A day after a nerve-wracking game in which they squeaked out a win, the Washington Nationals were nearly listless in Game 2 of the National League Divisional Series. The St. Louis Cardinals, armed with a lineup of big hitters, grabbed an early lead, then scored a few more and finally, for good measure, tacked on four more in the eighth inning.

By the time the walloping was over, the score was 12-4, and sent the series to Washington with the teams tied, turning the upcoming games into Nationals Park into a best-of-three runoff.

It’s not as if the Nationals didn’t have opportunities to match runs with St. Louis. The Cardinals’ starter, Jaime Garcia, lasted just two innings. He issued three walks in that brief span, and would have thrown a lot more if the Nationals’ lineup wasn’t so eager to swing at everything. Even through a battery of relievers, Washington kept whiffing; by game’s end, Bryce Harper was wearing the golden sombrero with his four strikeouts.

Jordan Zimmermann lasted an inning longer than Garcia, but he was even messier, allowing five runs on seven hits. The Nationals’ vaunted bullpen, which stitched together the Game 1 win after an erratic start by Gio Gonzalez, was astray yesterday, especially when Sean Burnett took a four-run licking in the eighth inning.

The one time the Nationals showed some life came in the top of the fifth inning, when Ryan Zimmerman and Adam LaRoche hit back-to-back home runs off St. Louis reliever Lance Lynn. But Michael Morse and Ian Desmond both flied out to right field, snuffing out whatever rally the heart of Washington’s lineup could have whipped up.

Still, the St. Louis jaunt should be deemed as a success. Under Major League Baseball’s new playoff scheme, the team with home-field advantage doesn’t gets to enjoy that advantage until the third game of the best-of-five series. That the Nationals took at least one game on the road gives them a good table-setting for the homestand beginning tomorrow.

“That was our goal,” second baseman Danny Espinosa told The Washington Post. “We wanted to get one win here.”

Tough as the Cardinals are, they struggled in their one trip to Nationals Park this year, losing three of four games at the end of August, including a pair of blowouts even worse than the one they just dealt the Nationals.