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It took a single inning to crystallize 100 years.
In the second inning of Game 2 of the NLDS, the Chicago Cubs, amid a din of boos, were out-managed, out-executed, out-hustled, out-performed, and even out-lucked by the Los Angeles Dodgers. The grimly predictable upshot is that the Cubs are on the verge of seeing their World Series dreams come to grief. Again.
It was apparent early that Carlos Zambrano was missing his spots, and it didn't take long for the revived Dodger offense to make him pay. A hit-'em-where-they-ain't bounder to a vacated hole at short and Rafael Furcal bunt, two hit-'em-where-they-are miscues by the Cubs, and a capstone Russell Martin three-run double buried the Cubs for, in all likelihood, a 100th straight season. Now, after a sloppy, distracted and listless performance, the Cubs will slouch their way to Los Angeles. They'll do so with history and the odds terribly against them. An entire city — or, to be more accurate, half of a city — is left wondering: what happened?
It's a question without a single answer. The Cubs, who have now dropped eight straight postseason games, ran into a team that's better than they appear at first blush. The Dodgers' offense has been "orders of magnitude" better since Manny Ramirez arrived; Furcal is back and igniting; and Derek Lowe, the Game 1 winner, and Andre Ethier have been on another level since the break.
That's to say nothing of Joe Torre's wise decision to ignore tenure and play the kids rather than grinding it out with unproductive vets like Jeff Kent and Juan Pierre. So yes, the Dodgers have the worst record of any playoff team despite playing in baseball's weakest division. But they're better than that. Just ask the Cubs.
While the Cubs went 5-2 against the Dodgers in the regular season, they out-scored them by only one run. The Cubs also had the good fortune of playing the Dodgers after the injury to Furcal that sidelined him for almost five months and before their trades for Ramirez and Casey Blake.
So the Cubs, in the process of besting the Dodgers by one total run across seven games, were going up against those Dodgers at their weakest point — during May and June. The team that ritually abused them in Games 1 and 2 isn't the team they faced in the regular season.
On another level, it's two games, and anything can happen over the span of two games. This season, the Cubs — best regular-season team in the National League by a comfortable margin — lost two or more games in a row on 17 different occasions. It happens. That it happened now, when it means so much, may not be the residue of poor managing, or a team-wide character flaw, or a curse (especially not a curse). It may just be, as unsatisfactory as this sounds, one of those things.
Baseball, by nature, has a great deal of in-game parity, and as much hay as football makes off the "any given Sunday/Saturday" thing, it's baseball that provides the least predictability and the most uncertainty. Anything can happen, and in Games 1 and 2, anything did happen to the Cubs. Or, as Cubs manager Lou Piniella said after Game 2, "If you play the way we played, it doesn't matter who your opposition is."
Throughout Game 2, the booing in Wrigley was almost tidal in regularity. And it's easy to understand why. An error from every infield position? A 10-3 score that would've been worse if not for some charitable umpiring on the bases? Heck, Geovany Soto, in trying to get the ball back to the pitcher, turned into Mackey Sasser on a couple of occasions. If the Cubs were a high school team, then they'd have been running laps after the game.
As for passing out blame for what's happened in this series, it's a crowded list of offenders. Zambrano and Ryan Dempster, the Chicago starters, combined to give up 11 runs. The Cubs' offense had as many runs as the Cubs' defense had errors.
The Cubs are now tasked with coming back from down 0-2 and winning three straight games, two of which will be in Dodger Stadium. In the history of Division Series, just four teams — the '95 Mariners, the '99 Red Sox, the '01 Yankees and the '03 Red Sox — have come back from down zero games to two to advance. And of those, only the '01 Yankees did it after dropping the first two games at home. Stated another, more discouraging way, in the 52 Division Series to date, only one team has done what the Cubs must do.
So while the odds of a Dodger trip to the NLCS aren't quite as high as, say, the odds that you'll see another erectile-dysfunction commercial during the course of the postseason, they're still quite lofty.
Worse for the Cubs is that, in Game 3, they'll face a pitcher quite similar to the one who dominated them on Thursday night. That's Hiroki Kuroda, and like Chad Billingsley he's a hard-throwing right-hander who lives off his splitter and fastball. In all likelihood, the Cubs' 2008 season — all 97 wins of it — will end on Saturday in Dodger Stadium.
At least the booing won't be as loud.
http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/story/8636 ... -best-team |
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