"People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do, I stare out the window and wait for spring." - Rogers Hornsby

:: Friday, September 17, 2004 ::

Here's Why I Like Neifi Perez

There are some things that happen on a baseball field that simply cannot be measured in a stat line.

One of them is the value of a player being able to assess the situation on the field and keep a potential crisis from becoming worse.

That's what Neifi Perez did for the Cubs tonight, and it won't show up in any box score, but Steve Stone picked up on it on the telecast, and in addition to the very real offensive contributions that Perez has made in his two weeks on the roster, he may have helped prevent a Carlos Zambrano meltdown.

Situation: third inning, scoreless game, runner on first, and Z lost Felipe Lopez to a walk on a pitch that was a hair inside and that he thought that plate umpire Andy Fletcher jobbed him on.

Perez immediately came over to Z, who can implode, or maybe even explode, at a moment's notice, and said something to him that must have calmed him down, because two pitches later, Sean Casey hit a soft line drive right to Mark Grudzielanek, and the Cubs were out of the inning.

Depending on the health status of Nomar Garciaparra, I'd think the Cubs ought to try to find a way to get Neifi onto the postseason roster, and even though he wasn't recalled till September 1, teams do this all the time, with the available loopholes. I don't want to disparage Nomar either, but the Cubs are now 5-1 without him this week. Perez had an RBI double too. He's not a great player, but he's contributing in both tangible and intangible ways.

I'll never forget the last day of the 1998 regular season, September 27, when the Cubs and Giants began the day tied for the wild-card, and I was watching the game with some bleacher friends in a bar near Wrigley Field. The Cubs had blown a 3-1 lead and lost to Houston 4-3 in 11 innings -- and we turned around to another TV showing the Rockies/Giants game, just in time to see Neifi hit a bottom-of-the-ninth homer and the Rockies came from 7-0 down to beat the Giants 9-8.

I walked out of the bar to the amazing sight of literally hundreds of people running down Clark and Addison Streets toward the box office to line up for tickets to the wild-card tiebreaker game the next day.

At that game there were several signs reading "Neifi Perez for President". There must be some magical connection between Neifi and the Cubs and now it's working on our side.

Anyway, tonight the rest of the offense worked the magic it's been on for the last week -- today's offensive hero, Derrek Lee, had his turn for a 5-RBI night, and the Cubs took advantage of the mediocre Reds pitching staff, blowing them out 12-4, (even after the bullpen gave the Reds some late consolation runs), winning their fifth in a row behind a crowd that seemed almost two-thirds Cub partisan, and I'd expect the same, if not even more, tomorrow and Sunday.

Z got in on the offensive fun himself, hitting his third career homer. It was also his first of the season, and third this year (Wood and Rusch the others) by a Cub pitcher. Z is now a .192 lifetime hitter with seven doubles and three homers in 172 career at-bats (including tonight), not to mention the seven strong innings he threw, and he definitely got stronger after Perez' conference with him in the third. He threw a typical 112 pitches, allowed six hits and only one run, a Sean Casey homer when the game was already well in hand at 7-0.

Everyone got into the act, including Ben Grieve, who pinch-hit for Z in the eighth, smacking a two-run double (his first RBI as a Cub) and then a homer in the ninth after staying in the game, and also Todd Walker, who drove in a run as a pinch-hitter -- this is a good sign, as Walker had been only 3-for-23 as a pinch-hitter before tonight.

Sergio Mitre, who came to the mound sporting a new short haircut tonight, finished the ninth uneventfully. Maybe that's been his problem -- his hair's been too long.

Tomorrow, Greg Maddux goes for his fifteenth win, and if he gets it he will establish a new major league record, as it would be the seventeenth consecutive season he's had fifteen or more wins.

At last, this ballclub appears to be the team we thought we'd have on the field on Opening day, and not a moment too soon. Keep the faith.

:: posted by Al at 9:07 PM [+] ::
...

Aramis!

The title of today's post was going to be "Happy New Year", in honor of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year we celebrated today, and with the kids off school we went to a service this morning, and then to the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in the afternoon.

