Winn homers, drives in 4 runs as Cardinals top Rockies 7-3

DENVER (AP) — Masyn Winn homered, doubled and drove in four runs, Lars Nootbaar scored twice, and the St. Louis Cardinals beat the Colorado Rockies 7-3 on Tuesday night.

St. Louis rallied to spoil the beginning of the last homestand of Charlie Blackmon’s career with a run in the seventh and four in the eighth. Blackmon tripled and doubled.

Blackmon, who announced he will retire at the end of the season, received a standing ovation when he led off the bottom of the first before getting hit by Cardinals starter Michael McGreevy.

His triple in the fifth gave Colorado a 3-2 lead. It was the 68th of his career, the most in franchise history, but the lead didn’t hold up after starter Ryan Feltner left the game one pitch into the seventh inning with cramping in his pitching arm.

“It was pretty much the whole front side of my arm, just tightness,” Feltner said of his right arm. “It was compounding over the course of the game. Nothing crazy.”

The Cardinals tied it in the seventh when Colorado’s mistake on a comebacker to reliever Victor Vodnik loaded the bases, and Nootbaar scored from third on shortstop Ezequiel Tovar’s wild relay throw on a potential inning-ending double play.

“It was a crazy play and worked out our way,” St. Louis manager Oli Marmol said of the comebacker.

The Cardinals scored four runs in the eighth of Angel Chivilli (1-3) on RBI singles by Jordan Walker and Victor Scott II and Winn’s two-run double.

The rookie shook off a minor injury to drive in a season-high four runs.

“I was in the cages and took a weird swing earlier and kind of tweaked my triceps,” Winn said. “I wanted to be in there, especially getting towards the end of this thing. I want to be out there and compete and play as much as I can.”

Andrew Kittredge (5-5) pitched the seventh inning for the win.

McGreevy escaped the first loss of his career when St. Louis tied it in the seventh. He allowed three runs on four hits in the second start and third appearance of his career. His ERA rose from 0.90 to 2.40.

The Cardinals opened the scoring in the third on Winn’s two-run homer, his 15th of the season.

“Feltner threw the ball well,” manager Bud Black said. “He got stronger as the game went on but unfortunately he started cramping.”

Aaron Schunk’s second home run of the season, a solo shot in bottom of the third, made it 2-1, and the Rockies tacked on two more in the fifth. Schunk’s dribbler to third drove in Sam Hilliard and Blackmon hit his team-leading fifth triple to center.

TRAINER’S ROOM

Rockies: 2B Brendan Rodgers was out of the lineup with a hamstring injury. Black said it was a nagging injury and considers Rodgers day to day.

UP NEXT

The Cardinals will send RHP Erick Fedde (8-9, 3.38 ERA) to the mound against former St. Louis LHP Austin Gomber (5-11, 4.67) in the second of the three-game series on Wednesday night.

AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/mlb

Colorado Rockies' Aaron Schunk breaks from the batter's box after hitting an infield single to drive in a run off St. Louis Cardinals starting pitcher Michael McGreevy in the fifth inning of a baseball game Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2024, in Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

Colorado Rockies starting pitcher Ryan Feltner reacts after giving up a two-run home run to St. Louis Cardinals' Masyn Winn in the third inning of a baseball game Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2024, in Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

Colorado Rockies second baseman Aaron Schunk, left, applies a late tag as St. Louis Cardinals' Michael Siani steals second base in the third inning of a baseball game Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2024, in Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

St. Louis Cardinals' Iván Herrera singles against Colorado Rockies starting pitcher Ryan Feltner in the second inning of a baseball game Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2024, in Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

St. Louis Cardinals second baseman Brendan Donovan, right, jumps away from Colorado Rockies' Ezequiel Tovar after forcing him out at second base on a ground ball hit by Brenton Doyle in the first inning of a baseball game Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2024, in Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

Colorado Rockies' Charlie Blackmon heads up the first-base line after connecting for an RBI triple off St. Louis Cardinals starting pitcher Michael McGreevy in the fifth inning of a baseball game Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2024, in Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

St. Louis Cardinals second baseman Brendan Donovan, back, throws over Colorado Rockies' Jacob Stallings after forcing him out at second base on a double play hit into by Jordan Beck in the fifth inning of a baseball game Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2024, in Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

St. Louis Cardinals' Masyn Winn follows the flight of his two-run home run off Colorado Rockies starting pitcher Ryan Feltner in the third inning of a baseball game Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2024, in Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

PLAINS, Ga. (AP) — Barack Obama and his advisers had two living former presidents to consider as they planned the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

Bill Clinton, eight years removed from the Oval Office, remained an image of centrist success that warranted a primetime speaking slot. But Jimmy Carter 's landslide defeat to Ronald Reagan lingered, even 28 years later.

