Mets will have to continue to cover for their pitchers

	Carlos Delgado will have to stay hot if the Mets are going to beat the Cardinals. Elsa/Getty Images
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ST. LOUIS -- This is how the Mets have to do this thing, if they're going to do this thing at all. If they're going to win the National League pennant, if they're going to get into the World Series, they're just going to have to pummel people. They really don't have any other choice.

The Mets, let's face it, aren't going to win any pitchers' duels. That would require them to have pitchers who actually can shut a team down.

They're not going to small-ball anyone, either. These Mets, even with a speedy guy like Jose Reyes at the top of the lineup, don't do small-ball all that well.

No, if the Mets are going to win the NL Championship Series against the Cardinals and advance to the World Series, they're going to have to spend a couple more nights like the one they had Sunday, when they blistered a bunch of hapless St. Louis pitchers -- if you want to call them pitchers -- in a 12-5 win at Busch Stadium.

The bludgeoning evened the best-of-seven series at two games apiece and elicited a major sigh of relief from the entire metropolitan New York area.

"It wasn't a must-win," Mets right fielder Shawn Green said of Sunday night's Game 4. "But it was as close to it as you can get."

Sunday's blowout was not pretty baseball by any stretch, and the games probably won't get any better-looking from here. Mets lefty Tom Glavine -- the only reliable starter the Mets have left -- is scheduled to go in Game 5 on Monday on three days' rest, always a risky proposition for a 40-year-old soft-tosser. (The wildly inconsistent Jeff Weaver pitches for St. Louis.)

After that, it's probably the Mets' John Maine in Game 6 back in New York on Wednesday (he lasted only four innings in a Mets loss in Game 2), and after that ... ol' one-inning Steve Trachsel, maybe?

Glavine and ... pray for a week's worth of rain?

The Mets, as most of Gotham surely knows, have been in a mess of trouble from the postseason's outset, ever since starters Pedro Martinez and Orlando (El Duque) Hernandez went belly-up with their injuries. That left only the veteran Glavine and a cast of non-supporting arms to carry them to the World Series.

In their first step, against the Dodgers in the Division Series, the lack of starters didn't seem to pose a problem. But when Maine and Trachsel crumbled under the pressure in Games 2 and 3 of the NLCS, it became an issue. Down two games to one as Sunday's Game 4 approached, it threatened to turn into an all-out crisis.

The Mets threw another prayer at the Cardinals on Sunday, and if 25-year-old lefty Oliver Perez, making his postseason debut, wasn't the second coming of Pedro -- and, really, he wasn't close -- he at least didn't pull a Trachsel. Perez went 5 2/3 innings and gave up five runs, which is about all that the Mets could expect.

That was plenty good enough, as it turned out, because the Mets' bats, slumbering in the series against the equally pitching-challenged Cardinals, finally stirred.