And that was refreshing -- how often in this modern age, in a big city like Chicago, can you do something with your kids absolutely free?

Thursday is "Free Day" at the nature museum, and with it being a weekday and most people working, parking was free on the street, and the museum was uncrowded, and it was a relaxing and enjoyable afternoon.

I've digressed here from the title discussion, but obviously, I had to retitle this one after Aramis Ramirez tied the Cubs' club record with fourteen total bases (three homers and a double), drove in all five runs, and basically single-handedly led the Cubs to a crucially important 5-4 win over the Reds, their fourth in a row, and sixth win in their last seven games.

I say crucially important for several reasons. First, all the other wild-card contending clubs won their games today (in the case of the Astros, leading big in the middle innings at the time of this post), and as Steve Stone (actually, I was a bit surprised to see Stone tonight, as he is Jewish and typically takes days off on the Jewish High Holidays) pointed out on the telecast, it's always a good thing to start out a road trip with a win, particularly when the trip is as long as this one is.

The third Ramirez homer, which gave the Cubs the lead back after some really bad pitching by Kerry Wood had allowed the Reds a 4-3 lead, also was the Cubs' 213th of the season, breaking the club record, which had been established in 1998. Ramirez, thanks to two walks in the 9th, to Corey Patterson and Neifi Perez (Neifi Perez? Walking? Who IS this guy, anyway?), actually came to bat with a shot at a fourth homer, and he had a pretty good at-bat before hitting a hard line drive to right field for the third out of the inning.

Wood had actually started the game off well, not allowing a hit till the fourth, when Ryan Freel did exactly what Stone said the Cubs should not let him do -- get on base, because then he stole second and by the time the inning was over the Reds had closed the lead to 3-2. Then Wood got wild in the fifth, walking, among other people, pitcher Josh Hancock (who had zero walks in his major league career as a hitter before tonight), and before it was over the Reds had a 4-3 lead.

Dusty had allowed Kerry to bat, amazingly enough, leading off the seventh, and he made Dusty look stupid by hitting the first pitch for a groundout. But that's when Aramis took over (after a hard grounder by Corey Patterson had gone off Sean Casey's glove for an error, and smacked his thirty-third homer) giving the Cubs the 5-4 lead, which was efficiently protected by Kent Mercker (an eight-pitch 1-2-3 eighth) and LaTroy Hawkins (a ten-pitch 1-2-3 ninth for his 22nd save), and at last the bullpen appears to have righted itself.

Dave Otto said on the FSN post-game show that he agreed with Dusty's decision to leave Wood in, and Kerry did throw a scoreless seventh. He had, however, already thrown 102 pitches by then, and I hope this doesn't affect him later on. Otto went on to say that it reminded him of the July 2003 game where Dusty let Carlos Zambrano bat for himself, and the Cubs came back and won -- but Z won that game all by himself when he homered.

It's moot now because the Cubs won, but I hope Dusty is a little more gentle with his starters as the last eighteen games go by.

The crowd appeared, on the FSN telecast, to be half Cub fans, and they were loud throughout, particularly on Aramis' homers, and then during the bottom of the ninth, all on their feet cheering "Let's Go Cubs!"

We remain happy and hopeful tonight, and this weekend, we root for the Brewers (who we hope play the Astros tougher than they played the Giants), the Braves (against the Marlins) -- and I suppose we must root for the Padres to take two of three from the Giants, though not a sweep, because that would put San Diego right back into it.

:: posted by Al at 9:00 PM [+] ::
...

Correction

I was reminded today by reader Eric Smedley that:

On July 31, 2001, the Cubs were 62-43 and came one Fred McGriff/David Weathers defensive blowup against the Padres away from being 20 games over .500 (a loss which started a downward spiral on the 2001 season).

So, the Cubs have been more than 15 games over .500 since 1989, but not this late in the season.

And the Brewers, who helped the Cubs out so much last year by beating Houston the final weekend, aren't helping now -- they got swept by the Giants, getting shut out by SF today 4-0, moving the Giants a full game up on the Cubs.

