The Cubs came home to die last week. Having already lost five in a row on the road, including a three-game sweep in New York at the hands of the hated Mets, they returned to Wrigley Field three games under .500 and fading in the wild-card race. The first team they faced was the Cincinnati Reds, the generally woeful division rivals who’d crushed the Cubs’ playoff hopes a year ago by beating them three straight the last week of the season. History repeated itself this season, only earlier.
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A festive crowd of 39,965 welcomed the Cubs on a steamy Monday night, but starter Jerome Williams, the promising if frustrating pitching phenom, gave up two runs in the second and two more in the third on a homer by Adam Dunn, which drew the first boos. When the top of the Cubs’ order went three up, three down in the bottom of the inning, the boos increased. Williams righted himself for a couple innings but then gave up three more runs in the sixth. Fans booed manager Dusty Baker when he came out to remove Williams from the game, and they booed Williams going to the dugout. When reliever Glendon Rusch finally ended the inning, after surrendering a homer to Ken Griffey Jr., the boos rained down. Rusch gave up another run in the next frame, and that made the score 9-0–a skunking. The four runs the Cubs scored in the bottom of the ninth to make the game “respectable” didn’t begin to air out the stench.
Yet the Cubs and their fans moved beyond anything charted by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross to a sixth stage of dying. Having come within five outs of reaching the World Series two years ago, the team and its followers had nursed high expectations ever since, which made this season’s mediocre demise even harder to process, with the unusual booing the sharpest sign of dissatisfaction. Once death had been accepted, however–as it had to be after Greg Maddux gave up a two-run homer to the Cards’ fearsome Albert Pujols in the first inning of last Thursday’s series opener–the Cubs and their fans could return to their traditional state of innocence, expecting to lose and hoping to win nonetheless. The Cubs weren’t dead, they were merely dormant, like Sleeping Beauty. Suddenly, it was as if Steve Bartman had never existed.
The Cards saved face for themselves and for their abundant fans in the stands with a win Saturday behind their ace, Chris Carpenter, but the Cubs, again inexplicably, won the series finale Sunday. Prior again squandered a 3-1 lead, but before he departed the Cubs went back in front on a two-run pinch-hit single by Jose Macias, Wood pitched two great innings of relief, and Dempster again gave up a run but preserved the win, 5-4.
