After losing six of seven games on their last road trip, the St. Louis Cardinals are trying to regain their footing at home.
They will bid for their second straight victory over the Milwaukee Brewers on Saturday afternoon in the middle game of a three-game series in St. Louis.
The Cardinals won the opener 3-2 Friday night to improve to 9-4 at home this season. They are just 2-11 on the road.
“You try to break it down into days, right?” Cardinals infielder Brendan Donovan told FanDuel Sports Network after Friday’s victory. “(Win) one today, one tomorrow, let’s focus on tomorrow. And then, I might have a one-track mind, but I’m not sure when we go on the road until I get a message that I need to pack my suitcase.”
The Cardinals will turn to their ace, right-hander Sonny Gray (3-0, 3.41 ERA), while trying to clinch a series victory on Saturday. Gray met the quality start metric in his last two outings while allowing three runs on nine hits in 13 innings.
He struck out 10 and walked only two in those outings. Gray is 4-5 with a 3.15 ERA in 16 career starts against the Brewers.
The Cardinals made a bullpen change ahead of the series, recalling Riley O’Brien from Memphis on Friday and demoting struggling Ryan Fernandez to the Triple-A team.
“When (Fernandez) is right, it doesn’t matter who’s in the box,” Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol said. “This isn’t something where you need to see his stuff play against big league hitters to know if it plays or not. It’s just a matter of him getting it to where he needs to in order to come back and be effective.”
Meanwhile, after losing three of four games to the Giants in San Francisco, Brewers manager Pat Murphy held a team meeting to address fielding, baserunning and situational hitting issues during that series.
“As a leader, I needed to say something,” Murphy said. “It was about love and discipline. Maybe I need to give more love and we need to have more discipline. This team can’t be an elite team unless we play a little bit ‘uncommon.’ Unless we have an edge like you saw a lot of last year — not all of last year, but you saw it a lot — we can’t compete the way we want to compete unless we have that.
“It was not meant to be brow-beating, it was meant to be awareness and a talk about responsibilities. Hopefully it was productive. … When you join the Brewers, you join knowing that if we’re going to win, you’re going to have to play a certain way. We just have to get everybody to understand that.”
The Brewers were better defensively Friday, executing a pickoff play and throwing a runner out at the plate to keep the game tight.
Milwaukee will counter Gray on Saturday with right-hander Quinn Priester (1-0, 1.93 ERA), who has allowed two runs or less in each of his three outings this season. But Priester failed to pitch more than five innings in each start while walking nine batters in 14 innings.
This will be his first career outing against the Cardinals.
Milwaukee outfielder Garrett Mitchell is questionable for this game after exiting Friday night’s game with a left oblique strain.
–Field Level Media