The rest of San Francisco's schedule is against contenders: six vs. San Diego, six vs. Los Angeles, and three vs. Houston, and the Cubs still have four games in hand (nineteen remaining, including tonight, against fifteen for SF), and lead in the loss column.

Think positive. The winning streak continues tonight.

:: posted by Al at 3:41 PM [+] ::
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Sweep!

It all came together as if a storm front were coming through, which, coincidentally enough, will be happening here in Chicago tonight.

Mark Prior pitched great, then poorly, then well again. The Cubs hit, then stopped, then opened up the floodgates just as a brief -- and by saying brief, I mean not more than five minutes -- downpour opened up on Wrigley Field, one of the true harbingers of the end of summer, though temperatures ought to just drop from the 80's to the 70's afterwards. About fifteen minutes after the game ended it started raining harder, and it's supposed to pour pretty good overnight, which we could actually use -- it's been so sunny and dry and beautiful the first two weeks of this month.

The Cubs blasted the Pirates 13-5, sweeping the series, winning their fifth in their last six games, equalling their season high for hits (18), and establishing a season high for runs, and not a moment too soon, the bats appear to be waking up. It was the Cubs' first sweep since they swept the Brewers out of Wrigley Field the last full week of August.

Let's get the stat corner out of the way first:

* Derrek Lee's thirtieth homer of the season in the first made the Cubs the tenth team in major league history to have four players with more than 30. As I wrote last night, it's a longshot, but if Corey Patterson (who cooled off today, striking out twice and having only one double) can somehow hit seven in the remaining nineteen games, the Cubs would become the first team ever to have five such players.

* Sammy Sosa appears to have begun one of the hot streaks we got so used to seeing between 1998 and 2002 -- he homered twice, giving him 571 for his career. It was his sixty-sixth multi-homer game, one short of Mark McGwire for third place on the all-time list of such things (Babe Ruth is first with 72).

* Mike Wuertz, who after a dreadful start and a return to Iowa, has now not allowed a run in his last ten appearances, covering 8.2 innings. He threw a scoreless inning today and received as a reward, his first major league win.

* He'll have to fight Ryan Dempster for the game ball -- Dempster was going to come out of the game after the eighth for LaTroy Hawkins when the score was 7-5, but with the Cubs' 6-run eighth, Dempster batted and finished up, recording his first major league save.

* The Cubs hit back-to-back-to-back jacks (can you just hear Ron Santo going nuts in the radio booth? I wore my Santo t-shirt today -- the one I got at his day last September. Maybe that was a sign.) in the first inning, and none of us was that surprised, with the wind blowing out at an announced 16 MPH -- those speeds always seem too low, incidentally. There were plenty of 25 MPH-plus gusts. The three first-inning homers all may have gotten a little help, but Sammy's grand slam in the eighth landed on Waveland Avenue, reminiscent of the monster bombs he used to send out there in his sixty-homer seasons. Another sign?

Stat corner over, this day began sunny, hot and humid, and with the wind blowing out we figured it might be a multi-homer day. Howard said there'd be seven, I said eight. We'll settle for the five we got, and we laughed at what everyone thinks is Dusty Baker's opinion about walks: "They just clog up the bases."

Well, in the first five innings, the Cubs scored when hitting -- four runs in the first -- but when they "clogged" the bases full with walks in the fifth with one out, they scored nothing. Dusty must have been saying "Told you so!" right then, and especially because the score was still 5-4 Pirates at the time. But Oliver Perez, who settled down after the first inning, ran out of gas in the sixth, and that's when the guy wearing #13 and calling himself Neifi Perez slammed a two-run homer to give the Cubs a 6-5 lead.

Whoever this guy is, I told everyone, "Don't wake him up!" Faux-Perez had two other singles, fielded flawlessly, and is now hitting .480 (12-for-25) as a Cub, with a double, two homers, four RBI, a walk, only two strikeouts and a stolen base. With the loopholes available to teams setting postseason rosters, I hope the Cubs find a way to keep Perez on theirs.

