One of the things about a five game playoff like the Division Series is that it doesn’t take much to lose control of your destiny and see an otherwise great season slip away. The Yankees saw it happen against the Indians last year, and the Cubs and Brewers are discovering it this year.
For the Cubbies, they so far are being dominated by Joe Torre’s Dodgers:
CHICAGO — It was as if all the Chicago Cubs’ ghosts came together Thursday to suit up for the home team. Leon Durham might as well have been at first base, with Alex Gonzalez at shortstop and a Billy goat and a black cat rounding out the infield. It was that ugly at Wrigley Field.
The Cubs were the best team in the National League in the regular season, but they have looked spooked and sloppy on the October stage. They made four errors — one by each infielder — in a 10-3 loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 2 of the Division Series Thursday. The night before, their starter walked seven in another lopsided defeat.
“The last two days, they’ve probably been the two worst games we’ve played all year, from a walks and errors standpoint,” Manager Lou Piniella said. “It wasn’t fun to watch, I can tell you that.”
Two games into a postseason they hoped would end their 100-year title drought, the Cubs are headed to California needing a victory Saturday to avoid another swift elimination. They were bounced in three straight last fall by Arizona, and have lost their last eight playoff games. Five of those have been played at Wrigley, where the Cubs have lost by an aggregate score of 39-13. They are introducing a new generation of fans to the pain endured by their forefathers.
“We pretty much gave them one game tonight, and we had a tough night last night,” Cubs center fielder Jim Edmonds said. “You can’t win in the playoffs like that. I can’t explain it. It’s pretty embarrassing. Good teams do it the right way, and we haven’t been good yet.”
Now, they have to go to Los Angeles and start a three game winning streak if they’re going to stay alive. Understandably, this has turned the mood in Chicago pretty gloomy pretty quickly.
Meanwhile, the Brewers, who are playing in their first postseason series since 1982, are also in danger of making a quick exit:
PHILADELPHIA — This was the one that Brewers fans had circled, underlined and highlighted, practically drawing a huge W atop Game 2 on their division series schedules. All because of one man, C. C. Sabathia, their savior, who, pitching every fourth day, had grabbed this floundering team by its scruff and dragged it into the postseason.
With that burden on his left arm, Sabathia finally crumbled Thursday night, leaving after a disastrous three and two-thirds innings in a 5-2 loss to Philadelphia. As he stalked off the mound to a rousing mock cheer from the largest crowd in Citizens Bank Park history, Sabathia shook his head and muttered to himself, perhaps vowing to pitch better in his next start. But when would that be? And for whom? The Brewers, trailing this best-of-five series, 2-0, can advance to the next round only by winning the next three games — two in Milwaukee and the third back here, for Game 5, with Sabathia on the mound.
Since 1995, when the division series began, only 4 of the 31 teams that have lost the first two games have come back to win the series, the last being the Red Sox in 2003, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.
Given Milwaukee’s sputtering offense — seven hits and three runs in two games — and Philadelphia’s superb starting pitching, it is possible that Sabathia, weeks away from free agency, might have pitched his last game for the Brewers.
Apparently.
