ST. LOUIS — When asked this week about what he hopes young talent Jordan Walker gets from spending the final month of the season back in the majors and back as an everyday player, Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol had a succinct, one-word answer.

“Confidence.”

If Walker’s celebratory flex at second base was any indication, it’s working.

After an early four-run lead slipped away from them, the Cardinals emphatically pounced on the Pittsburgh Pirates bullpen for six runs, and Walker’s bases-clearing double provided the exclamation point. A day after his home run was the difference in the game, Walker had the pile-on hit that shoved the Cardinals to a 10-5 victory against the Pirates at Busch Stadium. The win continued the 77-75 Cardinals’ attempt to break the gravitational pull of .500 even as it continued to slingshot Walker into a September to remember.

With the bases loaded and the Cardinals only just taking back the lead, Walker hammered a ball down the third-base line that scored three teammates. A month that began with a five-hit game at Yankee Stadium has become one with 12 RBIs in 15 games and seven extra-base hits.

The misplaced lead in the sixth cost Sonny Gray a win in his final home win of the regular season. Michael McGreevy, a few hours after his promotion, entered to snag the win with three scoreless innings of relief. In two major league appearances, McGreevy has two wins — twice as many wins as he’s allowed runs.

The Pirates called up former Cardinal Jake Woodford to make Wednesday's start, and while he held steady for several innings, he remained winless in the majors since the Cardinals visited London.

Nolan Arenado reached base five times and was in the midst of the Cardinals’ taking their first lead, pulling away for a larger lead, and then reclaiming it in the decisive seventh.

Six-run flood dunks Bucs

What started the rally was Masyn Winn’s leadoff homer in the seventh inning that tied the game. But what kept it going was an error and a couple walks that contributed to a complete meltdown by the Pirates’ bullpen. The trouble began with former lockdown closer David Bednar when a misplay behind him was followed by a walk from him.

Through the middle of the inning, the Cardinals had seven consecutive runners reach base. Six of them did without the help of an error.

Before Walker cleared the bases, the Cardinals took the lead with Ivan Herrera’s infield single and added to it with Lars Nootbaar’s single up the middle. The Cardinals slipped past the Pirates on Tuesday despite going 1 for 12 with runners in scoring position. Through the rally in that one inning Wednesday, the Cardinals were 3 for 3 with runners in scoring position and bookended those hits with two walks.

Sonny sure seems comfy at home

While everything from the standings to the consistency of his starts has not gone as hoped in Gray’s first year, he has found a welcome home at Busch Stadium.

Few pitchers have been as good at Busch or at their home ballparks as Gray had been through his first 15 starts as a Cardinal at their ballpark. In a total of 93 2/3 innings at Busch, he’s struck out 111 batters. Going into Wednesday’s game, he had 103 strikeouts at Busch against only 85 baserunners allowed. He sported a 9-5 record to go with a 2.56 home ERA. He saved one of his few clunkers for his final home start.

Though most of the damage was done after he left.

For only the second time this season, Gray allowed four or more runs in a home start. Two of the four scored after he was in the dugout having allowed nine hits in 5 2/3 innings and leaving two runners behind for the bullpen.

Gray joins Cardinals’ 200K club

Before an inning could slip through the rocky defense by Walker in right field and past him, Gray got ahold of it by joining one of the most exclusive clubs in Cardinals history.

The Pirates already scored two runs, hacked the Cardinals’ lead in half, and had the potential tying run on base with one out when Gray did what he does better than any other starter in the rotation.

He struck Bucs out.

Gray finished the inning and squelched the Pirates’ threat with back-to-back swinging strikeouts. The first of those two strikeouts that came from rookie Billy Cook was the 200th of his season. His 200-K season is the 20th in Cardinals history, and he’s the ninth pitcher to surpass 200 strikeouts in a single season. The previous Cardinal to reach 200 was Jack Flaherty in 2019. The only Cardinal with multiple 200-strikeout seasons since 1990 is Adam Wainwright, who did it three times.

Hall of Famer Bob Gibson has nine of the Cardinals’ 20 200-K seasons, and that includes the top five single-season totals in club history.

Gray and Flaherty are the only Cardinals on the list to eclipse 200 strikeouts and not also pitch more than 200 innings in that season.

Flaherty came 11 outs shy of 200 innings in 2019.

Gray has yet to throw his 170th inning of the season, and with one start at Coors Field remaining in his regular season, it’s unlikely he’ll get the 175 innings. How he’s accumulated so many strikeouts in so few innings is with the second-highest strikeout rate of his career. His 30.2% strikeout entering Wednesday’s start was a significant spike from last year’s 24.3%.

He had two strikeouts to start the pivotal sixth inning, but he did not finish that inning.

That’s where things went haywire.

One pitch and so long lead

The length of previous innings bloated Gray’s pitch count so that when the sixth started going sideways, bench coach Daniel Descalso and pitching coach Dusty Blake had an alternative ready.

When the two strikeouts to start the inning were followed by two singles to again put the tying run on base, the Cardinals lifted Gray for a reliever.

It took one pitch for Gray’s lead to become a deficit.

A day after pitching the eighth inning and guiding the Cardinals’ through one of his few genuine setup assignments, Matthew Liberatore misplaced the lead and allowed two inherited runners to score before he threw a second pitch. Liberatore entered the inning to face No. 9 hitter Cook. Eight games into his big league career and toting a .150 average, Cook struck out in both of his at-bats vs. Gray. He didn’t let a pitch go by from Liberatore.

Cook’s first big league homer was a three-run shot into the Cardinals’ bullpen that erased a two-run lead and delivered a 5-4 edge for the Pirates. The Cardinals’ four-run lead that came while Gray cooked with eight strikeouts had vanished in a blink.

Marmol ejected

While both sides appear to benefit from the elasticity on the outer edges of the strike zone, only one of the teams ended up getting ejected for offering an opinion.

An exchange at the beginning of the fourth inning led to some initial confusion and then a lengthy argument delivered by Marmol. Nootbaar struck out on a 93-mph fastball on the edge that left him in disbelief. He walked back to the dugout, and that was when home-plate umpire D. J. Reyburn appeared to follow him to deliver an ejection — but not to Nootbaar. Reyburn ejected hitting coach Turner Ward from his camera-well spot in the dugout. When Marmol emerged to argue it wasn’t long before the manager received his sixth ejection of the season.

Another day, another triple

How the Cardinals built their early 4-0 lead was similar to how they scored the day before.

A home run.

And a triple.

Just in reverse order.

Brendan Donovan followed Arenado’s leadoff single with a two-run homer off their former teammate, Woodford. Donovan’s 13th homer of the season came during an island of production around which Woodford retired eight of the first 10 Cardinals he faced. That stretch effectively ended in the third for Woodford as Paul Goldschmidt stretched for third and his first triple of the season. Goldschmidt drilled a ball that caromed off the right-field wall and away from Bryan De La Cruz. A run scored easily, and Goldschmidt raced for third so he could be the next one home on Arenado’s RBI single.

A day after Luken Baker’s triple and Walker’s homer provided two runs that were enough to win, Donovan’s two-run homer and Goldschmidt’s triple that generated two runs were not enough. They needed a late avalanche of assistance to assure a victory Wednesday.

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