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St. Louis Heads To World Series; Here's How The Cards Did It

Matt Carpenter of the St. Louis Cardinals as he scored his team's first run Friday night. The Cards would go on to beat the Los Angeles Dodgers 9-0 and advance to the World Series.
Dilip Vishwanat
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Matt Carpenter of the St. Louis Cardinals as he scored his team's first run Friday night. The Cards would go on to beat the Los Angeles Dodgers 9-0 and advance to the World Series.

The final score was 9-0. The win Friday night puts the St. Louis Cardinals into this year's World Series.

The Cards are Major League Baseball's National League champions after taking four of six games against the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Here's what you need to know if (like us) you missed the game:

"Everything great about the Cardinals was on display in their third-inning rally."

That's how ESPN.com sums up the story of the night. In that third inning, the sports network says, the Cardinals were "at their relentless best, wearing down the best pitcher in baseball with a four-run, five-hit, 10-batter, 48-pitch grind-a-thon that was about to lead them back to the 19th World Series in franchise history."

Drill down even further, as the Los Angeles Times has done, and you come away believing that one Cardinal batter in that one key inning was the catalyst.

St. Louis second baseman Matt Carpenter, the Times writes, "came to bat against a vulnerable Clayton Kershaw with one out and nobody on. Over the next five-plus minutes Carpenter saw 11 pitches, fouling eight of them off before finally hitting one fair into the right-field corner for a double. Four pitches later Carlos Beltran singled Carpenter home, the first score in a four-run rally ..."

If you want to see highlights from that third inning, MLB.com has some video here.

The Cardinals now wait to see which team wins the American League championship. The Boston Red Sox have a 3-2 lead over the Detroit Tigers in their series. Game 6 of that matchup is Saturday evening in Boston.

The Red Sox-Tigers game is being broadcast by Fox, starting at 8 p.m. ET. If the Tigers win tonight, the teams would play a deciding Game 7 on Sunday — also on Fox and also at 8 p.m. ET.

The World Series is set to get started Wednesday evening. Thanks to the American League's win in this year's all-star game, the AL champion will have home field advantage (and host up to 4 games if the series goes to 7).

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.