May 11—CHICAGO — It did not take long Wednesday night for the Cardinals’ Jordan Montgomery to realize his change-up and curveball had abandoned him and all he could do was make the most of the pitches he had left.

Winning streaks will remain short for the Cardinals if they’re unable to get more from the starting pitchers they have right now.

The Cardinals’ first and only winning streak thus far of the season halted at three games when the Cubs jumped Montgomery for six runs on the way to a 10-4 victory Wednesday night at Wrigley Field. Five of the runs came in the span of 11 batters and a volley of extrabase hits as Montgomery had to break away from his off-speed pitches and lean on his fastball. The Cubs noticed. They avoided a sweep and reinforced a truth for the Cardinals: Without steadier, more reliable starting pitching from game to game all streaks will be abbreviated.

“Five (innings) with six runs ain’t it,” said Montgomery, the most consistent of the Cardinals this season. “Anything less than six innings a game is just a failure to me. I want to go out there and at least eat up innings for the guys.”

For the first time this season, after Montgomery’s five innings, the Cardinals’ rotation went through a full turn without at least one starter completing six innings.

Only once in their past 10 games has the starter completed six.

At the same time other facets of the Cardinals’ game are starting to gleam or sharpen — two wins at Wrigley rested on the shoulders of the bullpen; Nolan Arenado drilled a triple Wednesday to drive in the Cardinals’ first run — the rotation remains too unreliable to sustain a winning stretch, to shovel innings into the furnace of a hot streak. Montgomery’s five innings on 88 pitches was the most efficient of the three starts at Wrigley, and the lefty acknowledged he wasn’t all that efficient at all. He was surviving.

The fewer innings the starters cover, the more the bullpen has to break from its roles to clean up the leftovers, and the more the bullpen must shoulder and risk being exposed in the following days. Instead of paving the way for winning streaks, the Cardinals are dodging potholes of missing innings.

If all of this sounds like a broken record, that’s because it is.

It’s why the Cardinals’ record is broken.

Their 13-25 start is their worst through 38 games since 1907.

“Any time less people touch the baseball, there’s less chance of something going sideways,” manager Oliver Marmol said when asked about getting more innings from the starters. “If you’re able to get that sixth inning from your guy and go from there and feel pretty good.”

The Cardinals have received six innings or more from their starter nine times this season. Montgomery has five of them. The Chicago Cubs got their 19th start of at least six innings Wednesday night from Justin Steele (6-0). That matches Pittsburgh for the most in the National League Central, and right behind them is Milwaukee with 16 sixinning starts in the first 36 games. Only Cincinnati is close to the Cardinals — and still the Reds have more with 10 starts of at least six innings.

There have been times when a Cardinals starter’s bid for six innings or more was cut short by the situation and the manager’s move for the bullpen. But not once in the series at Wrigley Field was the start both efficient and effective enough to pitch deeper in the game. Miles Mikolas, Jack Flaherty and Montgomery combined to pitch 14 1/3 innings in three games, averaging fewer than five innings an outing but more than 90 pitches. It took Mikolas 96 pitches to author 4 1/3 innings, limiting his ability to pitch deep into the game despite allowing only one run. Flaherty used 93 pitches to complete five innings and had to tiptoe around five walks.

The right-hander rebuffed questions late Tuesday night about a brief dip in his velocity by illustrating how he would do that strategically to challenge hitters and then criticizing whether reporters understood pitching and “the art” of it.

Montgomery spoke Wednesday of the pragmatism of it.

He set six innings as the minimum for his expectations.

“Just quality start,” the lefty explained. “You get out there in the sixth, then you have your setup guy and your closer to do the rest. I feel that’s me doing my job every time at least. That’s my goal — at least six every time.”

To get there Wednesday night, Montgomery had to find a way to do it with, at most, two of his pitches. He had only one, his fastball, that he could count on.

Montgomery felt that he was rotating too much with his torso during his delivery and that caused him to snap his change-up short. The pitch lacked its usual “shape,” Montgomery said, and when it found the strike zone it was flat or floating — until it was whacked and soaring. One of those misbehaving change-ups was drilled by Patrick Wisdom for a two-run homer that overtook the Cardinals’ early lead. Five of the seven hits Montgomery (2-5) allowed went for extra-base hits. All six of the runners who scored on Montgomery reached base by walk or extra-base hits.

In the second inning, he walked two batters at the back end of the Cubs’ lineup to load the bases and then found a way with his sinker to get out of trouble. The Cubs’ No. 9 hitter, Christopher Morel, looked at a 94.7 mph sinker for a called strike three.

“First of all I can’t walk those guys,” Montgomery said. “I walked (Trey) Mancini twice. Really just kind of take a look at what you’re working with that night and make a pitch, and I was able to that inning. Then, kept falling into trouble.

“Had to grind.” Montgomery allowed two doubles and a homer in the third inning.

The Cubs tagged him with another two-run homer in the fourth inning, and that came on a 93 mph fastball as Montgomery’s use of his off-speed pitches diminished.

“There’s going to be days when that happens,” Marmol said. “Leaned on the curveball to kind of combat that a little bit. Could not make the adjustment to get the change-up where he needed it.”

And that meant he could not get the innings the Cardinals needed.

It wouldn’t be so detrimental if Montgomery’s outing was the outlier, if his five-inning slog against the Cubs was surrounded by six-inning steadies. But because it was preceded by a five-inning start and a 4 1/3 -inning start before that and two five-inning starts before that, the uncovered innings started to accumulate. The Cardinals can piece together enough elements of their game to win a series when that’s happening — the offense provides, the bullpen holds, the defense steals — but over time, a series like that leads to a sag in the next series. Relievers spent to cover innings in Wrigley and relievers unavailable to hold a lead at Fenway Park.

“Definitely, it’s our job to keep the game under control, keep us in it,” Montgomery said. “We’ve been doing better. I just have to go back out in five days and do better than that, for sure.”