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ST. LOUIS (AP) -- Edwin Jackson believes he knows what ailed him at the start of his tenure with the Chicago Cubs.

"Earlier, I felt like I was kind of mechanical, kind of too much in a bubble," he said. "You have to go back to having fun."

The Cardinals kept Jackson from having much fun in his bid for a third straight victory. Yadier Molina hit his fifth home run and Jake Westbrook (2-3) pitched seven innings of two-hit ball in the St. Louis Cardinals' 4-1 victory over the Chicago Cubs on Wednesday night.

Jackson signed a four-year, $52 million contract with the Cubs in the offseason and promptly dropped his first five decisions and started 1-8 overall as his ERA ballooned to 6.29. In his past three starts, however, both he and manager Dale Sveum have seen a major difference in his approach.

"He's pitching with more conviction," Sveum said. "(Wednesday's) velocity wasn't like it was, but everything is going a heck of a lot better than the first half of his starts."

Jackson (3-9) was pulled after he hit Jon Jay following Molina's blast to left field. He pitched 5 1-3 innings, allowing four earned runs on six hits. He struck out one and walked two. His ERA is down to 5.49

He was pleased with his performance and wasn't even unhappy with the ball that Molina homered on.

"I thought it was a pretty good pitch, but either he was looking for it or he guessed right or it was right in his zone," Jackson said. "Either way, he hit it for a home run. But I threw my pitch with conviction and it was the pitch I wanted to throw. Sometimes it happens in a game."

Molina admitted to being surprised by his blast.

"Sometimes you get lucky," he said. "That was lucky."

Westbrook worked around trouble almost the entire night in his second start since coming off the disabled list with a sore elbow. He gave up no earned runs, striking out two and walking three.

Edward Mujica pitched a perfect ninth inning for his 21st save in 21 attempts.

Westbrook said if he voted for MVP, his battery mate would certainly get the nod.

"With the way he's been hitting, but more importantly the way he's handled us as a staff and the way we've been pitching," Westbrook said. "He, in my mind, is the reason for that."

Molina is hitting .365 and is pulling away from the field. Colorado's Troy Tulowitzki, who is on the disabled list, is second at .347. Molina is just outside of the top 10 in RBIs (41). He's also helped the Cardinals pitching staff post the major league's second-best ERA (3.28).

Allen Craig reached in the fifth after second baseman's Darwin Barney's throw on the back end of a double-play attempt went to the Cardinals dugout. Molina drove a 1-2 pitch just over the outfield wall to improve to 9 of 15 with three homers against Jackson.

Jay went to third on a hit-and-run with Daniel Descalso singling to right and scored on a hit from Pete Kozma to give St. Louis a 4-1 lead.

Westbrook retired the Cubs in order in the first and seventh innings, allowing at least one runner to reach in the five innings between. He faced the minimum in three of those five innings. Two runners were erased on inning-ending double plays and Luis Valbuena was caught stealing on a pitchout for the first out of the third.

"He was good," Molina said of Westbrook. "That sinker was moving a lot."

The pitcher lasted just five innings in his return Friday at Miami, giving up five runs (three earned) on eight hits in a loss.

"I felt good," Westbrook said. "I was throwing a really good sinker, tonight. I was locating it a lot better than the last start."

Anthony Rizzo opened the second with a single and went to third when second baseman Matt Carpenter's throw to start a potential double play sailed over the Kozma's head and into leftfield. Rizzo tagged up on a sacrifice fly from Barney and scored after knocking the ball out of Molina's glove.

Carpenter singled to start the first and scored on Craig's hit to center.

NOTES: The Cardinals earned at least a split of the four-game series. ... Jackson's exit with one out in the fifth snapped a five-game streak in which the Cubs' rotation recorded a quality start and a seven-game stretch in which it went at least six innings. ... Craig is hitting .431 with runners in scoring position. ... Rizzo's single in the second ended a 0-10 streak. ... Molina was assessed with his third error of the year for dropping the ball in the second and allowing Ryan Sweeney and Welington Castillo to advance. He had three all of last season. ... Major League Baseball made two scoring changes from the Cardinals' game June 11 at the New York Mets. It rewarded Molina a double rather than an error as originally scored and changed an error assessed to 3B David Freese to a hit for David Wright.

BOSTON (AP) -- After struggling for more than 120 minutes to score even once, the Blackhawks beat Boston goalie Tuukka Rask a half-dozen times in Game 4 of the Stanley Cup finals to send the series back to Chicago tied two games apiece.

Now that's an Original Six.

Brent Seabrook's slap shot 9:51 into overtime gave the Blackhawks a 6-5 victory on Wednesday night, restoring the home-ice advantage to the Western Conference champions. Game 5 is Saturday night in Chicago, with Game 6 back in Boston on Monday.

"I guess it was just our turn to score again," said Blackhawks forward Patrick Kane, who had a goal and an assist in the back-and-forth game in which Boston come back to tie the score three times. "It was a fun game to play. ... I'm sure the fans enjoyed that, for sure."

