Dodgers Take Out Carpenter, Cardinals

Dodgers 5, Cardinals 3

LOS ANGELES -- On another night, a regular season night, Joe Torre never would have made this walk. He never would have held out his hand in the fourth inning of a game his Dodgers led at the time 3-2 and ask his starting pitcher to give up the ball, his night done.

But in his head, with Game 1 of the National League Division Series in danger of slipping from his grasp, Torre heard the words of an old baseball confidant, a rotund man -- the object of so many chuckles and derision. A man they used to call "The Gerbil."

"Don Zimmer taught me that this postseason stuff is all about not being patient and doing what you feel you need to do at the time you need to do it," Torre said after the Dodgers' 5-3 victory over St. Louis on Wednesday night.

So out came Dodgers starter Randy Wolf with two outs, the bases loaded and Cardinals right fielder Ryan Ludwick strutting to the plate. And then came the march of Dodger relief pitchers starting with Jeff Weaver.

"I just slidered Ludwick to death," he said.

And this is how the Dodgers would steal the first game of a series many people do not believe they can win. They clutched precariously to a lead and let one relief pitcher after another hold it tight.

"It's really the way we've been winning all year," Wolf said.

For all of the Dodgers frailties -- Manny Ramírez's second half slump, the demise of a starting rotation that wasn't dominating to begin with and an offense that sputtered in the season's final two weeks -- Los Angeles has a luxury few teams can afford. A dominant bullpen. One so good that it believes it can beat the Cardinals with starters that go five of six innings and let the relievers take care of the rest.

This goes against most accepted baseball wisdom that says a team must rely on one or two elite starters -- aces if you will -- who can control a game from the start and pitch eight innings while giving up only one or two runs. Teams that rely on their bullpens to win games pay a heavy price at season's end, this thinking goes. They will have made the trot across the outfield grass to the mound too many times through the summer. They will have thrown too many innings. They will be tired by the postseason.

Except on Wednesday the opposite happened. After Wolf's departure the bullpen gate opened and one-by-one the Dodgers relievers came armed with a new weapon to aim at the feared St. Louis lineup.

Weaver struck out Ludwick with his sweeping sliders in the fourth and flung them again through the fifth.

Ronald Belisario hummed dancing 96 mph fastballs in the sixth.