Game 3 of the NLCS was a demonstration of the price the Cardinals pay for making Mike Matheny their manager. Whatever his strengths, and undoubtedly they are bountiful and manifold, the postseason has been a showcase of his obsessions and limitations.

First, it was die by the Grichuk, live by the Grichuk. Throughout the postseason, Matheny's devotion to outfield prospect Randal Grichuk has been repeatedly questioned. Grichuk had played well in Game 2 , but in the bottom of the first inning, it seemed as if the Grichuk pendulum (note that we are going for a record for most Grichuk-mentions in the second paragraph of a postgame story) had swung the other way, with the right fielder misjudging Travis Ishikawa's bases-loaded fly to right field, allowing it to drop at the base of the wall and score three runs. With one run already in off of John Lackey, the Cardinals were down 4-0 and the game had barely begun.

In fairness to Grichuk, the trajectory of Ishikawa's blast seemed to indicate that it was not only headed for the Cove, but was going to carry over that body of water altogether and come down somewhere in Alameda. The wind, which played tricks on the outfielders all day -- whether Candlestick Park or AT&T Park, San Francisco is going to be the Big Bad Wolf of baseball environments -- knocked the ball down, and what seemed like a sure grand slam became what should have been a wall-scraping fly-out.

It is impossible to know if any other outfielder, be he Oscar Taveras or Enos freakin' Slaughter, would have stayed with the ball until the last possible moment.

Later, with the Cardinals having clawed their way back into the game with a two-run Kolten Wong triple and a Jhonny Peralta single in the fourth and sixth innings, respectively, Grichuk pounded a flat Hudson seventh-inning offering off of the left-field foul pole. Tie game. Cardinals pitching had settled down after the first, with Lackey and three relievers combining for eight innings of one-hit baseball through the end of regulation play. The one hit was by Tim Hudson. A game that seemed destined to be a blow-out in favor of the Giants was forced onwards into the randomness of extra inning. Along the way, Grichuk added two more strikeouts to his postseason pile.

Regardless of how the postseason plays out for the Cardinals, Matheny's handling of young players will be put under a microscope this winter. He bailed on Wong early. He fell in love with Grichuk late. In between, he spent a lot of time being frustrated with Taveras. Maybe Taveras gave him reason, but when a manager starts saying things like, "We've got to do what we can to win today, we're not here in the development business," as a justification for playing a dead-in-the-water Allen Craig over a kid with all the promise in the world you have to fear for the future of the organization. The Cardinals ultimately had to trade Craig to free Matheny from a cage of his own making.

What we've seen this postseason may not be meaningful. We may never hear of Grichuk again, and perhaps Wong won't be an All-Star next year. Taveras may never capitalize on his talents -- or he may not capitalize on them with the Cardinals . We may be getting glimpses of possible futures or short-term perturbations. It's impossible to know. The only thing we do know is that Matheny plays favorites, and that intellectually inflexible posture is not a good one for a major league manager to take, not when continuing the run of great Cardinals teams means getting younger even as the team keeps winning.

The game ended with Matheny having maneuvered himself into a similarly rigid structure. Randy Choate has had a 601-game major-league career despite extremely mixed results, because modern major league managers have opted to burden themselves in a way their predecessors never would have, with "specialist" pitchers who aren't that special. They choose to advance, say, an organization's 20 ^th -best pitcher over its 13 ^th -best pitcher if the former happens to be left-handed. The problem, as we all well know by now, is that the left-handed hitter you brought the southpaw specialist into the game is often not the batter he ends up facing, whether because the opposing manager pinch-hits or the batter walks. Alternatively, it turns out that the better left-handed hitters don't have the same vulnerability to mediocre southpaws that average hitters do.

Choate has been very effective against left-handed hitters in his career, holding them .188/.270/.266 averages. As you might have guessed, right-handed hitters are another story, with a career on-base percentage over .400. His saving grace against them is that as a ground-ball pitcher even righties have a hard time taking him out of the park.

Still, he's a pitcher whose usage has been properly structured to one batter at a time. Roughly two-thirds of his career appearances have been shorter than one inning. Matheny has used him in roughly the same ratio of one- and two-out appearances to longer outings. With Game 3 headed to extra innings on the road, Matheny eschewed his shaky closer, Trevor Rosenthal -- like most managers, Matheny prizes protecting a lead he may never have -- not to mention the enigmatic Carlos Martinez and the missing-presumed-dead Michael Wacha. Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch asked Matheny if he characterized Wacha as an "extra-inning reliever," to which the manager agreed. Tuesday afternoon showed that he's more correctly viewed as a spectator or tourist.

Somehow, that meant Choate got to be the goat. Brought in to start the 10 ^th inning, he walked left-handed hitter Brandon Crawford, allowed the non-hitting defensive replacement Juan Perez, pinch-hitting for the pitcher, a line-drive single to left, and with runners on first and second and no outs that probably should have been that. But Gregor Blanco is a left-handed hitter, so even if he was going to bunt regardless of who was out there, Choate had one more batter coming. Joe Panik, next in the lineup, is a left-handed hitter as well, so perhaps Choate would have remained to face him as well.

Baseball works on more than a bilateral basis. There are considerations beyond left-hander or right-hander, youth or veteran, teaching or winning. Reduce matters to such simplistic terms too often and you leave yourself open to all the different ways what we call bad luck, but what is also indistinguishable from lack of planning, might defeat you.

You know what happened next. Bunt. Choate's throw sailed off into the outfield, Crawford scored, game over. Final: Giant 5, Cardinals 4, in 10 ... and Matheny 0.