It's So awesome!
NEW YORK — So Taguchi laughed, and it felt so good.
"I can't explain. It's unbelievable," he said. "Who expected that I would hit a home run? Maybe nobody. Even me."
No power threat during the regular season, Taguchi is a playoff slugger now — and St. Louis is heading to Busch Stadium tied with the New York Mets in the NL championship series.
After Scott Spiezio saved the Cardinals in the seventh with a two-run triple that was nearly a home run, Taguchi hit a tiebreaking homer off closer Billy Wagner leading off a three-run ninth inning that lifted St. Louis to a 9-6 victory over New York Friday night.
NL Cy Young Award winner Chris Carpenter faltered, allowing a pair of go-ahead home runs to Carlos Delgado that drove in four runs. But the Cardinals tied the game after trailing 3-0 and 4-2, then came back again after falling behind 6-4.
"This may have been the best comeback on a club I've been around," Cardinals manager Tony La Russa said.
During the regular season, the 37-year-old Taguchi homered just twice in 316 at-bats this year. But the Japanese player is 2-for-2 with a pair of homers in the postseason, also connecting off San Diego's Scott Linebrink in Game 3 of the first round.
"He plays well late," La Russa said. "He's not intimated at all by pressure situations."
Taguchi had entered as a defensive replacement in left in the eighth after La Russa saw Wagner warming up.
"Right now?" he asked La Russa. "He said, 'Yes."'
Wagner entered with the score 6-all in the ninth. Taguchi, 0-for-5 against him in his career, fell behind in the count 0-2, fouled off a pitch, took three balls, fouled off two more and then drove a fastball from the hard-throwing Wagner over the left-field wall.
"He's got a flair for the dramatic," Spiezio said.
Spiezio added an RBI double and scored on Juan Encarnacion's run-scoring single off Wagner, who had earned the save in New York's opening 2-0 win Thursday night but was booed when he walked back to the dugout after being removed with two outs.
"I just did not pitch up to standards," Wagner said.
New York, which had won eight straight dating to the regular season, threw 200 pitches — and St. Louis batters fouled off 55 of them.
"We made some bad pitches at the wrong times," Mets manager Willie Randolph said.