As the day went on the clouds kept building, and the wind picked up, though none of the hits in the six-run eighth, in which the first seven men reached base, needed any help from the wind. The Cubs drew six walks today, and the two in the eighth both scored when Sammy "unclogged" the bases with his grand slam.

Today's groaning puns came when Howard was talking about singer Tony Orlando, who was the seventh-inning stretch singer. I mentioned how Orlando has no real connection to Chicago or to baseball, which sent Howard on what I thought was a diatribe against the stretch singers, and then he said, "Maybe it'll finally dawn on them how bad this is," and it took me a second before it "Dawned" on me that he was punning on the name of Orlando's 1970's era backup singers, upon which I threatened to "Knock Three Times" on his head with the clipboard.

See, you can make these kinds of jokes and have this sort of fun when your team's going to a laugher of a win. This was apparently the thought of two young women, who none of us saw -- we only saw the commotion surrounding them -- several rows below us, who were ejected in the eighth inning for taking their tops off.

At long last, this appears to be the team we thought we had when they took the field the first week of April. Better late than not at all, I'm sure you'll agree.

Once again, the Cubs hit the high-water mark of the season at fifteen games over .500. The last time the Cubs were more than fifteen games over was in the NL East championship year of 1989. There's another mark that needs to be eclipsed, and tomorrow wouldn't be too soon.

At this moment the Cubs are in a virtual tie with the Giants for the wild-card lead, pending their game in Milwaukee tonight (I spent time chanting with Jon, the old Brew Crew cry, "Go! Brewers! Go!" as he imitated the old County Stadium organist.), and the Expos beat Carl Pavano in game one of their doubleheader and are leading in game two early, thus proving that they can only beat the Marlins when they are not playing them in Chicago (game one was the seventh consecutive Montreal win over Florida, excluding the two games at the Cell). I have also learned that the Marlins will have to dig even deeper into their bullpen for a substitute starter, as A. J. Burnett will miss his start against Atlanta this weekend.

In playoff-related news, MLB conducted coin flips today to determine home sites for possible tie-breaker games. For the NL Wild Card, tiebreaker games would be played as follows:

Cubs at San Francisco 
Houston at San Francisco 
Florida at San Francisco 
San Diego at San Francisco 
Cubs at Houston 
Florida at Cubs 
Cubs at San Diego 
Houston at Florida 
Houston at San Diego 
Florida at San Diego

Note, eerily, that the only game the Cubs would play at home in this scenario would be ... against the Marlins.

Hope is awake (unlike me -- I almost nodded off in the middle innings today), and perking right up. Kerry Wood, Carlos Zambrano, Greg Maddux and Matt Clement will face the Reds in Cincinnati starting tomorrow night. This won't be an easy road trip, even though the opposition (save the DH at Florida on Monday) is all sub-.500 teams. Twelve road games in 11 days is never easy.

Let's start it with another sweep.

:: posted by Al at 5:40 PM [+] ::
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A Cubs Blog Army Moment

Or, a Cub Fan Nation moment, as Kurt over at that blog might say.

On Monday, Kurt wrote:

... that the Glendon Rusch smack of Miguel Cabrera was probably intentional, according to Al Yellon, who I am not mentioning because the last time I did, he replied over at his wonderful blog. Yellon mentions that Cabrera did a mocking rendition of Moises Alou's hissy-fit from last year's NLCS. After the smack by Rusch, the Marlins lit the Cubs up.

First of all, I appreciate the kind words -- "wonderful". That feels great!

So, since, as he said, Kurt didn't mention me in that post, I figured I'd give him another plug. I don't, however, agree with his position that:

I suspect that even if they somehow manage to get [to the playoffs], it will be 3-and-out like in 98.

This team has far more talent than the 1998 squad, and furthermore, they'll be playing Atlanta or Los Angeles (unless the Dodgers totally collapse), and neither of those teams is as good as the 1998 Braves, who won 106 games and swept the Cubs, and even at that, the Cubs were two outs away from tying the series on the road.

The wins of the last two nights showed me that even if it takes 140 games, that this team does have what it takes to win in the postseason.

Now let's go out and get there.