“It was still an epithet: ‘Another Jimmy Carter,’” David Axelrod, top Obama adviser and confidant, said in an interview.

Obama decided against inviting Carter to the podium in Denver. The Georgia Democrat was featured in a video instead. “He, justifiably I think, he was a little miffed about that,” Axelrod said, adding that the decision was a “painful one” for Obama.

Now, as Carter nears his 100th birthday, the 39th president is being lauded not just for his longevity but for his accomplishments in government, his work as a global humanitarian and, as Obama himself said in a birthday tribute for his fellow Democrat, “for always finding new ways to remind us that we are all created in God's image.”

It's a preview, of sorts, of what will happen when Carter's long life ends and the nation pays tribute with state funeral rites in Washington. The praise, though, carries some irony for a president who campaigned against the ways of Washington and was an outcast of sorts even during his four years in the White House. To be sure, many presidential hopefuls campaign that way — Clinton and Reagan did it, too. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley of South Carolina tried it as recently as the 2024 GOP primaries. But for Carter, being a loner even as a power player has been, perhaps, the defining posture of his life — sometimes by circumstance, sometimes by design.

“Jimmy Carter was always an outsider,” said biographer Jonathan Alter.

That identity traced back to Carter’s earliest years, growing up on a farm outside of his tiny hometown in south Georgia.

“He was from one of the wealthier families,” Alter noted, because James Earl Carter Sr. owned land that Black tenant farmers worked. But “when he went to school in Plains, and he had been barefoot for most of the year, the kids in town would think of him as a country bumpkin.”

Carter used the dichotomy to position himself for the presidency.

The commonly told version reads like cliché political fantasy: Earnest Baptist, peanut farmer and little-known governor from the Old Confederacy wins on a promise never to mislead Americans after the quagmire in Vietnam and Richard Nixon’s Watergate disgrace.

Yet when Carter decided to run, Nixon was the lone president he had ever met, and that was only briefly at a White House reception. Carter leaned on his extended family, close advisers and other Georgians to blanket key primary states throughout 1975 and early 1976. The inner circle was dubbed the “Georgia mafia.” The rest constituted the “Peanut Brigade.” By the time big-name candidates — senators, mostly — realized Carter was a contender, they could not stop him.

“His was a unique presidency in that it came from completely outside the party establishment and then continued to operate that way even in Washington,” said Joe Trippi, who worked for Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, scion of a Democratic dynasty and Carter’s perpetual liberal rival.

“There was something so outside of Washington about them, such a loyalty and pride about those people,” Trippi said, noting that Carter mostly avoided appointing veterans of the Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

Obama, Reagan and certainly Donald Trump challenged the establishment as candidates, but ultimately absorbed their parties. Carter, as the sitting president in 1980, had to watch convention delegates give Ted Kennedy roaring ovations even after Carter had won their bruising primary fight.

“The Democratic Party never belonged to Jimmy Carter,” Trippi said.

Nor did Carter master Capitol Hill, the national press corps or Washington’s social scene.

David Gergen, White House adviser to four presidents, said Carter “had some legislative successes” but missed on some of his most ambitious proposals because he wouldn’t always take command of negotiations with Congress.

“He handed that responsibility off” to Cabinet officers and aides, Gergen said. “That was not his forte.”

Carter in turns embraced and was frustrated by the dynamics.

When he pushed treaties ceding control of the Panama Canal but didn’t have enough support from Democrats, Carter looked to Gerald Ford, the man he defeated in 1976. The former president cajoled Republican senators and the treaties were adopted.

“I appreciate his help,” Carter wrote in his diary on March 16, 1978. “He’s done everything he promised.”

With the media, however, Carter had no escape hatch.

In late 1975 and 1976, as Carter grew into a plausible underdog, “the media loved him,” Alter said. But as a Southerner, he also faced deeply held biases, media historian Amber Roessner said.

“Any leading candidate was going to get extra scrutiny after Watergate,” she said, “but for Carter it was even more intense.”

