It really is a shock that Tuesday’s game ended with a 4-2 score, because Jeff Kellogg’s strike zone was the exact opposite of Tim Welke’s strike zone in Game 1. Starters Jeff Weaver and Tom Glavine had to hit the heads of pins to get strikes. The scoreboard operator should have been a lot busier. But hitters on both sides were helping the pitchers out by taking bad hacks. Preston Wilson and Albert Pujols certainly took some strange swings at balls that were way out of the strike zone in the first inning when David Eckstein set the table with a base hit.

Jeff Weaver got squeezed much the same by Kellogg throughout the game, but he too was helped by Met hitters, such as Jose Reyes and David Wright, who swung wildly at bad pitches. – Metsradamus

That was a bush league play by Pujols on the ground ball by Cliff Floyd. Obviously Floyd can™t run so Pujols, instead of filping the ball to Wainright, sprints to the base which was the same as saying œC’mon you cripple run, run. What a piece of shit.

You know it wouldn™t be the Mets to do this the easy way. Just make sure to give John Maine a hit of Ritlin to keep that focus. There will be a Game 7. – Steve Keane, Eddie Kranepool Society

The Cardinals began taking pitches. They started to stroke the ball to the opposite field. Glavine looked all of his 40 years. The Cardinals took more pitches. Glavine looked 41, 42. He threw more pitches, more balls out of the strike zone. The Cardinals stayed patient. Glavine was 46 years old, 47, 48. The Cardinals kept waiting and taking, turning the clock for Glavine. He turned 49 years old. From the start of the fourth until his departure only three batters into the fifth, Glavine faced 11 Cardinals, and eight reached base, and he probably was 50 by then. – Bernie Miklasz, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Jeff Weaver got away with mistakes all night, and was bailed out by some terrible at bats by your New York Mets. Home plate umpire Jeff Kellogg had a terribly inconsistent strike zone all night, but he had a better game than most of the Mets hitters, so resist the urge to blame him, please. In a very important game, the Mets reverted to their September offensive approach, with predictable results. – Mike’s Mets

Jeff Weaver is beginning to look like the player that he was meant to be when he left Detroit (by the way, Jeremy Bonderman is one of the players Detroit got in return for Weaver, if you like those storylines). He deserves a lot of the credit for the team not deflating under pressure.

What can you say about Adam Wainwright? The guy apparently is completely unflappable–he comes into the game, in a very debatable decision, and proceeds to get all four outs he needs with nary a baserunner allowed, and two strikeouts. – Viva El Birdos

Suddenly failed Yankees have an aura and mystique you have to see to believe. First Kenny Rogers helps bury the Yankees, now Weaver is channeling Bob Gibson. If the Cardinals have been hiding Kevin Brown on their roster, the Mets are in real trouble. – John Harper, New York Daily News

Perhaps it was too much to expect of Glavine, to keep pitching as if he were 30 years old, not 40, but with the injuries to Pedro Martinez and Orlando Hernandez, the Mets, and Glavine, had no other choice. They needed him to beat the St. Louis Cardinals last night, then hope to squeeze out one more win of the two remaining games of this NLCS, both of which would be at home.

But Glavine couldn’t do what the Mets needed him to do, which last night was to hold the Cardinals to one run. He allowed three in four innings, not a terrible night’s work but not nearly good enough, and now the season rests in the callow right hand of John Maine tonight, followed by a committee of has-beens, mop-up men and situational specialists for Game 7 if it gets that far. – Wallace Matthews, Newsday

In boxing, the saying is that styles make fights. The same is really a lot truer of baseball than it sometimes seems. I don’t really have any doubt that in the abstract, the Mets’ offense is better than the Cardinals’ pitching and defense, but if that doesn’t add up to runs scored for the Mets because the Redbirds’ array of junkballing short relievers are particularly well-suited to take advantage of overaggressiveness and the willingness of key Mets hitters like Wright and Jose Valentin to swing at the inside pitch, then being better doesn’t mean much. – Tim Marchman, NY Sun

This was a tough loss, but we all have the attitude that we’ll just win it in seven at home. We had a great chance to win it last night but came up a bit short. We walked into the clubhouse brimming with confidence, but things just didn’t work out. – “Billy Wagner”, New York Post

If the Mets lose the series, they can sit at home during the winter thinking about how they scored in the first inning of 61 regular-season games and how they scored five or more runs in 81, or half, of their games but how in the N.L.C.S. they could not score in the first inning or score as many as five runs against Jeff Weaver twice and Jeff Suppan once.

That™s right, Weaver and Suppan. Not Nolan Ryan and Mike Scott, not John Smoltz and Greg Maddux. Weaver and Suppan. – Murray Chass, NY Times