The 42-year-old got one final plate appearance in Sunday’s game — going down on strikes against Alan Busenitz in the eighth inning. Wainwright concludes an outstanding big league career with a 200-128 record, 3.53 ERA, 1.24 WHIP and a 2202/736 K/BB ratio across 2668 1/3 innings over 18 seasons with the Cardinals. He also recorded three saves. Best of luck to Wainwright in the next chapter of his life.

That means that the 42-year-old hurler will go out on an epic high note — recording his 200th victory and hurling seven scoreless frames against the Brewers in what will be his final major league start. Wainwright finishes the disappointing season with a 5-11 record, 7.40 ERA, 1.90 WHIP and a 55/41 K/BB ratio across 101 innings in his 21 starts. He will remain with the team and will have batting gloves in his locker — with the possibility that the Cardinals could find him one final at-bat over the final week of the season.

After finally recording his 200th career victory on Monday night, the Cardinals will give the 42-year-old hurler a bit of a breather. Marmol noted that if Wainwright does take the hill again this season, it will come in St. Louis in front of the hometown crowd. It’s possible he takes the mound one last time, or simply opts to go out on a brilliant high note.

With an 8.19 ERA this season and zero victories since mid-June, it just didn’t seem realistic at all 10 days ago that Wainwright would get the two wins he needed for 200, at least not unless the Cardinals tried to finesse it by putting him in winnable situations in relief. At is turned out, that was unnecessary. Wainwright allowed two runs over five innings to defeat the Orioles on Tuesday, and now he’s shut out the postseason-bound Brewers for seven, doing so without throwing a pitch harder than 87.6 mph. Ironic is that he owes the win to Willson Contreras, whose homer provided the only run of the game. Wainwright is scheduled to make two more starts, but we’ll see if those materialize.