Cardinals 3, Rockies 0
ST. LOUIS -- Colorado flailed to no avail Friday night against St. Louis' Shelby Miller.
Retiring the last 27 men he faced after Eric Young started the game with a single, Miller authored the first shutout of his career with a 3-0 win over the Rockies at Busch Stadium.
Miller struck out 13 -- including Troy Tulowitzki three times and Carlos Gonzalez twice, all looking -- and walked none in a dominant display. Mixing a 95 mile per hour fastball with a breaking ball in the upper 70s, Miller (5-2) yielded few hard-hit balls.
The crowd of 37,800 stood and chanted Miller's name as he overpowered Young with a 95 mph heater on the inside corner to end the game. It was the first time a Cardinal rookie had fanned 13 since Scipio Spinks did it in 1972.
It was the eighth win in nine games for the Cardinals (22-12), which maintained a three-game lead on Cincinnati in the National League Central in the opening game of a season-long 10-game homestand. The Rockies (19-16) dropped their third in a row.
As has been the case for most of the young season, Miller racked up the strikeouts early and often. After Young's looping single into short right-center field, Miller froze Gonzalez and Tulowitzki with fastballs for called third strikes, leaving Young at second.
That was it for Colorado's offense. Following the first, only Josh Rutledge came close to a hit, but third baseman David Freese snagged his hot smash on his knees to start the third and threw him out.
Meanwhile, the Cardinals reached Jon Garland (3-3) for single runs in the second and third. Pete Kozma's two-out single in the second scored Jon Jay and Carlos Beltran's long homer to right in the third made it 2-0.
St. Louis added its last run in the fifth when Jay lofted a sacrifice fly to center, scoring Matt Holliday. The Cardinals finished with 10 hits off Garland and Edgmer Escalona, but stranded 10 men on base.
NOTES: This series features two of the game's top pitching staffs in terms of inducing grounders. St. Louis leads the National League with a 65.4 groundball rate and Colorado is third at 60.4. ... In a reversal of club history, the Rockies entered Friday night's game as the league leaders in road batting average (.276) and slugging percentage (.451). ... Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina extended his hitting streak to 10 games with a third-inning single. That's the team's longest streak this year.
