about where each of these clubs is in late August.
What happened in Pirates vs Cardinals on Saturday
Flores Jr.'s three-run shot was the swing that reordered the game. I don't have his full line in front of me yet, but you don't need the rest of the box score to understand what a three-run homer does to an afternoon: it turns a manageable inning into a deficit, and it turns a starter's game plan into a bullpen phone call.
Lowe's solo homer did the other kind of damage, the demoralizing kind. A team claws back a run, and then a veteran left-handed bat gives it right back with one swing and a slow trot. Lowe made his name in Tampa Bay doing exactly this, punishing mistakes in the middle of the plate and doing it in games that mattered. That skill does not expire when the uniform changes.
The Cardinals scored twice. Against a lead built on two big flies, twice was never going to be enough.
Why this one matters more for St. Louis than the score suggests
Late August is the month where baseball stops being a season and starts being an inventory. Every club in the sport is doing the same arithmetic right now, and it is not complicated: how many games are left, how many of them are against teams playing for something, and how many arms are still healthy enough to be trusted in the seventh inning.
For St. Louis, losing at home to a division rival in that stretch is the kind of afternoon that shows up later, not immediately. For Pittsburgh, this is the version of the Pirates that has always been the most fun to watch and the most annoying to face: young power, a veteran or two who has been to the deep end of October, and absolutely nothing to lose in a rivalry that predates almost everything else in the National League.
checked the almanac: the pirates and cardinals have been kicking each other around since the 1890s, and pittsburgh's last world series title came in 1979, the "we are family" club. long time between parades. games like saturday are how a franchise starts convincing people the wait has an end.
What comes next for the Pirates and Cardinals
They close the set Sunday afternoon in St. Louis, first pitch at 2:16 PM ET. The Cardinals will want the series split more than the Pirates will want the sweep, which is exactly the sort of imbalance that makes a getaway-day game interesting instead of routine.
What I want to see: whether Flores Jr. gets pitched differently. That is the real test for a young hitter after a game like this. The scouting report travels overnight in this sport, and the second look is always harder than the first. Sunday tells you whether Saturday was a hot swing or a hitter.
The rest of the league did not exactly sit still around them, either. Pete Crow-Armstrong hit three home runs in one game at Wrigley in a 17-5 Cubs win over Cincinnati, which is the sort of afternoon that lives in a career highlight reel forever. Andrew Benintendi had all three of Chicago's hits in a 3-2 White Sox win over Minnesota, and one of them was a sixth-inning homer that decided it. Three hits, one man, one win. Baseball still finds new ways to be strange in the last week of August.
But the ball I'm following is the one Flores Jr. hit. Sunday afternoon, back in St. Louis, we find out what the league does about it.