ATLANTA — Ten runs. Five hits. Oddly enough, no home runs.

For the St. Louis Cardinals, that was Wednesday’s glorious first inning. For the Atlanta Braves, it was their latest contribution to this city’s collective, seemingly ceaseless sports migraine.

As for the 43,122 people who filled SunTrust Park, well, they could be forgiven for perhaps feeling as if they had tickets for St. Louis batting practice instead of the decisive Game 5 of a National League division series.

Yet most of them stayed — for a while — as the Cardinals kept scoring and the Braves kept collapsing. Eventually, the scoreboard showed that the Cardinals had won, 13-1, and clinched a berth in the National League Championship Series.

“When we scored 10 runs in the first inning, I felt pretty good about the game,” Kolten Wong, the St. Louis second baseman, said in the clubhouse after the final out. “You put pressure on these guys early, that’s our motto and we did it and these guys broke.”