I also got a mention over at Scott and Dennis' Northside Lounge, where Scott Lange wonders:

Can anyone explain to me how Al attends games, goes home, writes a longer post than me, and gets it online before me, despite his spectating-blogging commute of Wrigley-home versus mine of living room-to-computer room? That guy is unreal.

Well, here's how: I live ten minutes from the ballpark, and last night in particular, I wanted to get home and write while the high from the win was still fresh in my mind.

"Unreal". Sounds good to me! Thanks!

Finally, Joe Aiello's "The View From The Bleachers" has moved. Click on the link above to go to the new site, which is nicely designed, and has a timely post today about the wind, which surely helped the Cubs win last night.

:: posted by Al at 9:09 AM [+] ::
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Coming Of Age

Corey Patterson has arrived, everyone.

Mike said that the reason he caught Corey's homer last week is that he's the only one of us who hasn't been telling him that he sucks. This may be true, and I think that Mike's homer catch is what finally got Corey to realize that he belongs.

Yeah, that's silly.

But Corey singlehandedly won tonight's incredible come-from-behind 3-2 game over the Pirates, with his game-tying two-run homer that rode a gust of wind into the LF basket in the 8th, and his second twelfth-inning homer in a week's time, the game-winner. No, Mike didn't get this one -- it landed in the CF shrubbery, and finally we got some emotion out of this team, with one of the happiest Group-Grope-And-Jumps you'll ever see out of a ballclub.

It seems almost ridiculous to think this, with twenty games to go, but Corey now has twenty-three homers. Assuming Derrek Lee has one more in him for thirty, could Corey hit seven more in twenty games to give the Cubs five thirty-homer players, the first team ever to do that?

The way Patterson is playing now, and with the pump up they have to feel from this game, I'm saying -- it's possible. This is the second half that Corey was on pace to have last year when he got hurt, and not a moment too soon.

Actually, there was some rare emotion shown even earlier in this game. Maybe these guys are finally starting to wake up and actually enjoy playing. Lee made an ill-advised steal of third with one out in the bottom of the ninth, but when he got up you could see how pumped he was that he made something happen. OK, Michael Barrett promptly hit into a double play, but at least the Cubs showed some fire.

Also returning was the Sammy Sosa of about three or four years ago. He had two hits, and had a terrific ninth-inning at-bat, fouling off four pitches before striking out, and that effort carried over into the extra innings, when he made an unbelievable -- and I don't use that word lightly, that was one of the best catches I've ever seen anyone make, not just Sammy -- catch of a sinking Ty Wigginton liner, and then a bullseye throw to double Jason Bay off first, in the top of the eleventh.

This is how you play playoff-intensity baseball, and we have seen glimmers of it over the last week or so, but tonight -- it arrived. Now, let's hope it stays.

Sammy "felt the love" again, as Krista put it, and we justifiably gave it to him, and he did respond with a two-out single in the eleventh inning. You can just sense, especially after his homer last night, that he might be ready to break out with one huge salvo over the last two and a half weeks of the year.

It didn't start out that way. How it started, in fact, was with Howard and Jon making horrible pun on top of horrible pun, and I won't repeat them here, because some are not fit for a G (or even PG) rated blog. I actually got one off on Howard when I said Josh Fogg was pitching, and he said "Maybe he's lifting", and after a bit of thought, I said, "Sure, since it's CLEMENT weather."

I got smacked with the clipboard for that one.

Fogg, for his part, looked terrific, until he was inexplicably yanked by Lloyd McClendon with two out in the seventh after only 78 pitches. We tried everything -- tomatoes (fourth inning, no go), rally Milanos -- nothing doing till after the bag was finished, and maybe that was what the club needed, just pure baseball.

As for Matt Clement, he looked for all the world like his back or shoulder or both were bothering him in the first two innings -- he couldn't seem to throw a strike, yet got out of the first with no runs because of a nifty Neifi Perez (Howard says that if he does well, they could rename Navy Pier "Neifi Pier-ez" -- yes, you can smack him for that one) started DP. He'd have gotten out of the second too, if he hadn't failed to put the .067-hitting Fogg away with two strikes. This has been an annoying tendency of this pitching staff all year.

