Arizona Erupts for Five in Fourth, Buries St. Louis 9-4

The Diamondbacks turned a tied game into a rout with a five-run fourth inning that featured back-to-back home runs and never looked back. Arizona walked out of St. Louis with a 9-4 final, handing Matthew Liberatore a brutal afternoon on the mound.

St. Louis drew first blood in the second when Blaze Jordan doubled to left and Jose Fermín scored, staking the Cardinals to a 1-0 lead. That advantage lasted exactly two innings. In the fourth, Tommy Troy reached on an infield single to score Carroll and tie it, then Ildemaro Vargas doubled to left to score Troy and Arenado — and that was the moment the game broke open. The win probability swung from 61% to 36% on that Vargas double, a 25-point shift that effectively announced Arizona's intentions. LuJames Groover followed with a 388-foot home run to left that scored Vargas and pushed the lead to 5-1, and Ketel Marte immediately went back-to-back with a 416-foot shot to left center. Five runs, four consecutive batters reaching base, and Liberatore suddenly staring at a 6-1 deficit before the Cardinals could exhale.

Liberatore never recovered. He finished with 5.1 innings pitched, allowing 8 hits and 6 earned runs against just 3 strikeouts. Arizona kept adding: Troy hit a ground rule double in the seventh to score Moreno, Gurriel Jr. doubled to left to score Troy, and Moreno added a sacrifice fly in the eighth to push the lead to 9-2. The Diamondbacks' offense looked relentless — Troy went 2-for-5 with 2 RBI and 2 runs scored, Marte went 2-for-5 with a home run and an RBI, and Groover's 1-for-3 line undersells his impact: 1 HR, 2 RBI, 2 runs scored.

St. Louis made the final score look slightly more respectable with a two-run ninth — Fermín homered to left at 387 feet, and Jordan singled to center to score Nootbaar — but it was cosmetic. Jordan finished 2-for-3 with 3 RBI for the Cardinals, and Fermín's 2-for-3, 3-run, 1-homer night was genuinely impressive, though it came almost entirely in garbage time. On the pitching side, Arizona's Mitch Bratt was hardly sharp through 3 innings — 2 walks, 1 earned run — but the offense made it irrelevant. The story of the night was the Cardinals' front office promoting Bill DeWitt III to CEO on the same afternoon their rotation got carved up; it appears the new executive's first order of business will be figuring out why Liberatore surrendered six runs before the sixth inning was over. Arizona's offense looks like a problem for every team on its schedule right now.