Wranglers' power burst sinks Cards

Three home runs by Wichita ruin an otherwise strong outing by Springfield starter Lambert.

 Kary Booher
News-Leader

Chris Lambert looked at his night and shrugged his shoulders.

Three shutout innings to open the game? He'll take it.

Three homers in next three innings? Well, that's part of the learning process in the minor leagues.

"Before this, I had been on a streak of like five games in a row, that's the way I look at it," Lambert said. "A couple of centimeters, it could have been a 2-0 game instead of a 4-0 game."

Maybe so.

A night after swatting four home runs off Randy Leek, the Wichita Wranglers continued their home-run binge by pummeling Lambert with three homers, including a pivotal two-run shot by Justin Huber, and sank the Springfield Cardinals 5-2 on Wednesday night in front of 7,073 at Hammons Field.

No doubt it was just another show of power by the Texas League's best-hitting club as Josh Pressley homered and doubled, Mel Stocker swatted a solo shot, too, and for the second night in a row, Huber became the main assassin.

His two-run blast staked Wichita to a 4-0 lead in the sixth inning, giving the 22-year-old Australian 13 homers for the year and his second two-run homer in as many nights.

"The boys have been swinging it well lately," Huber said, speaking almost apologetically. "He just started leaving some pitches up to hitters and our team is pretty locked in right now, so we took advantage of those mistakes. But he was pitching real good. We were lucky enough to capitalize on his mistakes."

And that's what gave Lambert (1-3) and the Cardinals reason not to sulk too much about this one.

While Wichita right-hander Kyle Middleton (9-3) pitched six innings for the win, muzzling the Cardinals until Papo Bolivar's run-scoring single in the sixth, Lambert showed signs that he is overcoming the jitters that haunted the right-hander much of last month as he tried to settle into Double-A baseball.

Unfortunately, most will look at the homers and wonder where Lambert, the Cardinals' top pick of the 2004 draft, is really headed.

Lambert was cruising until he served up a one-out solo homer to Pressley in the fourth on a ball that Pressley one-armed near the flag pole in center field. Change-up, Lambert said.

He then started to cruise again, only to see Stocker pull a first-pitch fastball for a solo home run down the right-field line in the fifth. But the sixth inning would get no better.

Mike Aviles opened it with a single, and Huber followed with a blast that landed on the concourse beyond the left-center wall.

The league's best hitter with an average now at .349 on a team that entered the night batting .281, Huber had singled in his first at-bat against Lambert, but the right-hander retaliated with a strikeout in the fourth. Still, Lambert had no such luck in the sixth when he offered a 1-1 fastball.

"I was trying to elevate a fastball," Lambert said. "He missed one earlier, and I had a strike on him, but I didn't get it up enough."

How surprising it was. Lambert had struck out six in the first four innings and seemed to be on his way to a fourth quality start in six tries.

"I feel like I didn't pitch bad tonight; I just missed my spots sometimes," Lambert said. "It could have been pop-ups. It could have been homers. Unfortunately, they were homers tonight. Except for those three homers, they really didn't have a clue."

And that was the thing. Lambert scattered six hits and issued two walks in his five-plus innings, a good sign to the Cardinals. Lambert, who has made nine starts, hadn't given up a home run in his four previous starts.

"Sometimes progress is something you don't see in the box score or in the results," Springfield manager Chris Maloney said.

"His command is getting better and he's throwing more strikes. He looks like he's getting more comfortable."

However, the Cardinals couldn't mount a rally to tie. Four of their first five hits were with two outs. Bolivar drove in a run on a two-out single in the sixth. The Cardinals pulled within 4-2 on Travis Hanson's groundout off Barry Armitage an inning later, but right fielder Brett Groves made a diving catch on a Juan Diaz sinking line drive to stop the threat.

Jonah Bayliss pitched the final four outs for his eighth save.

Meanwhile, Lambert headed home, his head up.

"I wouldn't even call this a setback," Lambert said. "I go into my next start feeling just as good. I wished we would have won, but it's baseball."