But I should not malign them too much, because after that Clement, Mike Wuertz, Mike Remlinger, LaTroy Hawkins and eventual winner Todd Wellemeyer threw ten innings of two-hit baseball (and eight K's after the 2ndd), and this is how this ballclub is going to win games -- with pitching and longballs.

Of the wild-card contenders, the Marlins, Giants and Astros all won tonight (the Astros got the Cardinals to lay down pretty good for them, except they must have told St. Louis that it was looking suspicious, so they allowed them to turn a 7-1 blowout into a 7-5 game in the ninth), and the Phillies lost, and the Padres are losing late (to be updated tomorrow).

The bottom line is, though, that the Cubs still have lost fewer games than any of the other teams, and if they go out and just win, that's all that matters.

Finally, you might remember that Jeff and I met Andy Rayburn, the owner of the Daytona Cubs, the Cubs affiliate in the Class A Florida State League, in the bleachers on August 27.

Today, one of his assistants called both of us and asked for our addresses so that Andy could send us some Daytona Cubs merchandise. A truly nice guy, and if you live in Florida or visit there next baseball season, go support the future Cubs and see a game at Daytona.

In the meantime, Mark Prior (though the ESPN website says it's Kerry Wood) goes for the sweep for the Cubs tomorrow afternoon.

Just win, baby.

:: posted by Al at 11:00 PM [+] ::
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Doubleheader!

Well... MOST of a doubleheader, anyway, but more on that anon.

This afternoon, under weather conditions much like they'd have in Miami this time of year, I went to see the Marlins play the Expos at their relocated home at the Cell.

Dave and Howard from our section joined me as well as Holly from RCF, and we sat a few rows behind the 3B dugout, since it was general-admission-sit-anywhere, and just before the game there was a bit of a commotion down near the field in our section, and we spotted Jerry Reinsdorf talking to a man in a dark-colored shirt with his back to us.

When he turned around the commotion got even louder. It was Steve Stone.

The crowd of 4,003 (not too different from what the Expos draw at home) was part Cub fans (a large Cub flag was unfurled in LF during the game, part Sox fans rooting for the Marlins, and also a large contingent of Marlins fans who had been in town for the weekend Cub series and decided to stay.

Marlins management tried to make them feel at home: they flew in Marlins home white pants, their PA announcer, some scoreboard videos (they also couldn't resist tweaking the Cubs when posting on the board tomorrow's Montreal pitcher, Scott Downs, and reminding all that he had "shut out the Cubs last week"), music (no Nancy Faust, other than a taped version of "Take Me Out To The Ballgame", and their silly mascot Billy the Marlin, who threw out a ceremonial first pitch.

The Sox must not have expected that large a crowd because they only opened two concession stands and lines were very long. They did hand out free scoresheets, which I thought was nice of them.

Everyone was into the game. I wore my "Serie de los Expos de Montreal" T-shirt I got in Puerto Rico last year, and if you come to a game like this, you truly have to love baseball, and I think that's refreshing. It was apparently announced on one of the teams' broadcasts that this game was the first time a pitcher had batted at the Cell, but that isn't true -- a pitcher batted in the very first game played there, a 16-0 Detroit blowout of the White Sox, where DH Tony Phillips was put in the game at SS, and pitcher Frank Tanana batted. He struck out.

The rest of the Marlins' 6-3 win over the Expos was pretty crisply played -- at least till the eighth inning, when the Expos forgot how to play the field and made four errors, not a single one of which ought to have been made by a major league player, including Juan Rivera's drop of an easy pop fly into short right which would have ended the inning with only one run scoring; instead six runs crossed the plate in an inning eerily reminiscent of a Marlins eighth inning last year which shall best go unmentioned. All of this ruined a very well-pitched game by Sunny Kim, who threw seven scoreless innings, helped out by three double plays.

The only home run recorded was Tony Batista's for Montreal in the top of the 9th; we were wondering if they'd have set off the scoreboard if the Marlins had homered, but it didn't happen.

