Thursday's 5-3 loss in Milwaukee was a mildly disappointing affair. The desire of Jimy Williams to rest Craig Biggio and Jeff Kent had something to do with it but, in addition to that decision, the Astros played somewhat as I had suspected they might, like a team looking forward to getting back home for a key series with the St. Louis Cardinals.

On Friday, Houston showed us what "looking forward to a series" can sometimes mean. Wade Miller and Adam Everett each drove in three runs, Jeff Bagwell smashed his 34th homer, Richard Hidalgo went 4x5, and the team as a whole pounded out nineteen hits in a 14-5 destruction of the Cardinals. St. Louis actually outhomered the Astros two to one, but in every other way, Houston (79-68) wiped out the third-place team in the NL Central, raining down a nearly-endless barrage of hard-hit singles, doubles, and triples on Tony LaRussa's hard-pressed pitching staff, a deluge that pushed St. Louis 3.5 games back in the division and enabled the Astros to maintain their one-game lead on the Cubs, who defeated Cincinnati on Friday at Wrigley Field.

The relatively late-in-the-game homers by Mike Matheny in the fifth off Miller (13-12) and So Taguchi in the seventh off Rick White gave the game a kind of 2000 first-year-of-the-ballpark, bombs-away feel, but they also obscure the fact that St. Louis only got five hits off Miller and White and Dan Miceli and Jared Fernandez. Miller was especially impressive in bouncing back from a dead-armed outing last Sunday in San Diego, going six innings, allowing two runs, two hits, and four walks, while striking out five. His fastball was consistently in the 92-95 m.p.h. range, and his curveball was also excellent. He would have won tonight with very little run support, but the Astros gave him nearly three games' worth over the first six innings, when they crushed everything that Woody Williams threw up there.

Come to think of it, if it was the case that Miller had a dead arm last Sunday, it might very well have been the case that Williams had one Friday night. Bill Brown informed us that Williams has been averaging 111 pitches per start this season, and most of us know he's also been used in relief this season. After Matt Morris was sidelined with a broken finger, Williams was the Cardinals' only reliable starting pitcher for a long while, and he pitched like a guy who just had nothing to offer in a game St. Louis surely felt was a must-win. Williams was wild--so wild in the first inning, in fact, that the Astros couldn't really zone in on any of his pitches because they couldn't guess where they were going to be. Williams walked Biggio and hit Blum, saw Bagwell move Bidge over on a flyout to CF, and gave up his first run on a fielder's choice grounder by Jeff Kent. Having scored a run without benefit of a hit, the Astros might have understandably figured they were going to be in one of those low-scoring Astrodome games of seasons past, but that turned out to be a mistaken perception on all our parts. When Williams tried to locate his pitches low in the strike zone, he either missed or wasn't getting a strike call. That left only one direction to go--up--and Houston was ready for him in the second. That inning set the tone for the rest of the evening. The thread running through all of the hits was that they were all hit hard--everything except an Adam Everett single to RF in the fourth. Even the foul balls were rockets tonight, particularly those of Geoff Blum, who was on nearly every pitch he saw. In the second, Hidalgo doubled to LF, but Brad Ausmus popped to 1B for a key out--or, at least, I thought it was key. Ausmus's job was to get Hidalgo to 3B but he didn't do it; Hidalgo had to stay right where he was, which is what the Cardinals should have wanted. It was a big mistake, then--the biggest of the game, in my view, for Williams to get greedy and attempt to pick Hidalgo off 2B. Williams's errant throw gave the Astros what they should have earned by sacrifice--a man at 3B with one out--and it set in motion a big inning. Everett doubled to LF and Wade Miller couldn't possibly have hit the ball any harder or found a more perfect spot for his LCF double, a hit that drove in Everett and a hit that also told me that Williams was way, way off for this game. A Biggio single scored Miller and boosted the Houston lead to 4-0.

When Houston expanded its lead to 6-0 in the third on Hidalgo's triple to LCF, a Scott Rolen error on a ball hit by Brad Ausmus, an Everett double, and a Miller fielder's choice, and pushed that lead one run further on Bagwell's homer early in the fourth, I was surprised that LaRussa left Williams in as long as he did. Williams clearly didn't have it, surrendering two more run for a total of nine runs (eight earned) on eight hits in 3.2 innings. The aim surely was to get as many innings out of his starter before going to a poor bullpen, but Williams was getting hit so hard that I thought it was pointless to keep him out there. Had LaRussa pulled him when the game was still 4-0, the Cards might have had a chance, but to leave Williams hanging even after the Bagwell homer was truly questionable. The fascinating thing about the fourth, however, was that after Bagwell's blast it was, essentially, yet another two-out rally inning, extending the Astros' healthy September pattern of offense. Kent and Berkman made outs, but Hidalgo singled and Ausmus walked. That was finally it for Williams, but Everett blooped in that hit to RF against Russ Springer, and Miller found the LCF gap again with his second low, hard liner of the night, a hit every bit as pretty as his first. Biggio walked and Blum singled to RF. That hit and RBI precipitated a call to the bullpen again, this time for Josh Pearce, but it also ended the scoring of the inning at five runs on five hits. It was now 11-0, and although the TV crew was reminding us of the Astros' remarkable comeback against that same deficit against St. Louis some years back in the Dome, the note was, for the most part, good only for history's sake. This game was over.

St. Louis finally got on the board on Matheny's homer in the fifth but a Kent double and a Berkman single to LF retrieved that run in the bottom half. Then, in the sixth, the Astros cranked up the offense one last time. Biggio walked, Blum singled and Kent doubled 'em both home. At 14-2, it was time to call off the dogs, but I gotta tell you, that was the thing I most liked about Friday's game: that the dogs attacked in every inning until they were called off. There's no sense hoping or wishing that runs could be saved for another night; there are too few games left in the season to indulge that conservative fantasy. The best thing the Astros can do is to go out Saturday night and try to do the same thing--it is permitted under the rules, you know.