NLCS Game 4: The unlikely bat that got Anthony Rizzo back on track
LOS ANGELES – The first time Anthony Rizzo struck out Wednesday night he dropped his bat where he was, right there at his feet. This was before all the hits, all the runs, before he back-spun that fastball into the bleachers, before the Chicago Cubs tied the National League Championship Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers at a two games apiece. It was best, perhaps, in the moment, to disassociate himself from all offending implements, including the bat. Especially the bat. Dumb bat.
The second time Anthony Rizzo struck out he carried his bat to the dugout, a slow walk with that bat held away from him, like it smelled bad or had been dipped in uranium, and there’d be no sense in having someone else exposed. This was before he laced that slider into right-center field, before the Cubs had endeavored to clear Dodger Stadium of Dodger fans before the seventh inning, leaving a more familiar blue.
There’s almost always another at-bat, though. That’s what gets them through the 2-for-28’s, the 2-for-freakin’-28’s, all the at-bats still waiting, all the promise for better, at least the opportunity for better, which is a lot more comforting in June than it is in October. The at-bats are approaching something more finite now, and Rizzo dropped the bat at 2-for-27 and returned the bat at 2-for-28 and he was running out of options. The wood chipper maybe.
So this is where the smile comes from, the soft chuckle, when the 2-for-28 is gone and replaced by 3-for-5, and a 10-2 win at Dodger Stadium replaced two hard losses, which means it wasn’t just Anthony Rizzo leaving a slump behind but Addison Russell too, as well as an entire lineup (almost) that hadn’t scored since Saturday, which, had it gone on like that, would’ve been a helluva way to turn 103 wins into dust.
The Cubs had spent three full days claiming they were better than back-to-back shutouts, better than a deficit in this series, and of course they were, and are. Except this is what can happen over a couple days or even a week, which is what makes October, October, particularly when you’re the club with something of an October reputation to live down. One crummy at-bat becomes a dozen, or one unhappy result becomes a dozen, and suddenly you’re playing just to make a best-of-seven series competitive, playing to get back home before the free booze is uncapped.
Not everything has to go right, but enough does, and it sure is helpful when the guy batting third or fourth in the batting order rediscovers the stroke that feeds pitches to (and drives in) the men before him and delivers RBI opportunities to the men behind him. That would be Rizzo, who is one of the more ferocious and productive hitters in the league, who should draw some MVP votes when folks are done writing in teammate Kris Bryant’s name, and who – as we mentioned – carried his bat back to the rack in the third inning Wednesday night with two singles, zero RBIs and nine strikeouts over 13 days of the most important baseball games of the year.
“All the guys in the clubhouse are there telling you, all the veterans, it just takes one at-bat,” Rizzo said after Game 4. “It just takes one.”
So, having run out of bat transport ideas after the third inning, and having watched eight Cubs bat in the fourth inning, all but him, turned out, and counting four runs scored without him, Rizzo chose otherwise. As he has occasionally, he borrowed a teammate’s bat, Matt Szczur’s bat, one that is shaped and weighted similarly, but is a different model and has a different name on it. Rizzo homered for the Cubs’ fifth run. An inning later, after the Dodgers had rallied to close to within 5-2, Rizzo singled home two more runs, the Cubs’ ninth and 10th runs. Two innings after that, he singled again.
Against the disappointment of 2-for-28, he was 3-for-5. He scored twice. He drove in three runs. Russell, who’d been 1-for-25 in the postseason, had three hits as well, including a fourth-inning, two-run home run against 20-year-old lefty rookie Julio Urias that established the Cubs would not go without some kind of fight, and definitely would not go while amidst the movie stars and palm trees. They had 13 hits in all. The preponderance of balls in play and baserunners seemed to exasperate the Dodgers, too, as they committed four errors and had a man picked off and played their worst game in recent memory.
A lot had to happen to get to 10-2, to get to the postgame handshakes and grins, nearly four hours’ worth of things. And it seemed the best to come of it was a whole Rizzo. A productive Rizzo. A Rizzo who spent three plate appearances on his bat’s barrel, or Matt Szczur’s bat’s barrel, as it were.
He homered on a 98-mph fastball, pretty much in the middle of the plate, off Pedro Baez, two pitches after pulling another fastball a few feet right of the foul pole. The at-bat began with three balls, so a 3-and-0 count. It ended on a full count.
“It was kind of a rollercoaster at-bat, three-oh there,” he recounted. “I know I have to get on base, and we’re up four. So, just said to myself, ‘This is going to be a good pitch for me to just let it eat.’ And I missed foul, just foul. Obviously, I’m not too happy about that ball going foul at the moment, and then the next pitch is painted on the inside corner. So I go from three-oh, just missing a home run, to three-two. You know, miss another good pitch and I got the hat trick on the day. So, just stuck with it and he threw another fastball and I put a good swing on it.”
He had been hunting that at-bat, of course. Hunting a pitch and a swing that would carry him away from 2-for-whatever-it-was-becoming, October’s end drawing nearer but not here yet. And there it was, a thick fastball on the heavy end of a borrowed bat, followed by another, and another, and the Cubs looked healthy again, and the Dodgers were falling all over themselves, and now it’s a fair fight again.
“Yeah, that’s our team,” Cubs manager Joe Maddon said. “You saw our team out there today.”
It started, really, with all of them, with layers of good at-bats, and some good fortune, and enough pitching, and sometimes these things come out of nowhere and sometimes they come out of perfectly reasonable expectations. Sometimes it starts right in the middle, soon as it’s understood it was probably the bat’s fault.