It was the third overtime game in the matchup of Original Six franchises, but it bore little resemblance to the three tightly contested games that opened the series. The teams combined for five goals in the second period - as many as in Games 2 and 3 combined - as Chicago bounced back from its first shutout of the season with its most prolific output of the playoffs.

Bryan Bickell and Michal Rozsival had two assists apiece for Chicago, which had scored only five goals total in the first three games of the series and hadn't gotten the puck past Rask in more than 129 minutes coming into Game 4. Corey Crawford made 28 saves, coughing up the lead three times.

"They keep coming," Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville said. "One of those nights."

Patrice Bergeron scored twice and Zdeno Chara and Jaromir Jagr each had two assists for Boston, which has won 11 of 14 playoff games; the three losses have all been in overtime.

Rask made 41 saves but he was screened by Jonathan Toews on the game-winner, which quickly quieted the building where Boston had earned a dominating, 2-0 victory two nights earlier - the only Blackhawks' shutout of the season.

"One of the things we have talked about, get pucks to the net," said Seabrook, a defenseman who also had the overtime goal in Game 7 of the Western Conference semifinals. "I just tried getting it on net, we had a great screen in front. ... It just found a way."

The Blackhawks led 1-0, 4-2 and 5-4, but each time the Bruins evened it up. The last, just 55 seconds after Chicago took the lead, came when Johnny Boychuk slapped it over a sliding Johnny Oduya with 7:46 left in regulation.

Boychuk, who had never scored more than five goals in a season, has six in the postseason.

"It wasn't a Bruins' type of game, but at the same time you have to get yourself back into it," Bruins coach Claude Julien said. "Our guys worked hard to score goals. Probably got ourselves out of what our normal game plan is. So we opened up and we scored goals, but we also gave them some goals, like the game-winning goal."

The overtime was even until the Bruins failed to clear the zone, and the Blackhawks got the puck to Seabrook at the right point. What seemed like a harmless shot eluded Rask, and the Blackhawks followed with a subdued celebration at the end of another long night.

"If he sees the puck, he's going to be almost impossible to beat," Quenneville said. "We want to make sure we get there and make it hard on him to find it, try to go on the second and third opportunity. Nice ending with traffic in the net, Seabs having a shot that tied us up."

The Bruins had trailed for under 60 minutes total of the almost 900 minutes they had played in the postseason. But the Blackhawks came out strong early in this one, recording the first seven shots and taking a 1-0 lead on a short-handed goal when Oduya was off for interference early in the first period.

Brandon Saad picked Tyler Seguin clean in the defensive zone and brought the puck down the ice before flipping it across to Michal Handzus, who rattled it in off the post to make it 1-0. That snapped Rask's shutout streak that dated to the first period of Game 2, but the lead didn't last for long.

None of them did.

The Bruins tied it on the power play when Andrew Ference kept the puck in at the blue line, and Rich Peverley finished it off with a wrist shot.

But it was in the second period that the teams really opened things up.

Toews tipped in Rozsival's shot to put the Blackhawks back in the lead with 6 1/2 minutes gone. Just over two minutes later, Chicago took its first two-goal lead of the series when Kane converted a rebound to make it 3-1.

It stayed that way for six minutes before Milan Lucic deflected Chara's shot into Crawford and then put back his own rebound to make it a one-goal game. Forty-nine seconds later, Kruger stuck with the puck until he had poked it past Rask and into the net to make it 4-2.

That's when Boston got some luck.

Chara's shot from the center of the blue line deflected off Crawford's left shoulder and over the net, where it hit the back wall, bounced back onto the top of the net and landed in the slot, right in front of Bergeron. He chipped it in to make it 4-3, then tied it two minutes into the third.

"You think you have a good lead at 3-1 and they made it 3-2. Then we had 4-2 and they scored on the power play," Kane said. "It was back and forth the whole game but a fun game to play."

Patrick Sharp gave Chicago a 5-4 lead with 8:41 left in regulation - on an assist from Marian Hossa, who missed Game 3 with an undisclosed injury - but it lasted only 55 seconds before Boychuk tied it.

Notes: Bruins Hall of Famer Bobby Orr, who also played briefly for Chicago, was in the crowd, waving a yellow towel in support of the Bruins. ... Boston killed 29 consecutive penalties dating to Game 5 of the Eastern Conference semifinals, including the first 13 Chicago opportunities of the finals. ... The Blackhawks had the first seven shots of the game despite a penalty that left them short-handed. ... Jagr assisted on both goals by Bergeron, giving the 1999 NHL MVP 199 career postseason points. He is fifth all-time. ... Midway through the first, Boston's Shawn Thornton hit the scoreboard when he lofted the puck out of the zone.

BERLIN (AP) — Trying to tamp down concerns about government over-reach, President Barack Obama on Wednesday defended U.S. Internet and phone surveillance programs as narrowly targeted efforts that have saved lives and thwarted at least 50 terror threats.

"This is not a situation in which we are rifling through ordinary emails" of huge numbers of citizens in the United States or elsewhere, the president declared during a news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He called it as a "circumscribed, narrow" surveillance program.

"Lives have been saved," Obama said, adding that the program has been closely supervised by the courts to ensure that any encroachment of privacy is strictly limited.

