Lance Lynn needed only a few words to describe a 13-pitch at-bat.

“Three-two heater. He beat me.”

There were more questions for the St. Louis Cardinals reliever, of course, but the answers were more or less the same. He went mano-a-mano with Jayson Werth in the bottom of the ninth inning of a playoff game, losing the battle when the Washington leadoff hitter put the baker’s dozen offering off the back wall of the visitors dugout beyond left field.

“Everyone in the stadium knew what I was throwing there,” Lynn said. “Tip your cap to him. The guy can play, and he beat me.”

The Nationals’ 2-1 win Thursday in Game 4 kept the Cardinals from clinching the NL Division Series, and now there will be a decisive Game 5 in Washington on Friday. It’ll be hard to top this one — with Werth going strike, strike, ball, ball, foul, foul, foul, foul, foul, foul, ball and foul before launching the hit that had him circling the bases, tossing his helmet high and leaping into a pile of teammates at home plate.

“He battled that whole at-bat, and I was making good pitches, making my pitches, and you know, he won,” Lynn said. “It was just a matter of time. I was challenging him, and he was up for it.”

It’s the kind of playoff moment all at Nationals Park will remember for a long time. The tension was building with each of the 13 pitches, the sellout crowd ready to explode.

“I guess for the pitcher and the hitter, the pressure on them have to be unbelievable,” Cardinals star Carlos Beltran said. “Because Werth is battling, and our pitcher’s trying to get him out. He ended up winning that battle right there, but we have one more day.”

The Cardinals wasted a stellar effort by Kyle Lohse, who allowed just two hits over seven innings with five strikeouts and a walk, his only miscue coming on Adam LaRoche’s dead-center homer in the second.

Mitchell Boggs handled the eighth, and rookie manager Mike Matheny opted to go with Lynn — a starter relegated to the bullpen for this series — rather than closer Jason Motte with the score tied in the ninth.

“If we were at home, it would have been a very easy decision to bring in Motte,” Matheny said. “We are looking at a team that had every save of our season by Jason Motte, and we take a lead there at any point (in extra innings), you’re asking one of our guys, especially one of our young guys, who have never been in that situation to come in and close out a game, and that’s a lot to ask.

“Had a lot of confidence in Lance. He came in throwing the ball well. Werth just put together a very good at-bat.”

The Cardinals had scored a combined 20 runs in Games 2 and 3, but they managed only one unearned tally against Nationals starter Ross Detwiler. Pete Kozma circled the bases in the second inning by way of a walk, a sacrifice bunt, a booted grounder by shortstop Ian Desmond and a sacrifice fly.

Detwiler allowed three hits over six innings — the type of performance Washington needed after Gio Gonzalez, Jordan Zimmermann and Edwin Jackson were far from their best in Games 1-3, respectively.

It got worse for the Cardinals against the Nationals’ relievers. Zimmerman, the Game 2 loser, struck out the side in the seventh in his first career relief appearance, and Tyler Clippard also notched three Ks in the eighth. Drew Storen got two more strikeouts in the ninth before Desmond ended the inning with a nice, stumble-to-the-ground catch of a deep popup by pinch hitter Matt Carpenter.

Although St. Louis is a wild-card team facing the club with the best record in baseball in the regular season, the intangibles should belong to the visitors Friday. While nearly to a man — Werth being an exception — the young Nationals are new to this sort of thing, the Cardinals have quite the postseason pedigree: In the past two years, St. Louis is 5-0 in games where it faces elimination, including must-have victories in Games 6 and 7 of the 2011 World Series against the Texas Rangers.

“We’ve got a lot of veterans in this clubhouse that have been in big spots before and have lost games and know how to bounce back,” second baseman Daniel Descalso said. “We’ve done a good job of that lately, and we’re going to try to do it again tomorrow.”

On the mound will be Adam Wainwright, a 14-game winner who was a spectator during last year’s title run while recovering from elbow reconstruction surgery.

“Of course I wish we would have won tonight, but you know what? This is every pitcher’s dream, I would say,” said Wainwright, who pitched well in Game 1 of this series but didn’t get the decision. “Every competitor’s dream is to go in huge moments like that, so I look forward to the challenge.”

— Associated Press —

Set aside the high-pressure task of postseason pitching that Chris Carpenter routinely masters for the St. Louis Cardinals and think about this:

Even the take-it-for-granted act of breathing feels odd on occasion now that he’s missing a rib and two neck muscles.

Taking the mound for only the fourth time in 2012 after complicated surgery to cure numbness on his right side, the 37-year-old Carpenter spoiled the return of postseason baseball to Washington by throwing scoreless ball into the sixth inning, and the defending champion Cardinals beat the Nationals 8-0 Wednesday to take a 2-1 lead in their NL division series.

“To go from not being able to compete, and not only compete but help your team, to be able to be in this situation,” Carpenter said, “it’s pretty cool.”