The reason I said almost a doubleheader is that my early evening hours were spent at my daughter Rachel's new school, at an open house to meet the staff and her new teachers, a worthwhile experience at a worthwhile place, and then on to Wrigley Field for the last half of the Cubs' efficiently played 7-2 win over the Pirates, moving them to within half a game of the wild-card leading Giants, idle today; tomorrow San Francisco plays at Milwaukee. No, no more doubleheaders for me this week, and besides, the Cub and Brewer games tomorrow are head-to-head.

For once, the Cubs took a minor-leaguer that they'd never seen before and roughed him up good. Frank Brooks gave up a homer to that guy who's wearing Neifi Perez' uniform -- and he's going to be playing for a few more days, because Nomar's sore groin is going to keep him out most of this week. After an error, Derrek Lee singled in two runs and Sammy Sosa hit his first homer in almost three weeks, the 569th of his career and 30th of the season, giving the Cubs three 30-homer men for the first time.

History corner!

The Cub team that came closest to this milestone was the 1965 team -- Billy Williams (34), Ron Santo (33), and Ernie Banks.

When Lee hits his next homer, the Cubs will become the tenth team in history to have four such players -- the first being the 1977 Dodgers, who had Steve Garvey (33), Reggie Smith (32), Ron Cey (30), and... Dusty Baker (30), and on the radio tonight they mentioned that they thought Baker qualified by hitting his 30th on the last day of the season.

Right on the money! Here's the boxscore from that game on October 2, 1977. Not only was it the last game of the year, it was his last at-bat of the year, and it was the only time Baker hit 30 homers as a player.

Anyway, the Cubs accomplished today's first-inning runs without the benefit of help from the Tomato Inning, since I arrived late, I had Jeff get me a scorecard and I simply caught up with the scoring after I got there. Kevin, Dave's son and catcher for the Frontier League champion Rockford Riverhawks, was also at the game tonight, so I was able to congratulate him for his team's sweep of the championship series last weekend.

Finally, Greg Maddux, the leading winner on the staff (who would have guessed that on Opening Day?) threw seven shutout innings in classic Maddux form -- only two strikeouts and a walk, helped out by some nice defensive plays, too.

One day at a time, my friends, this is how this race appears to be going right down to the end, just as it did a year ago, just as it did in 1998. Maybe we're just not used to this.

Faith and hope, every single day.

:: posted by Al at 10:07 PM [+] ::
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Yes, I'm Going

And why not? It's gorgeous and sunny today here in Chicago, so I'm going to hie myself down to the Cell this afternoon to see the Expos play the Marlins, a baseball event that may not ever be repeated, a neutral-site NL game at an AL ballpark, with perhaps the two worst draws in baseball participating.

The games are, of course, meaningful to the Cubs, as the Marlins are in the increasingly tightening wild-card race. I've got an Expos-related T-shirt to wear (the one I got in Puerto Rico last September), and will be rooting hard for Montreal to pretend they're playing like they did last week against the Cubs.

Dave's going too, and he says the games will probably draw less than 1,000 people. We shall see.

Stuff I left out of yesterday's post: I'm not doing the onion thing any more because I remembered that I had accidentally dropped onions on my scorecard at the Cell when the Cubs were there in June, and they lost that game too.

Also, Dave, who isn't a football fan, seemed really happy when he heard about the Bears loss -- something I expected, because the Bears really aren't very good (even though Phil insists they'll go 10-6 -- yeah, right). When I talked to Jeff this morning, we couldn't figure out which of us had seen the worse Chicago team performance:

* me -- I saw a Cub blowout loss

* him -- he saw the Bears lose to a team that hadn't won a road game in almost four years

Chicago fans. We wear this stuff like badges of honor.

And finally, yesterday was the day that my son Mark chose to reveal to me that the instrument he had chosen for the school band is... drums.

When Mike heard this he said, "You are SCREWED!"

Which is true. Maybe I'll have the drums installed in the garage so he can have his very own garage band. At the very least they're headed to the basement.

