Game 2 featured a match-up of two veteran starters, Washington's Max Scherzer and St. Louis's Adam Wainwright. With two ace pitchers on the mound and late-afternoon shadows on the field making it hard for batters to see the ball, another pitcher's duel ensued. Scherzer walked second baseman Kolten Wong in the first inning and center fielder Dexter Fowler in the sixth, but otherwise allowed no base runners and carried a no-hitter through six innings. Wong stole second after walking in the first inning, but he was the only Cardinal to reach scoring position while Scherzer was on the mound. First baseman Paul Goldschmidt finally broke up Scherzer's no-hit bid with a single to lead off the seventh inning on a liner into left field that left fielder Juan Soto played conservatively so that the ball would not get past him and allow Goldschmidt to reach scoring position in a one-run game. Goldschmidt got no farther than first base, as Scherzer completed his outing by striking out left fielder Marcell Ozuna and getting catcher Yadier Molina to ground into an inning-ending double play. Scherzer left the game after seven innings of work having allowed three base runners on one hit and two walks while striking out 11 Cardinals; he threw 101 pitches, 65 of them for strikes. The outing gave him an MLB-record five postseason no-hit bids of at least five innings. Playing for the Detroit Tigers in 2013, he and Aníbal Sánchez had become the first teammates since postseason play began in to have back-to-back postseason no-hit bids of at least five innings, when they did it during Games 1 and 2 of the 2013 American League Championship Series; with Sánchez pitching innings of no-hit ball for Washington in Game 1 of the 2019 NLCS the previous evening, they became only the second teammates with back-to-back five-inning no-hit bids in the postseason, and the first to carry postseason no-hit bids through at least six innings in consecutive games.