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Wasted effort Cardinals' ace Morris outpitched, outscored again
Updated: Monday October 15, 2001 12:27 AM
PHOENIX (AP) -- For the second time, Matt Morris had to be nearly perfect. For the second time, he turned in a good game and came up a run short. Morris was victimized by another dominating performance by Curt Schilling on Sunday night, and the St. Louis Cardinals were eliminated from the playoffs with a 2-1 loss to the Arizona Diamondbacks. Morris lost the opener of the series 1-0 to Schilling and the Diamondbacks. "I never planned it that way, but a guy like that is going to put up zeros no matter what," Morris said. "He stepped it up again. We were able to get one off him, but I made a mistake to Reggie Sanders. I threw him a curveball for a strike, and I'm sure he was sitting on it." By his account, Morris made just one mistake in seven innings in the opener, a six-hit, one-run performance. That was allowing a two-out RBI single to Steve Finley. This time, Sanders feasted on Morris' wayward curveball, hitting a 447-foot homer deep onto the second-tier seats in front of a restaurant in left field in the fourth inning. Morris needed 130 pitches to get through eight innings, and had to turn the game over to the bullpen. St. Louis lost the game on Tony Womack's two-out single -- coming after he missed a suicide squeeze -- off Steve Kline in the ninth. Morris had no margin for error as the Cardinals scored their only run on J.D. Drew's game-tying homer in the eighth. "He's an elite pitcher," Game 2 winner Woody Williams said about his teammate, who won 22 games in his first year as a starter since 1998. "I'm honored to sit back and watch how he executed in a situation like this. That's not easy for a guy that's been here 100 times, and he's still a young pitcher." Morris was hurt again from lack of run support -- St. Louis was 0-for-6 with runners in scoring position in this game and 2-for-33 in the series. The Cardinals stranded 29 runners in all and seven against Schilling this time. Catcher Mike Matheny lined out to Finley in center in his first at-bat and singled twice. But Schilling struck him out to end the St. Louis ninth with a runner on second and set the stage for Arizona's dramatic win. "We came to play today," Matheny said. "Maybe someday I'll get a tape and watch it and enjoy it. I was having about as much fun as I could have in a baseball game up until right at the end." In the third, Womack started a Diamondbacks' rally with a two-out single. Morris walked Craig Counsell, and Luis Gonzalez loaded the bases with a sharp single that jumped out of Mark McGwire's mitt as the big first baseman fell to his right to stop it. Morris recovered to get Steve Finley on a popout to end the fourth. But Morris could do nothing but watch during Arizona's winning rally. "It's tough from the dugout," Morris said. "We got so high after the botched-bunt attempt, the squeeze, and everybody was thinking, "We have a chance." We were able to get the second out at third. "But that's just baseball -- we were all jumping around and thinking about who's up the next inning, and they blooped one in, and that's the ballgame."
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