In a series now clearly destined to be memorable, Albert Pujols's massive homer to LF leading off the thirteenth inning Saturday afternoon against Dan Miceli gave the Cardinals a draining 3-2 victory in game two of a weekend set that has forced the Astros to lay everything on the line in the hope of earning a playoff spot in October. The loss, disheartening in one sense because so much effort was expended in giving the team a chance to pull it out, and acceptable in another because both teams played with such intelligence and heart, cuts the lead Houston (84-70) has in the NL Central back to a full game over the Cubs, who are sending Matt Clement out this evening, weather permitting, in game three of Chicago's series in Pittsburgh.

In following up on Friday night's flawless performance, the Astros played a completely different kind of game today, though one no less intense than last night's. Brett Tomko stepped up and threw as well for the Cardinals as anyone around here or in Busch stadium itself can remember having seen him throw, getting ahead of at least eight of the first nine batters he faced. His fastball, routinely topping 96 m.p.h., was as direct a challenge to the Astros as they could want, and truthfully, they couldn't handle it. They did, however, break through against Tomko in the top of the third, when Tim Redding singled to LF and Craig Biggio followed with a beautifully-executed bunt single down the 1B line that Fernando Vina couldn't get over on fast enough to find the bag after taking the throw. Geoff Blum singled to CF to load the bases--all this with no outs--but Tomko humped up and just threw the ball past Bagwell for a strikeout. Jeff Kent reached him for a two-run single to RCF, a hit that looked like it was going to be the catalyst for a huge inning, but Tomko dusted Lance Berkman, walked Richard Hidalgo, and got Brad Ausmus swinging to end the Houston rally. The half-inning was, in and of itself, a miniature of the larger epic struggle of the game as a whole. The Astros stroked four hits and drew one walk, but Tomko struck out the side and held Houston to the only two runs it would get all day.

I'm not the greatest Tim Redding fan in the world. While I can't say I knew he wouldn't hold the lead, I had a pretty strong gut feeling that he wouldn't. For one thing, he didn't have a good curveball Saturday. It was loopy thing, dropping well inside off the plate on most pitches. The Cardinals got some good swings against him even early in the game, and had it not been for Geoff Blum's stab of Eli Marrero's liner at 3B and Adam Everett's nearly-as-fine short-hop stop of Scott Rolen's hard bouncer with two men on base in the first inning, St. Louis would have broken on top from the outset. Thus, Houston's 2-0 lead did not feel safe to me. Someone could counter, I suppose, that part of the problem is that the Astros, for whatever reason, don't score runs for Redding, but even so, it's still a rare thing when I feel safe with any Redding lead. The reason why I don't feel safe with Redding on the mound was made clear with Tomko leading off the bottom half of the inning. Redding got him to chase a curve in the dirt for strike three, but the pitch was so wild that not even a catcher with Brad Ausmus's skills could have tracked it down. The ball skipped way beyond Ausmus to his left, and Tomko had an easy time of it reaching 1B, Redding had a strikeout to add to his total of three, but the Cardinals had a free baserunner, and I was left wondering why in the world it was necessary to throw that kind of pitch to retire a pitcher, even a good-hitting pitcher like Tomko. It drove me crazy. What bothers me about Redding is that he just gives up too much garbage; a hit after he's ahead in the count, a walk with two outs in an inning, or a strikeout on a wild pitch with a base open. He's made some strides this season in tightening up his game and reining in his emotions, but one of the off-season questions the Astros will have to ask and answer is whether Redding's progress in a 9-14 season is enough to keep him around for 2004 or whether Houston could do better for itself over the long run by dealing Redding away for somebody else. The sentiment at the moment would probably be to hang on to him but I wonder, even after two back-to-back good performances against St. Louis, if Redding will ever develop the consistency a good starting pitcher needs.

Just about the time I was screaming "Make a pitch!" to my television set in the fifth, Redding made one. Vina had reached on an infield hit toward 1B, a ball Bagwell should have been able to play, but didn't, and Pujols had walked, J.D. Drew also walked, as Redding danced on the edge of a cliff with his control. The bases were loaded and Scott Rolen was up. Redding did what I didn't think he would be able to do: he got Rolen to pop up foul to Bagwell, who staggered under the late summer sun but held it for the final out. Such is the pressure of the pennant race that I find myself yelling at everybody these days--Jeff Kent, sweet tempered Adam Everett, Redding--everybody. Makes no difference to me. All I want is for plays to be made.

