Nationals Defeat Cardinals in 2nd Game of NLCS

The National League Championship Series is underway. The St. Louis Cardinals are playing the Washington Nationals. The Cardinals have home field advantage because they won their division and the Nationals were a wild card team. The series started Friday night with the Nationals winning the first game by a score of 2-0 behind Anibal Sanchez at Busch Stadium. The Nationals continued their winning ways again on Saturday afternoon by defeating St. Louis 6-1 behind the brilliant pitching of ace Max Scherzer. Adam Wainwright pitched a very good game as well. He only allowed three earned runs over seven innings. However, it was not good enough. Scherzer had 11 strikeouts and only allowed a single hit and no runs over seven innings. It was his best playoff performance.

The series will now shift to Washington for the next two games. If a fifth game is necessary, it will also take place in Washington. The Nationals stunned the Los Angeles Dodgers in the divisional round of the playoffs. They won the fifth and deciding game in 10 innings after hitting two consecutive home runs off Clayton Kershaw. It was a rally that will not soon be forgotten. The Nationals have had many playoff failures in their short history. This was the first time they had ever won an elimination game.

The Cardinals believe that they can still win the series. Needless to say, being down 2-0 in a best-of-seven series is not a good situation to be in at all. However, there are examples of teams that have rallied from that sort of deficit in the playoffs before. The Cardinals are taking it one game at a time. They know that they have a hard task ahead of them. They will need to win four out of the next five games to advance. The Nationals are riding a wave of momentum. They have been playing great baseball for the past four months. They feel they have the talent to put the Cardinals away before it goes back to St. Louis for game six.

This is shaping up to be a series that is dominated by pitching. The Cardinal hitters have been shut down in the first two games. They have only managed to collect four hits and one run during the first two games. It remains to be seen if they will be able to do better during the rest of the series.