Ouch! That experiment didn't go so well

Ryan Ludwick could have gone 5-for-5 from the leadoff spot Monday and not been in the No. 1 hole again Tuesday. But Ludwick's 0-for-5, four-strikeout game assured that he won't be back at the top when the Cardinals play Cincinnati again at 7:15 Tuesday night.

But at least Ludwick didn't lose a pop fly in the twilight sky. That's what happened to left fielder Chris Duncan and center fielder Rick Ankiel in the third inning. With the Cardinals already trailing 3-0, Edwin Encarnacion hit a short fly to left-center. It should have been the third out, but Duncan and Ankiel converged on the ball and let it fall, scoring Ken Griffey Jr. with what proved to be the winning run in a 4-3 Cardinals loss.

Duncan was terse after the game, clearly agitated with the responsibility he shared with Ankiel.

"As soon as it got out of the stands, I couldn't see it," Duncan said.

The rest of the interview:
Reporter: So you get it off the bat, but then it goes up and you lose it?
Duncan: Yeah.
Reporter: It seemed like a lot of weird stuff happened like that tonight to hurt you. You had a couple of chances offensively and they make a couple of plays that are the difference.
Duncan: It's a tough break. It's all it is, really.
Reporter: Was (Bronson) Arroyo anything special or did he just make pitches when he had to?
Duncan: He made some pitches when he had to.
Reporter: This may be overstatating it, but it seems like you guys are having a little more luck getting guys on than getting them in. Is there anything to that or is it just kind of the way it's happening?
Duncan: That's baseball.

End of interview. For you statistics freaks out there, Duncan averaged five words per question over the last four questions. With reporters seeing that Duncan was going to shed no further twilight on the situation, the interview, to everyone's glee, broke up. Maybe the questions just weren't compelling enough to capture Duncan's interest.

Ludwick said it's easy to lose a ball in the sky at Busch at certain times of the day.

"Sometimes it's real tough," he said. "You can pick it up coming through the stadium. Then once it gets up in that sky, at times it can be real, real tough. Anywhere when it's a blue sky like that and the colors tend to dim and fade in with the ball, it can be awfully hard to pick up.

"Unfortunately for Dunc, he caught it at the time of day when it was really tough."