For first time in 6 months, the Cubs are playing from behind
LOS ANGELES — Destiny — whatever it is, assuming it’s a thing at all — must arrive by flatbed truck, having been driven through a hard rain. A cold rain. Sleet, almost. Because it’s haggard, man. It’s unloaded weathered, done some hard miles. And every time the truck slowed down along the way, gassed up, somebody out there thought, “Hey, my destiny is here,” and yet it rumbled away. “Maybe tomorrow. I’ll check tomorrow.”
The Chicago Cubs, the done-their-time Cubs of clever management and a thick-shouldered roster and 103 wins, may have some thoughts about destiny, thoughts they keep to themselves, because inevitability doesn’t generally include doing something with a two-strike, backdoor curveball on the black. What it does demand, however, is another day, another game, and the Cubs would seem to have at least a couple of those ahead. They lost Tuesday night at Dodger Stadium, just as they lost Sunday night at Wrigley, first to Clayton Kershaw, which folks can live with, and then to Rich Hill, and they’ve been shut out in consecutive mid-October games, and now the Cubs are playing from behind.
Granted, they’ve spent well more than a century in a similar condition, with a few this-time-it’s-differents mixed in, and in those times you probably couldn’t have talked them out of the destiny end of the experience until you no longer had to. The games had taken care of that. Except this season really is different, probably. These Cubs haven’t played from behind since April 8, the fourth game of a 162-game season, a day that passed with almost no notice at all, and indeed would be rectified the very next day, and most days since, until Oct. 18, that being Tuesday, when the Dodgers beat them, 6-0, for a two-games-to-one lead in the National League Championship Series.
Still only three games into this. Just three. They have John Lackey as their starting pitcher Wednesday in Game 4 against Dodgers lefty Julio Urias. Lackey was winning a World Series Game 7 when Urias was still in kindergarten. It’s where the Cubs were going to be better in this series, after all, with all their starting pitching fresh and lined up against a Dodgers’ rotation that was said to thin pretty quickly after Kershaw, but which hasn’t yet. They’ve held the Cubs scoreless for 18 innings, the Cubs whose offense was the best in the National League outside Colorado, whose offense has five singles and a double strewn across those 18 innings, since Miguel Montero and Dexter Fowler homered to put away Game 1.
See, hold a sharpened paperclip to the heads of Dodgers players and they may confess to having some destiny thoughts of their own, which doesn’t fit the Cubs’ story, which probably is fine by the Dodgers. Every man drives his own flatbed truck. So sometimes you score eight runs across three hours and sometimes you hit .100 over the next three days, when one run is enough to beat you, when six feels like overkill, when the story maybe doesn’t change but undoubtedly gets a lot more interesting.
“It’s not a predicament,” Cubs outfielder Dexter Fowler said, protesting the word itself. “It’s seven games for a reason.”
Or six. Or five. It’s hard to say.
They’d probably understand at The Cubby Bear bar were the Cubs unable to muster much of a fight against Kershaw, just as it’s possible the same patrons would be mystified were the Cubs to fall under a hail of curveballs from Hill, a Cub from a different generation.
Hill threw 50 of them Tuesday night, which is a lot of curveballs. Kris Bryant struck one for a single in the third inning and another for a single in the sixth. Anthony Rizzo took one for ball four in the second. Meantime, the Dodgers were biding their time against Jake Arrieta, who, like Kyle Hendricks before him, was in a situation where he’d lose with a single mistake. He made several. The Dodgers hit two into the bleachers. Suddenly somebody else was throwing that little party in the middle of the field, shaking hands and yucking it up for the locals, in the middle of a series in which the Cubs merely had to be themselves, in which the Dodgers would require a fairly accurate and well-timed lightning strike, which would explain the tin-foil hats and held-aloft 2-irons.
“I’m very surprised,” Montero said of an offense that in three games has scored eight runs, four on his swing in Game 1. “I think we’re trying to do too much. We’re all trying to be heroes here.
“We’re young, but we’ve got experience. So we’ve got to learn. … We’ve got to grow. We’ve got to get better. … We have to start now.”
Plenty of them were on the wrong end of the NLCS sweep at the hands of the New York Mets around this time last October. Their time last October, they believed then, an uncomfortable outcome mostly buried by those 103 wins, by the authority in which they came. And now they have to start winning again, hitting with authority, rediscovering their usual game, because three games is just three games, and nobody’s saying it’s anything more than that. Not yet.
“There is not a whole lot to do except come out and play again tomorrow,” manager Joe Maddon said. “I believe we’re going to be ready to play. We do need to make better contact. We’re going to have to pitch well, also. They’re going to throw that same left-handed-laden lineup against us, and we’ll have to do well against that. But, more than anything, I think we need to get a couple runs and hits early to try to get that feeling back.”
And that’s all it is, right? Wait your turn. Play your game. Lean on the man beside you. Keep showing up, see what comes by, shorten up on a few swings, hit a ball in the gap, see what passes by.
Maybe tomorrow. They’ll check tomorrow.