Merkel, for her part, said it was important to continue debate about how to strike "an equitable balance" between providing security and protecting personal freedoms.

"There has to be proportionality," she said. She added that their discussion on the matter Wednesday was "an important first step" over striking a balance.

Merkel appeared to be looking to avoid a public rift with Washington over the surveillance program, particularly since Germans benefit from U.S. intelligence. Much of the German criticism of the program has come from her junior coalition partners, facing the prospect of losses in the September election and looking for an issue.

The two leaders spoke to the media after meeting privately on a range of issues confronting U.S. and European leaders, including the fragile effort to bring peace in Afghanistan, where peace talks with the Taliban are in the offing to find ways to end the nearly 12-year war. Earlier Wednesday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai suspended talks with the United States on a new security deal to protest the way his government was being left out of the initial peace negotiations with the Taliban.

Obama said the U.S. had anticipated "there were going to be some areas of friction, to put it mildly, in getting this thing off the ground. That's not surprising. They've been fighting there for a long time" and mistrust is rampant.

Karzai said Wednesday that peace talks cannot begin amid "fighting and bloodshed." But Obama said it was important to pursue a parallel track toward reconciliation even as the fighting continues, and it would up to the Afghan people whether that effort ultimately bears fruit.

On another world trouble spot, the 2-year-old Syrian civil war, the president declined to provide details on the type of military support the U.S. will provide to opposition forces. But he said the administration had been consistent in working toward the over-riding goal of a Syria that is "peaceful, non-sectarian, democratic, legitimate, tolerant."

"I cannot and will not comment on specifics around our programs related to the Syrian opposition," he said.

The president said while world leaders at the just-completed Group of 8 summit in Northern Ireland could not agree on whether Syrian President Bashar Assad must go, he believes Assad cannot regain legitimacy.

And the president offered reassurances on another issue of particular concern in Germany. In response to a question from a German reporter, Obama said the United States doesn't use Germany as a launching point for unmanned drones to strike terrorist targets. He said he knows there have been some reports in Germany speculating that was the case, but it's not so.

Later Wednesday, Obama planned to draw attention to his plan for a one-third reduction in U.S. and Russian arsenals, rekindling a goal that was a centerpiece of his early first-term national security agenda.

His 26-hour whirlwind visit to the German capital caps three days of international summitry for the president and marks his return to a place where he once summoned a throng of 200,000 to share his ambitious vision for American leadership.

Obama will make the case for his nuclear plan during a speech at Berlin's iconic Brandenburg Gate. His address comes nearly 50 years after John F. Kennedy's famous Cold War speech in this once-divided city, and five years after Obama spoke in the city during his 2008 run for president.

The president has previously called for reductions to the stockpiles and is not expected to outline a timeline for this renewed push. But by addressing the issue in a major foreign policy speech, Obama is signaling a desire to rekindle an issue that was a centerpiece of his early first-term national security agenda.

Five years later, Obama comes to deliver a highly anticipated speech to a country that's a bit more sober about his aspirations and the extent of his successes, yet still eager to receive his attention at a time that many here feel that Europe, and Germany in particular, are no longer U.S. priorities. A Pew Research Center poll of Germans found that while their views of the U.S. have slipped since Obama's first year in office, he has managed to retain his popularity, with 88 percent of those surveyed approving of his foreign policies.

Obama also has an arc of history to fulfill.

Fifty years ago next week, President Kennedy addressed a crowd of 450,000 in that then-divided city to repudiate communism and famously declare "Ich bin ein Berliner," German for "I am a Berliner." Since then, presidents from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton have used Berlin speeches to articulate broad themes about freedom and international alliances.

Obama, fresh from a two-day summit of the Group of Eight industrial economies, placed his hand over his heart outside the sunny presidential palace as a German military band played "The Star-Spangled Banner," the American national anthem. He and German President Joachim Gauck inspected a lineup of German military troops before entering the palace, stopping to greet children who waved American and German flags.

The visit was attracting widespread attention in Germany. People waved and snapped photos as Obama sped by after his arrival and a thick cluster awaited the motorcade as it passed the Brandenburg Gate. An evening news show in Berlin devoted itself to the president's visit, highlighting "Das Biest," or "The Beast," as the president's armored limousine is called.

There have been a few small protests, including one directed against the National Security Agency's surveillance of foreign communications, where about 50 people waved placards taunting, "Yes, we scan."

Merkel has said she was surprised at the scope of the spying that was revealed and said the U.S. must clarify what information is monitored. But she also said U.S. intelligence was key to foiling a large-scale terror plot and acknowledged her country is "dependent" on cooperating with American spy services.

For Merkel, the visit presents an opportunity to bolster her domestic standing ahead of a general election in September.

The U.S. and the Germans have clashed on economic issues, with Obama pressing for Europe to prime the economy with government stimulus measures, while Merkel has insisted on pressing debt-ridden countries to stabilize their fiscal situations first.

But the two sides have found common ground on a trans-Atlantic trade pact between the European Union and the U.S. At the just-completed G-8 summit, the leaders agreed to hold the first talks next month in the U.S.

___ Associated Press writers Julie Pace, Robert Reid and Frank Jordans contributed to this report.