PITTSBURGH — Rookie JJ Wetherholt had three hits and primed the Cardinals' offense Wednesday while playing close to home, and lefty Matthew Liberatore had the kind of start to build on wherever this offseason takes him next.

In his final start of the season, Liberatore held Pittsburgh to one run on six hits through 5 2/3 innings. He leaned into his breaking pitches to make his fastball more effective, and his solid finish bought the offense plenty of time to stir for the first time in the series.

Wetherholt reached base four times, scored a run and drove in a run as the Cardinals won, 5-1, at PNC Park, the ballpark he grew up going to as a kid. Wetherholt, who grew up in Mars, Pa., singled three times to improve to 9 for 24 in six games at PNC.

He has scored seven runs in those games.

The Cardinals overtook the Pirates’ early 1-0 lead a day after being held to a single hit by the Bucs on Tuesday. The win kept Pittsburgh from assuring it would finish with a better record than the Cardinals and a hold on third place in the National League Central. Only once since 2000 have the Pirates finished ahead of the Cardinals in the division standings.

The season overall has been disappointing for Liberatore (6-14) as he’s seen his ERA bloat to 5.36 coming into his 31st and final start. He’s had flickers of success, whiffs of swing-and-miss stuff, but he’s had many starts that convulsed in one problematic inning and a misbehaving fastball that made sluggers out of opponents. Liberatore flipped the mix Wednesday with his curveball and was able to use a variety of breaking pitches to strikeout six in his 5 2/3 innings. He notably did not walk a batter to invite the problematic inning.

Stung once, Liberatore stuns from there

The pitch that has given Liberatore the most trouble this season is his fastball. It has been hit often and often hit hard, and when he turned to it at the start of the second inning, the result was familiar Wednesday night.

Liberatore challenged left-handed batter Brandon Lowe with a fastball that caught too much of the plate as it entered Lowe’s wheelhouse. He turned on it and drove it over the seats above the right-field wall and out into the night. Lowe’s solo homer was his 34th of the season, and it staked the Pirates to a 1-0 lead.

Liberatore would allow two more hits in the inning.

But he’d surface before taking on more runs.

And the lefty offered little from there.

Liberatore featured his curveball as often as he threw his fastball, and it was that tandem in concert that proved the most effective against the Bucs. The Pirates took 10 swings at Liberatore’s curveball and missed five times. He was able to use it to also set up his other breaking pitches. Liberatore finished three of his strikeouts with the slider, and he threw only a handful of sweeping sliders but one of them finished of another strikeout.

All three times that Liberatore faced the top of the Pirates order, he retired them in order. In the first, he got three fly balls for outs from the first three batters. In the second, he got back-to-back ground outs from the top two batters before freezing switch-hitter Bryan Reynolds for a called strikeout that ended the third. He retired leadoff batter Konnor Griffin to end the fifth inning on a groundout.

And the first and only two outs that Liberatore got in the sixth inning were from the Bucs’ Nos. 2 and 3 hitters. He struck out Rafael Flores Jr. before then getting a line out from Reynolds.

Liberatore left one runner behind for reliever Luis Gastelum to deal with, and the rookie right-hander stranded Lowe on base when he quickly ended the sixth with a groundout.

Cards’ playlist: Hit singles

The Pirates were on their third pitcher of the game already in the third inning when the Cardinals conjured a rally out of hits, walks, and a wild pitch or two.

The Cardinals rapped three times as many hits in the span of five batters in the third inning Wednesday as they had in the entire game Tuesday night.

Leadoff batter Wetherholt led off the third with a single to reach base for the second of three times in the first four innings. Wetherholt advanced into scoring position when Ivan Herrera walked. Alec Burleson followed with a single to center that scored Wetherholt, tied the game and gave him his MLB-leading 112th RBI. Herrera raced for third on the single, and that put him in position to score on a wild pitch.

Burleson took second on that wild pitch so that he could score on a single.

Burleson’s RBI single chased the Pirates’ second pitcher, lefty Brandon Eisert, from the game. Leo Burnal’s RBI single to score Burleson welcomed right-hander Khristian Curtis into the game. By the end of the third inning, the Cardinals had a 3-1 lead, five hits in the game and had started disrupting the Bucs’ plan for their bullpen game.

Long at-bats pay off

Pittsburgh was already busy trying to cobble together enough innings from its relievers to get through 27 outs when the back end of the Cardinals lineup added to the workload of Curtis as he slogged through the middle innings.

The Cardinals added to their lead by tenderizing Curtis, then pouncing.

In the fourth inning, Jose Fermin had a line drive nearly snared by Pirates rookie shortstop Griffin. The ball dropped from Griffin’s glove for a single that put the Cardinals’ second rally in motion. It started, though, with an out.

Nathan Church, the Cardinals’ No. 8 hitter, worked Curtis through an seven-pitch at-bat. He got ahead in the count 3-2, then fouled off back-to-back cut fastballs to get the count full and keep it there. Church eventually flew out to center field for the first out of the inning. But the amount pitches he saw dragged on Curtis.

Masyn Winn, the Cardinals’ No. 9 hitter, then pushed Curtis through an eight-pitch at-bat. Winn fell behind 0-2. He then ignored two fastballs and a slider to get the count back to full. Winn fouled off a fastball, and he nicked a cutter too before the eighth pitch of the at-bat. Curtis went back to the cutter, and Winn clubbed it to right-center for an RBI double.

Curtis threw 45 pitches to get 11 outs for the Bucs.

A third of them went to Church and Winn in that fourth-inning exchange.

Two pitches after Winn’s double, Wetherholt singled on a fastball from Curtis for another RBI hit that ran the Cardinals’ lead to 5-1.

Herrera ties record with a bruise

Immediately upon entering the game, the Bucs’ fourth pitcher plunked Herrera with a pitch to put him right alongside only one other Cardinal in the organization’s history.

The hit by pitch that led off the seventh inning was Herrera’s 31st of the season. That tied him with Steve Evans for the Cardinals single-season record. Evans set the record in 1910, when he led the majors in the statistic. Evans played 151 games for the Cardinals that summer and hit .241 but upped his ability to get on base at a .376 clip with 63 walks and the 31 bruises.

Herrera also tied former Pittsburgh catcher Jason Kendall for the second-most HBPs by a catcher in a single season. Kendall was hit 31 times in 1997 and another 31 times in 1998.

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