Wild night produces wild results for two wild card teams

Chris Carpenter and the St. Louis Cardinals completed one of baseball’s greatest comebacks on Wednesday night, clinching the NL wild card with an 8-0 win over the Houston Astros.

After the game was over, the Cardinals hung out in the locker room to witness the Atlanta Braves blow a 3-1 lead and fall to the Philadelphia Philies, 4-3 in 13 innings.

St. Louis trailed Atlanta by 10 1/2 games on Aug. 25, then won 23 of the last 31 games to finish its improbable charge. The Braves fueled the Cardinals’ surge by losing 18 of their last 27.

St. Louis will open the postseason on Saturday against the team that helped them get into the playoffs, the NL East champion Philadelphia Phillies.




Four minutes after the Boston Red Sox lost to the Baltimore Orioles in the 9th inning after leading 3-2 for most of the game, Evan Longoria capped a startling comeback by hitting his second homerun of the game, hooking a drive barely inside the left-field foul pole in the 12th inning Wednesday night and giving the Tampa Bay Rays the AL wild-card spot with an 8-7 win over the New York Yankees, who lead the game 7-0 until the 8th inning.

The crowd of 29,518 at Tropicana Field was mostly silent until Longoria’s three-run homerun finished a six-run burst in the 8th inning and Dan Johnson, hitting only .108, tied it with a shot off Cory Wade.

Boston was ahead of Tampa Bay by nine games on Sept. 4 and now, after a furious comeback, the Rays will open the first round of the AL playoffs on Friday against the Rangers in Arlington, Texas.