Good hitters meet like with like, which is what they mean when they say that the key to hitting is to go with the ball or to try not to do too much. A pitcher with a great fastball will get his strikeouts, but he’ll also give up his home runs, even on good pitches; as a simply matter of physics, a hard thrower’s best pitch, met by a hard swing, is going to be hit hard. Movement, command, and deception are more valuable than velocity for this reason. You can drive a golf ball a lot farther than you can drive a cottonball.

In the St. Louis Cardinals 4–2 victory over the Mets last night, the Cardinals hit like they knew this. With the Mets’ rotation in such abominable disrepair, Monday’s rainout was a pure blessing, one that prevented the team from having to pitch Tom Glavine on short rest. With so much focus on the improved chances a fully rested Glavine would give the Mets, though, it was easy to forget that despite not having given up a run this postseason going into last night’s game, he was still Tom Glavine — truly nervy, an uncanny reader of hitters’ body language, and quite capable of being beaten by a team willing to take what he gives them.

If not quite disastrous, Glavine’s performance — four-plus innings, in which he gave up seven hits, three walks, and three runs — was just not what the Mets needed. He pitched basically as he did last week and as he always does, trying to keep the Cardinals’ hitters off-balance with a inside changeups in outside fastball counts, changing speeds off his changeup, challenging fastball hitters with his not very intimidating fastball, and so on. It didn’t work, and it could have been worse without Tony LaRussa’s commitment to the running game, come what may. A variety of chip shots, dinkers, rollers, and patient atbats that ended with ball four wore Glavine down. Even Albert Pujols’s home run, which cut a Mets lead to 2–1 and somewhat redeemed the uncharacteristically unsportsmanlike comments he made about Glavine last week, wasn’t quite a solid shot, but a fisted liner that would have left the yard for pretty much no other hitter. You take what the pitcher gives you.

The Mets’ hitters weren’t quite willing to do the same. All through Jeff Weaver’s six innings, in which he racked up just one strikeout while giving up two runs, the same image repeated itself: A lazy change or sloping breaking ball was cracked off the underside of the bat and a fielder settled right under it. Maybe two of Weaver’s pitches were truly hit on the screws, and while he was doing a fine job of mixing speeds and locations, the Mets’ consistently being out front of his pitches really looked like overaggressiveness after a point. You want to hit the ball hard, but hitting it well — or, in the right circumstances, not offering at it at all — is more important.The tentative swings Carlos Beltran was taking on pitches not even in the strike zone in the eighth inning were not what got the Mets this far. Carlos Delgado’s single right up the middle, and David Wright’s subsequent double, both against slider-chucking reliever Josh Kinney, were the first real signs of the Mets doing what they have to do now to win: waiting, not for a pitch that can be hit, but for a pitch that can be hit well. But though they got on base, the Mets didn’t score a run in the inning. Marrying aggression to discipline came a bit too late.

In boxing, the saying is that styles make fights. The same is really a lot truer of baseball than it sometimes seems. I don’t really have any doubt that in the abstract, the Mets’ offense is better than the Cardinals’ pitching and defense, but if that doesn’t add up to runs scored for the Mets because the Redbirds’ array of junkballing short relievers are particularly well-suited to take advantage of overaggressiveness and the willingness of key Mets hitters like Wright and Jose Valentin to swing at the inside pitch, then being better doesn’t mean much.

The Cardinals have Chris Carpenter going tonight. He’s a very, very fine pitcher, and might end up winning his second Cy Young in a row this year, but the Mets have handled him once and they’ve got a very good shot at doing so once again. He’s a hard thrower and he keeps the ball where hitters can reach it; if the Mets aren’t going to try to serve the ball or wait the pitcher out or cue it up the lines, their best shot is going to come against someone who’s throwing hard enough to meet force with force. There will be time enough, if the Mets don’t win, to ponder whether all of their problems amounted to bad luck, injury, and some technical challenges they weren’t able to overcome, or whether they just choked. For now I’m feeling quite foolish about having claimed this series wouldn’t be competitive, and quite eager to see whether or not the Mets can ease back tonight and so what they did so naturally all year long.

tmarchman@nysun.com