Cardinals put Braves on the brink with 10-4 win

ST. LOUIS -- The Atlanta Braves are threatening to do it again.

They've scaled the castle wall, swam the moat, avoided the alligators, crawled across the front lawn, landed on the front porch, picked the lock on the front door, stepped into the foyer ... only to find themselves standing on a trap door.

And this time, it's the St. Louis Cardinals who are poised to yank the string that sends Braves tumbling into the darkness.

Carlos Hernandez blasts a solo home run in the second inning off Tom Glavine.(AP)

Again.

The Braves, America's favorite October disappearing act, boarded their charter back to Atlanta late Thursday stunned to find themselves trailing St. Louis two games to none in this best-of-5 National League Division Series. Their hole became deeper when the Cardinals whacked them 10-4 in front of another raucous sellout of 52,389 in Busch Stadium in a most unseemly manner.

Two days after blasting Greg Maddux for six runs in the first inning, the Cardinals pummeled Tom Glavine for seven runs in 2 1/3 innings.

It was like watching the Joker take down the Superheroes.

Except, there's no Joker in these Cards.

Nothing even remotely close.

"That's the first time I've seen Tommy get banged around like that since I can remember,'' pitching coach Leo Mazzone said quietly in a somber Braves' clubhouse.

Between them, Maddux and Glavine -- who hadn't lost to the Cardinals since June, 1995 -- have six Cy Young awards, and each is a candidate for another this season (although Arizona's Randy Johnson probably is the favorite).

Yet ...

In Game 1, Maddux was hammered for six first-inning runs for the first time in his career -- regular or postseason.

In Game 2, Glavine produced his shortest postseason outing since Game 6 of the 1992 NL Championship Series, when he gave up eight runs (seven earned) in a 13-4 loss to Pittsburgh.

As for the regular season, the last time Glavine went fewer than the 2 1/3 innings he went Thursday was Aug. 19, 1993, when he gave up six runs in just two innings in a 7-5 loss to Los Angeles.

No wonder Mazzone was a little hazy in recalling Glavine getting knocked around like that.

"It was all about location,'' Mazzone said. "He was down the middle.

"Tommy always lives on the edge, and today he was down the middle -- especially to left-handers. He couldn't get it away from them.''

Indeed, St. Louis' left-handed quartet of Fernando Vina, Jim Edmonds, Will Clark and Ray Lankford combined to go 4-for-6 with four RBI against Glavine, who also walked another lefty (Edmonds) and hit another (Clark) before departing.

"I just wasn't very good,'' Glavine said. "That's about it, really. Things didn't go well.''

No kidding. On a soggy afternoon, raindrops, doubles and home runs kept fallin' on Glavine's head. After the Braves took a 2-0 lead in the top of the first, Clark clubbed a three-run homer four batters into the bottom of the inning.

It only got worse from there. Carlos Hernandez thumped a leadoff homer in the second, and then the Cardinals poured it on with three more in the third.

Suddenly, the Cardinals led 7-2 and that sure looked like an "EXIT" sign hanging above the Atlanta dugout.

In two games, the Braves haven't been able to do anything right. The two tenets of winning playoff baseball are pitching and defense and, quite surprisingly, the Braves have been abysmal in each department.

As a team, the Cardinals are batting .299 this series -- and who would have figured that with Maddux and Glavine starting?

"That is a very difficult way to win two games, faced with that,'' St. Louis manager Tony La Russa said. "When you face Atlanta, you know you will face outstanding starting pitching. Both days, our offense cranked early before they got into the game.''

Defensively, the Braves committed two first-inning errors in Game 1, finished with three and should have been charged with four.

In Game 2, left fielder Reggie Sanders made a comical, ill-fated leap at Jim Edmonds' slicing fly ball in the fourth that was more fitting to an episode of the Three Stooges than it was a playoff baseball game. The misplay resulted in St. Louis' eighth run. Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.

"We've scored nine runs in two games,'' Atlanta third baseman Chipper Jones said. "A lot of times, that's enough, with our pitching staff.''

Make no mistake, these Braves are perplexed. They've been soundly and thoroughly thrashed in consecutive games, and there aren't many solutions in sight. It's not as if they can point to two or three tough breaks and insist that, well, if things would have gone this way, maybe this would be a different series.

Nuh-uh. Right now, they're taking on water and they're bailing as quickly as they can. Sure, the Braves won 15 consecutive games over one stretch during April and May of this season, but this, this is different.

Someone mentioned the 15-game winning streak to Jones and wondered if maybe the Braves could hang their caps on that as they set out to win three in a row to save their season.

"Just a three-game winning streak?'' Jones said, repeating part of the question. "You say that like it's an everyday occurrence.

"We've done it before, but we've got to face Garrett Stephenson, and then (Rick) Ankiel and (Darryl) Kile again. It's not going to be an easy road.

"I can't emphasize enough that that's a hell of a ballclub over there. It's going to be hard to beat them three straight, whether it's at our yard or their yard. But it can be done.''

Thing is, the landscape for this series was dramatically altered before it even began. Since Sunday afternoon, when the Braves were one strike from gaining home-field advantage on St. Louis -- and possibly for the entire NL playoffs -- manager Bobby Cox's club has played as if somebody slapped a voodoo curse on it.

The Braves lost home-field advantage when closer John Rocker served up a three-run homer to Colorado's Todd Helton on Sunday, forcing them to quickly pack their bags and head for St. Louis.

And it has been downhill ever since. The incline is so steep right now, in fact, that even the Braves themselves are wondering what life might be like if they actually are eliminated before the National League Championship Series -- something that hasn't happened since 1990.

Since they've played in eight consecutive, it's difficult to imagine the Braves not in an NLCS.

"Life will go on, it's not the end of the world,'' Jones said. "We've just run into a hot team. That's not to say we're defeated yet, because we're not. We've still got a pulse.

"If not, I'm sure some faces will change in here, and we'll come back to spring training trying to get to the postseason again.''

Yes, the Braves came back on St. Louis in the 1996 NLCS, winning three in a row when they were down three games to one.

But right now, the Braves seem much closer to spring training than they do to playing next week.