When Carter described himself as a “born-again Christian,” the reference was commonly understood anywhere Baptist evangelicals are prevalent, but not so much in the Northeast, where national media is headquartered and where most voters in 1976 were mainline Protestant, Catholic, Jewish or nonreligious.

“Some members of the press," Carter complained in a Playboy magazine interview, "treat the South as a suspect nation.”

Long after leaving office, the U.S. Naval Academy graduate and engineer still bemoaned a political cartoon published around his inauguration that depicted his family approaching the White House with his mother, “Miss Lillian,” chewing on a hayseed.

In December 1977, when Carter's team had been in the West Wing less than a year, Washington Post society columnist Sally Quinn labeled them “an alien tribe,” incapable of “playing ‘the game.’” An elite Georgetown hostess herself, Quinn nodded to Washington’s “frivolity” even as she assessed ”the Carter people” as “not, in fact, comfortable in limousines, yachts, or in elegant salons, in black tie” or with “place cards, servants, six courses, different forks, three wines ... and after-dinner mingling.”

The uneasiness in Washington tracked Carter’s rise in Georgia.

After Earl Carter died, Jimmy Carter followed his father’s path as community leader and businessman. The younger Carter didn’t openly fight Jim Crow segregation laws but publicly refused to join the White Citizens Council. Then he took a state Senate seat in 1962 by challenging a local political boss who had rigged the election against him.

As a good-government lawmaker, Carter cast an outlier vote against money for a new governor’s mansion where his family eventually resided.

He first ran for governor in 1966, dissatisfied with the General Assembly. When he narrowly missed the Democratic runoff, Carter opted not to endorse a fellow racial moderate who had advanced, despite their shared distaste for the other contender: Lester Maddox, an avowed white supremacist. Maddox won. That silence enabled him to peel off Maddox supporters to become governor four years later in a race that built his grudge against media megaphones.

“The Atlanta Constitution,” he told Playboy in 1976, “categorized me during the gubernatorial campaign as an ignorant, racist, backward, ultraconservative, redneck south-Georgia peanut farmer,” while framing his big-city opponent as “an enlightened, progressive, well-educated, urbane, forceful, competent public official.”

Once in Atlanta, Carter previewed his Washington tenure, bucking legislators with a reorganization of state government that he pitched as necessary efficiency.

“He spent a lot of political capital making people mad, going after their fiefdoms,” said Terry Coleman, a Carter ally in the Assembly.

Georgia law dictated that Carter couldn’t succeed himself as governor. In Washington, it wasn’t his choice to serve just one term.

Carter returned home in 1981 “humiliated by the voters” and “at least somewhat depressed,” Alter said, but found his most sustained success as an outside influencer once he and Rosalynn Carter founded The Carter Center in Atlanta in 1982.

Decades of global democracy and human rights advocacy followed. Some of the former president’s international maneuvering annoyed his successors and Washington’s foreign policy establishment. Carter criticized U.S. wars in the Middle East, the West’s isolation of North Korea and Israel’s treatment of Palestine. He won a Nobel Peace Prize along the way.

“The best way to understand Carter as outsider is to see him as always understanding the rules of the insider circle,” Roessner said. “He just didn’t always play by them.”

FILE - Former President Jimmy Carter and President Clinton applaud former first lady Rosalynn Carter as she speaks, after Clinton awarded the couple the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, during a ceremony at the Carter Center in Atlanta, Aug. 9, 1999. (AP Photo/John Bazemore, File)

FILE - President Jimmy Carter acknowledges the applause of about 1,100 people gathered in the Elk City High School gym for a town meeting in Elk City, Okla., March 24, 1979. (AP Photo, File)

FILE - An estimated crowd of 35,000 people gather for a noontime speech by Presidential candidate Jimmy Carter in downtown Philadelphia, Oct. 29, 1976. (AP Photo, File)

FILE - Sen. Joe Biden and former President Jimmy Carter are seen at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Aug. 26, 2008. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya, File)

FILE - Democratic presidential nominee Jimmy Carter shakes hands with tourists as he takes an early morning walk down the main street of Plains, Ga., July 30, 1976. (AP Photo/Peter Bregg, File)

FILE - President Jimmy Carter carries a peanut plant as he follows his wife Rosalynn from the field at their Webster County, Ga., farm on August 19, 1978. (AP Photo/Jim Wells, File)