:: posted by Al at 8:19 AM [+] ::
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The Little Things

Here is an example of how the Cubs turn their anger the wrong way.

In the bottom of the second, with the score still 1-0 Marlins, Derrek Lee fouled a ball into the seats in left, right near the bullpen.

Yeah, near that seat.

Marlins LF Miguel Cabrera did a mocking imitation of what Moises Alou did back on that dreaded day last October, slamming his glove down and jumping up and down.

So what, you say.

Well, someone in the bullpen must have told the boys in the dugout, and when Cabrera next batted in the fourth, Glendon Rusch smacked him in the back with the first pitch he threw.

Now how stupid is that? All that did is wake the Marlins up, four of the next five hitters hit line drives, and before you could catch your breath it was 5-0, Rusch was out of the game, having thrown 89 pitches to get ten outs, and the Cubs weren't going to touch A. J. Burnett anyway today, and the Marlins blasted the Cubs 11-1, splitting the series.

I guess I could blame my son Mark, who I invited to come today on another gorgeous weather day (let's see -- we had June in April, July in May, May in August and now we are having June, in this confused weather year), and maybe I should have thought twice, because he occupied the same seat for game six of the NLCS. I told him he's not coming back to see the Marlins any more (kidding, I think), and he occupied himself most of the day with one of the plastic tubs of sugar -- er, cotton candy, that they sell at the ballpark these days.

This was all after Moises Alou decided he wasn't going to make any baserunning blunders today, so instead we had the Alou Fielding Screwup, when on an ordinary single to left with a runner on first, Moises airmailed the ball not only beyond the cutoff man, but all the way back to the new seats behind the plate, thus scoring a run. The Cubs kept doing this most of the day -- two other runners in the sixth advanced on ill-conceived throws, though by then the score was 7-0 and it mattered not.

I've been looking up and down the scorecard to see if I can find anything positive to say, and all I can say is that it smells funny. Why is this?

Because Howard was going to be late, I asked Carole (who was riding the bus up Clark past Jimmy John's) to pick up a sandwich for me. The order has to be placed carefully because as good as the sandwiches are, the employees seem programmed to dump lettuce and alfalfa sprouts on them, even when you ask for them not to. So Carole wrote down the info, got the sandwich, and when I opened it -- not only were there no tomatoes, but it was filled with sprouts.

This was obviously a sign, even though I had received a plaintive e-mail yesterday from Andy Weishaar, who wrote in regard to the thought of changing vegetables:

In regard to doing away with the tomato inning in exchange for the onion - I know it's an odd request from a man you don't even know - but could you stick with tomato? I feel at this point in the year, the tide could be turning and we're just gathering our momentum and to switch now could be devastating - go with what got us to this point - i.e. the Tomato - and if you're feeling superstitious - try ketchup. I know it's crazy but don't change for of all things an onion at this point in the year.

And I was going to stick with it, despite what Mike and I had discussed yesterday, but had to improvise. The onion landed on three different innings, and we settled on the third as being the largest portion, but all that accomplished was a couple of force plays and a caught-stealing after a leadoff double, and the fact that the card still smells of onion.

Even so, it smells better than this game did. I go back to Mike's comments of a couple of days ago, when he reminded me that in the 1998 wild card race, we suffered through ridiculous losses like this, only to rebound later. There were just as many heartwrenching or stupid losses last year, and the club won anyway.

As of now ESPN's website shows the Pirates without a listed starting pitcher for tomorrow night's game, when the Cubs will send Greg Maddux to the mound (the Cubs website lists someone named Frank Brooks). Maybe this means that the Cubs can send their own BP pitcher out there, or maybe the Pirates will recruit one of the Expos or Marlins, who will both be in town tomorrow afternoon to play the first of two games at the Cell. Those teams are used to playing in front of mostly empty stadiums, and I'd expect about the same tomorrow.

You know what, I ought to be more upset about this game but I'm not. Rusch has been terrific all year and he was due a bad outing, and as I've said before, it still only counts as one loss.

Keep the faith. There are still twenty-two games remaining.

:: posted by Al at 5:07 PM [+] ::
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