Next year ain't here
After 99 years, Cubs will have to wait again
Maybe the long road to October finally caught up with the Cubs.
Maybe the exhilaration of getting there drained what was left of their emotional reserve.
(Tom Cruze/Sun-Times)
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Fans: Not again
Maybe it was just bad timing, bad luck or bad karma.
More likely it was this: The Cubs lost to a better team.
''That's tough to admit,'' second baseman Mark DeRosa said quietly in a somber Cubs clubhouse Saturday night. ''And I won't.''
Give them this much: The Cubs still had pride and fight. But after the Arizona Diamondbacks beat them 5-1 at Wrigley Field, they had no more games to play.
''You never envision a sweep,'' said team leader Derrek Lee, choking back tears nearly an hour after the Diamondbacks completed the three-game sweep in the first-round playoff series. ''We just didn't play well. They were the better team. They deserve to go on.''
In a Cubs season filled with fits and poor starts, fisticuffs and late slumps, their 85-win division championship seemed like the upset victory that offered a reason for optimism against any opponent in the National League playoffs.
But the NL West-champion Diamondbacks, who won an NL-best 90 games, improved on their 4-for-6 performance against the Cubs in the regular season by outplaying them in every aspect of the game during the brief series.
''This game sometimes is crazy,'' said Alfonso Soriano, the $136 million leadoff hitter who went 2-for-14 in the series without a run scored -- the poster boy for all that went wrong offensively for the Cubs in the series.
He credited a Diamondbacks pitching staff that turned a healthy fear of the Cubs' big hitters into three games of not making mistakes. But that hardly could explain a Game 3 performance by the Diamondbacks' Livan Hernandez that featured five walks, a hit batter and five hits in six innings of work -- in which he allowed only one run.
But this does: A Division Series record-tying four double plays, including three to end innings -- with one by DeRosa with the bases loaded and a 3-1 count in the fifth.
''I felt good at the plate all day,'' DeRosa said. ''But the one at-bat I needed to come through, I didn't get it done. And that's what you take from it. Period. The end.''
He wasn't the only one in a Cubs uniform who didn't get it done. The Cubs had runners on base in 23 of the 27 innings in the series but scored only six times in three games -- going 2-for-23 (.087) with runners in scoring position.
''I learned a lot,'' said Lee, who won a World Series with the Florida Marlins in 2003 but managed just four singles and didn't drive in a run in this series. ''There are certain times you need to show up. And if you don't, you go pack.''
But as easy as it is to point to that as the reason the Cubs lost, they also broke down in the area that had been their strength all year: pitching. Even with a dominant six innings by Carlos Zambrano in a Game 1 no-decision, the starters combined to go 0-2 with a 7.30 ERA in the series -- with Rich Hill giving up a tone-setting home run to Chris Young on the first pitch of the game and lasting just two batters into the fourth.
Overall, the pitching staff that ranked second in the NL this season with a 4.04 ERA had a 5.76 mark in the three games.
Shortstop Ryan Theriot wasn't ready to accept that meant the Diamondbacks were a better team. But, he said, ''They played better for three games, and that's all that matters in the postseason. You don't look at matchups and the stats you had that season. It's who's playing better at that point, and they were.''
Still, the sweep was stunning -- the last thing anyone on the North Side expected even in the darkest moments of doubt.
''Every season comes to an end, and you walk out of the clubhouse sometimes disappointed and thinking you should have done better,'' DeRosa said.
''But this was the one season, the one team that I thought was really capable of making a run at this thing. And to get swept and to watch them celebrate on our field is going to be tough to get over.''
Yet history might suggest a team that had a season filled with an ugly start, early clubhouse dissension, a fistfight between teammates, an August slump and the Milwaukee Brewers setting a torrid early pace had no right to expect to play in October at all -- especially coming off a 96-loss season.
''We have nothing to be ashamed about,'' said Cliff Floyd, who won a World Series with the Marlins in 1997. ''As tough as it may be to see people jumping around and having a good time on your field, we dealt with a lot of adversity and we beat it, and it just wasn't our turn.''