Rookie Pete Kozma delivered a three-run homer, and a trio of relievers finished the shutout for the Cardinals, who can end the best-of-five series in Thursday’s Game 4 at Washington. Kyle Lohse will start for St. Louis. Ross Detwiler pitches for Washington, which is sticking to its long-stated plan of keeping Stephen Strasburg on the sideline the rest of the way.

“We’re not out of this, by a long shot,” Nationals manager Davey Johnson said. “Shoot, I’ve had my back to worse walls than this.”

With the exception of Ian Desmond — 3 for 4 on Wednesday, 7 for 12 in the series — the Nationals’ hitters are struggling mightily. They’ve scored a total of seven runs in the playoffs and went 0 for 8 with runners in scoring position and left 11 men on base in Game 3.

Rookie phenom Bryce Harper’s woes, in particular, stand out: He went 0 for 5, dropping to 1 for 15. He went to the plate with an ash bat and no gloves in the first inning, tried wearing anti-glare tinted contact lenses on a sun-splashed afternoon — nothing helped.

“Nothing I can do,” the 19-year-old Harper said. “I just missed a couple.”

All in all, quite a damper on the day for a Nationals Park-record 45,017 red-wearing, towel-twirling fans witnessing the first major league postseason game in the nation’s capital in 79 years. They didn’t have much to enjoy, in part because of the problems created by Nationals starter Edwin Jackson, who was on the Cardinals’ championship team a year ago.

“I didn’t feel like I was out of rhythm. I didn’t feel like I couldn’t throw strikes. I just missed across the plate with a couple of balls and it cost me,” Jackson said.

He gave up four consecutive hits in the second, the biggest being Kozma’s first-pitch homer into the first row in left off a 94 mph fastball to make it 4-0. Kozma took over as the Cardinals’ everyday shortstop in September, replacing injured All-Star Rafael Furcal, and only had 72 at-bats during the regular season.

But he’s only the latest in a series of “Who’s that?” stars of this postseason.

With the Capitol Dome rising beyond left field, the crowd of today was ready to root, root, root for the home team, breaking into chants of “Let’s go, Nats!” after player introductions and again after a four-jet flyover. And, boy, did they boo — when Cardinals outfielder Jon Jay was announced as the game’s first batter, when first-base umpire Jim Joyce missed a call, when catcher Yadier Molina trotted to chat with Carpenter, even when Carpenter paused between pitches to tie his red-and-gray right shoe.

“Carp’s been a dominant pitcher his whole career. Big-game pitcher. He showed up,” Washington’s Jayson Werth said. “He pitched well today. We had him in some spots. We had him on the ropes a couple of times. We were just one bloop away from a totally different ballgame.”

The Cardinals won 10 fewer games than the majors-best Nationals this season and finished second in the NL Central, nine games behind Cincinnati, sneaking into the postseason as the league’s second wild-card under this year’s new format. But the Cardinals become a different bunch in the high-pressure playoffs — no matter that slugger Albert Pujols and manager Tony La Russa are no longer around.

Carpenter still is, even though even he didn’t expect to be pitching this year when he encountered problems during spring training and needed what Cardinals manager Mike Matheny termed a “radical” operation in July to correct a nerve problem.

“Everyone had written him off, kind of,” Jay said. “It could have been a season-ending injury, where he could have just gone home and said, `See you later.”

The top rib on Carpenter’s right side was removed, along with muscles that were constricting blood flow up there. After Wednesday’s game, he squeezed his big right hand with his left, explaining, “Basically, my nerves were getting squished down by all the scar tissue and all the muscles and everything. There wasn’t enough space.”

Still adjusting to the way breathing feels different, he returned Sept. 21, going 0-2 in three starts totaling 17 innings, so it wasn’t clear how he’d fare Wednesday.

Yeah, right.

Carpenter allowed seven hits and walked two across his 5 2/3 innings to improve to 10-2 over his career in the postseason. That includes a 4-0 mark while helping another group of wild-card Cardinals take the title in the 2011 World Series, when he won Game 7 against Texas.

The 10 victories tie Carpenter for seventh-most, behind Andy Pettitte’s record 19.

“If the baseball world doesn’t know what an amazing competitor he is by now, they haven’t been paying any attention,” Cardinals left fielder Matt Holliday said.

Carpenter collected a pair of hits, including a double off the wall in the fifth that was about a foot or two away from being a homer. When he reached second base, he raised his right fist.

Earlier, Carpenter stepped to the plate for his first at-bat and chatted with umpire Joe West.

“I say hello to him. And he said hello back, and he talked about what a beautiful day it was to play a baseball game. And I was like, `You ain’t kidding,” Carpenter recounted. “Beautiful weather. The crowd is going crazy. … There’s no question you take time to reflect on that.”

— Associated Press —