By Yours Truly
https://fancredsports.com/Articles/22-feeble-innings-end-the-cubs-2018
Just like that, the season ended for the Cubs. Just like that, they spent their final two games of the season---one of two tiebreakers to determine National League division championships, then the wild card game---scoring two runs in two days and 22 innings and in their own venerable home playpen.
Just like that, the team with the National League's deceptively best regular season record was gone for the winter. Just like that, a .170 hitting backup catcher named Tony Wolters---inserted into the game in the twelfth---rapped an RBI single up the pipe in the thirteenth before Rockies reliever Scott Oberg struck out the side swinging in the bottom of the inning Tuesday night.
Just like that, the Cubs were finally exposed as having weaknesses enough at the plate and elsewhere despite the team being, mostly, the same aggregation that pulled a World Series rabbit out of its hat at the eleventh hour two years ago. And, just like that, they exposed concurrently that the Brewers, who beat them in the 163rd game Monday, and the Rockies, who out-lasted them in a thirteen-inning thriller of a wild card game, are better teams than they've been credited.
Against the Brewers in the Monday tiebreaker, even knowing the Brewers entered on a seven-game winning streak having won nine of ten, the Cubs had nothing to say at the plate other than Anthony Rizzo hitting Jhoulys Chacin's o-1 service almost to the rear end of the right field bleachers to tie the game at one leading off the bottom of the fifth.
Rizzo's bomb was the first Cub hit of the game. Ian Happ opened the sixth with a full-count walk but Willson Contreras dialed Area Code 1-4-3 almost immediately. With Xavier Cedeno relieving Chacin, Daniel Murphy---who once wrecked the Cubs during his 2015 postseason home run binge as a Met---rapped a base hit over second base and Ben Zobrist wrung out a four-pitch walk, but against Cedeno's relief Joakim Soria Javier Baez, an MVP candidate, struck out swinging on a shoulder-high fastball.
And other than Baez keeping the Cubs alive in the ninth with a two-out base hit punched over shortstop into left, the Cubs had nothing else to say at the plate. The Brewers had enough more to say at the plate: Another MVP candidate, Christian Yelich, opened the scoring in the third with a base hit right back up the pipe to score Orlando Arcia. Lorenzo Cain dumped a quail into shallow center with second and third and nobody out in the eighth to score Arcia, and Ryan Braun shot one up the middle to score Domingo Santana, who'd come in as a pinch hitter for Brewers reliever Corey Knabel, the knuckle curve specialist.
The Rockies may have been shoved to the wild card game when Dodgers rookie Walker Buehler no-hit them into the sixth and had a 5-0 lead when he came out in the seventh, even though they put a little shake into Dodger Stadium, when Nolen Arenado and Trevor Story greeted the Dodgers' formidable but possibly still-ailing closer Kenley Jansen with back-to-back home runs opening the top of the ninth for their only runs of the game.
But they wrestled the Cubs all wild card game long Tuesday. Cubs starter Jon Lester and Rockies starter Kyle Freeland---on three days' rest and in his first postseason game---matched each other almost exactly, with Lester ringing up three more strikeouts but the Rockies prying a single run out of him in the first, when Charlie Blackmon drew a leadoff walk, D.J. LaMahieu planted a ground rule double into the left center field ivy, and Arenado lofted a sacrifice fly to left center. It stayed 1-0 until Baez, with pinch runner Terrance Gore aboard to run for Rizzo (a two-out single) ripped Gore home with a double to the back of the yard after Gore stole second.
And it stayed tied until Wolters stepped up to play . . . try the hero least likely to be a topic in the first place, never mind the unlikely one. With first and third and two out in the top of the thirteenth, against Kyle Hendricks, normally a starter but pressed into relief (as was Cole Hamels earlier), Wolters looked at a strike, swung for strike two, took a high ball one, then shot one up the pipe to score Story. In the bottom, Gore tried and failed to convince the umpires he'd been hit by a pitch before he struck out swinging on a full count; Baez swung right through a fastball down the pipe on 2-2; and, Albert Almora, Jr. struck out swinging on three pitches that didn't get anywhere near his wheelhouse.
The Cubs just spent two days playing the most important 22 innings of baseball they'd play all year long, and they went 1-for-8 with men in scoring position. That after they came down the stretch unable to hit well enough to hold a five-game National League Central lead. They managed to hang in when losing Kris Bryant for a month or so with a shoulder injury, but when it came down to the two biggest games of their season nobody other than Rizzo and Baez really picked it up.
The wild card game was barely over when the rumours began flying that Joe Maddon's days as the Cubs manager were numbered, maybe even earlier than his contract expires at the end of next season. The only man in franchise history to take the Cubs to four straight postseasons while winning the club's only World Series since the Roosevelt Administration (Theodore's, that is) had fired one hitting coach to hire another (Chili Davis) who was supposed to remind these Cubs of the wisdom of using the entire field and playing as much station-to-station ball as trying to hit past Waveland Avenue.
Maddon also came under scrutiny for his bullpen management, which enough called mis-management or mal-management, where he's been ever since he let Pedro Stop bat against the Nationals and Strop ended up with a hamstring issue he's still battling. He seemingly over-used Steve Cishek and Jesse Chavez and may have hooked his Monday starter Jose Quintana a little too soon, after five and two-thirds, but then he may also have hooked Chavez a little too soon with a pinch hitter who grounded out to end the seventh.
Then Justin Wilson surrendered a leadoff single to Arcia and a followup double to Santana. Maddon brought in Cishek and Cain's RBI single came promptly. He hooked Cishek for Randy Rosario, who promptly struck Yelich out---then hooked Rosario for Brandon Kintzler, the exiled Nat who hadn't been pitching anywhere near as well for the Cubs as he did in Washington before his controversial trade. And there came Braun's RBI insurance run.
Various published reports say his players have Maddon's back. "We love our manager. The way he talks to us and the way he lets us do whatever we want, be us out there," Baez told the
Chicago Sun-Times, "I think [that] has a lot to do with what we do out there. Because we've got to be ourselves." Bryant was just as emphatic: "Joe always does a great job with us. He always has our best interests in mind. We won 95 games. I mean, that's pretty impressive."
The Brewers in the tiebreaker and the Rockies in the wild card game were more impressive when it mattered. How impressive they'll be against each other when their division series starts Thursday won't be known until they start going at it. But they were both a lot more impressive in sending the Cubs---with pretty much the same nucleus that won that thriller of a 2016 World Series---home for the winter than the Cubs were in trying to claim their division and then just stay in the postseason at all.
Now, look what the Cubs have to look forward to for 2019. A manager who may be going into the season as a lame duck if he isn't offered a contract extension. A farm system that isn't quite as full as was only recently. A bullpen with a few holes and a closer whose recovery is critical. A lineup that needs a full healing for the third baseman who forms its heart and soul with its first baseman. A rotation that needs a fully-rehabilitated Yu Darvish. And yet, those actually seem to be small orders right now.
Because winning 95 is impressive, even if the way they lost their final two was anything but. So say goodbye to the Cubs for 2018, but don't write off 2019 just yet. They're not exactly going to roll over and play dead, or start sending this or that man to the guillotine. Are they?
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