St. Louis Cardinals starter Kyle McClellan allowed only one run over six innings and drove in two runs and Lance Berkman homered twice to lead the Cardinals to a 8-2 victory over the Arizona Diamondbacks in the first of a three game series.
Arizona starter Barry Enright also pitched six innings and was really pretty effective outside the fourth inning, when he could not get the final out of the inning and allowed three runs, giving St. Louis a 4-0 that Arizona was not able to overcome.
Reliever Sam Demel took over in the seventh inning and gave up the first of the two homeruns to Berkman.
Arizona rallied in the bottom of the seventh but was only able to muster one run in the inning, and that was it offensively. But after bringing the deficit to three runs, Juan Gutierrez came in after Joe Patterson and allowed two homers and three runs.
The story of the game was timely offense. The D'backs were 1-9 with runners in scoring position and left nine runners on base. The Cardinals scored seven of their eight runs with two out.
Tuesday night the two teams face off again at 6:40 PM. Chris Carpenter will start for St. Louis and Arizona will counter with Armando Galarraga.
Game notes:
Willie Bloomquist with his one hit has hit safely in each of the eight games he has played.
Juan Gutierrez has now given up five earned runs in his last 1 1/3 innings, looking a lot like how he looked at the start of last season.
Coming to Monday's game, the current Diamondbacks roster was batting .333 against McClellan in 27 at-bats. That success did not continue.
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