Watching a game in September during a year like this one is an experience I find hard to describe, In one sense, the players have it easier than the fans do because they have something to occupy the whole of their attention for the three hours of a game. I know this because I've been part of the participant/spectator dichotomy more times than I can count, and I would much rather be a participant. As a spectator, it is not merely that one may live and die on each pitch; it is also that, as a fan of a particular team, we carry with us into each game the successes and failures of each year that has gone before. It is said that ballplayers must have short memories, and that is true, for if they truly remembered all of their failures, they'd never have any success. But those memories don't just disappear, They are carried somewhere. Who carries them? We do; we who watch. We carry them on our scorecards, our stat sheets, our recordbooks, our videotapes. That is why September baseball is such glory and such agony to watch, because all of those memories are part of us. They form the context of every game that we watch, and they are both blessing and curse. It is our memory of superbly-executed baseball that draws us back the game each day, and our memory of moments of failure that compel us to swear off it for all time at the end of every October. Yet, few of us do swear off it. We bear the weight of what we remember every year; we scream and we groan under that weight after every strike not called or every hit not made for our guys, and to live with that weight requires, for some of us, a Zen-like mastery of our emotions, a will to calm ourselves and recall that this is not life and death, but merely baseball that we are watching. Even Zen, however, may not be enough to help us as we get drawn back into the action on the field, for the tenth time or the ten thousandth. It dawned on me as I watched Bagwell squeeze that fifth inning pop-up that I had seen such narrow escapes countless times before and to see one again was why I was watching today. It also dawned on me, as I connected Bagwell's play to every play like it that I've seen, that the legendary Curse of the Red Sox is not one based on any particular play but one based on the terrible weight of years.

I say these things to try to express what watching this afternoon's game was like after Redding was lifted before the sixth inning with a mild blister problem and the Cards tied the game against Ricky Stone and Mike Gallo. An Edgar Renteria double to deep RCF put him at 2B with two out. Jimy Williams made a pitching change from Stone to Gallo to deal with the lefty Palmiero and stuck with him after Tony LaRussa substituted Eduardo Perez. Gallo, unfazed by the switch, did his job, and Jeff Kent should have done his. Perez's hard grounder up the middle, past Gallo's glove, should have been fieldable behind 2B, but Kent didn't get his glove all the way down. In a hit reminiscent of plays involving Bill Buckner and Leon Durham, Kent endured a Red Sox moment at the worst possible time. The ball ricocheted past the diving Everett into shallow LCF and Renteria scored. The run should not have happened at all; in the most local of contexts (one fan writing about one play by one team), that is all one can say. But who knows? Kent's error may one day take its place in Astro lore alongside Gary Woods leaving the 3B bag early and Tony Eusebio's infield out with the bases loaded.

As the game wore on, I do not know what was more remarkable: the Astros' futility with men on base against Cal Eldred, Jason Isringhausen, Mike DeJean and Jason Simontacchi, or the way in which Houston escaped certain defeat time and again in extra innings. Eldred escaped a two-runners-on jam in the seventh when Blum hit into a 4-6-3 double play; Jason Lane looked awful striking out on a pitch way down and out from Isringhausen in the ninth, leaving Ausmus at 2B; Mitch Meluskey just stood there and took strike three from DeJean in the eleventh, again stranding Ausmus, who had singled and stolen, at 2B; Kent popped out and Morgan Ensberg's fielder's choice grounder wasted walks to Biggio and Bagwell against Simontacchi in the twelfth. But those frustrations were balanced by the tremendous efforts of the Astros in the bottom halves of the extra innings to keep the game alive and generate those winning possibilities. Dotel wasted a walk to Miguel Cairo in the ninth by striking out Eli Marerro, the second K of that inning, and an out that left Dotel pumped; Billy Wagner, who had no slider whatsoever this afternoon, escaped a J.D. Drew double in the tenth by intentionally passing Scott Rolen and, later, with two out, Renteria, and getting So Taguchi to ground to Everett, leaving Drew at 3B. In the twelfth, a bases-loaded jam prompted Jimy Williams to try an infield of five players for the third time this season. It didn't work in Milwaukee in April; it didn't work in Chicago in mid-season, but it worked here. Joe Girardi's grounder was snapped up by Biggio for an 8-2 putout at home, and Vina ended the inning by flying out to CF after Biggio retreated to his normal position. These last two jams were traps from which I thought the Astros would never escape, but each time they did, I felt that they would spur the offense on to get the one big hit and the one big run they needed.

Unfortunately, despite all of their missed opportunities, the Astros were bested by a Cardinal relief corps backed into a must-win situation. The Astros, I thought, could have gotten to Simontacchi eventually, but Eldred and, in particular, DeJean, threw wicked stuff that Houston wouldn't have been able to touch given ten years to do it. I faulted the Astros in the very late going for having the bats on their shoulders much too much against Simontacchi, but the reality is the Cardinals had to win to stay alive; the Astros did not. Miceli's pitch to Pujols leading off the thirteenth was a mistake, pure and simple, low and out over the plate, and the Cardinal LF crushed it. There was no thought of walking him; no out could be set up that way, and in a tied game, to put the winning run on is too great a risk; the challenge was to pitch to him successfully, and Miceli couldn't meet it. The loss slows Houston down and, depending on what the Cubs are doing tonight (the Pirates lead 6-1 after six as this column is being posted), it may put extraordinary pressure on Jeriome Robertson in Sunday's season road finale to pick up his exhausted teammates. But whether Houston enters Sunday's play a half-game up or remains a game and a half ahead, their play continues to be "memorable" in all the ways we might apply that word to the plays of a pennant race, and if they can get by the Redbirds one more time, the final seven games of the season back in Houston, even if three of them are against a potential playoff opponent in the Giants, might be a schedule advantage too great even for the Cubs--playing lower-echelon teams--to overcome.