The Curse of Wrigley Field

Let’s cut to the chase. The Cubs are really good this year, at least record wise. Thanks to a 9-6 win over the Padres Tuesday night, the team’s ninth straight win, Chicago has the most wins in the Majors and leads the central division by 3.5 games over St. Louis. The Cubs haven’t won this much since 1908 and we all know what happened that year.

But manager Lou Piniella wasn’t a happy camper last night, and for good reason. His starting pitching sucks. OK, that may sound a little harsh but it’s not top of the line.

Outside of Ryan Dempster and Carlos Zambrano, the Cubs haven’t benefited from consistent starting pitching this season. If not for the bullpen, Chicago wouldn’t have the best record in baseball and might not even be the best team in the National League central.

Let’s look at the Cubs’ other three starters:

In his last seven starts, Jason Marquis has pitched six innings just once and in that span of games he’s struck out 32 batters and walked 26. He’s also given up three or more runs in all but one of those starts. He’s been so off, Piniella made a point of visiting the mound during Tuesday night’s game and exchanging pleasentries with the starter. To translate what he said in family-friendly matters: “Don’t suck!”

Ted Lilly had been pitching well, but in his last two starts he’s been tagged for 18 hits and eight runs in nine innings of work. A stretch of starts from April 22 to May 9 seemed to indicate that Lilly had gotten over his poor early-season form, but he’s given up four runs in three of his last four starts and hasn’t pitched beyond six innings in any of those games.

Finally, Sean Gallagher wasn’t even expected to be in the starting rotation, but thanks to Rich Hill’s demotion and Jon Lieber’s failure as a starting pitcher, he’s starting games and doing the best he can. Unfortunately, the best he can doesn’t include consistency. In his five starts he’s given up four, one, five, one and three runs, in that order. So Piniella never knows which Gallagher he’s going to get, which isn’t good for the collective heart of Cub fandom.

As a result of the extra load on the bullpen, Chicago called up Kevin Hart from triple-A Iowa. That means we must bid farewell to Micah Hoffpauir. In 11 games the lefty was hitting .421. That’s what happens when you spend six years in the minors. You want to impress during your one shot at the Bigs. But thanks to the starting rotation’s inability to pitch more than six innings, this feel-good story must be put on hold for a bit.

I hope you’re happy starters!
Well, not that we got out of the way, we can briefly discuss the offense because there was quite a bit Tuesday night at pitcher-friendly Petco Park. Alfonso Soriano went 2-for-4 with three RBI and his 14th home run of the season. Geovany Soto (1-for-5) also jacked one, providing the eventual game-winning RBI with his solo job. And Mark DeRosa (2-for-2) went yard and drove in two RBI to go along with two walks. That’s a 1.000 OBP if you’re keeping track at home. All around the Cubs notched 11 hits, nine runs and walked more times (six) than they struck out (five).

I’d say they had a good day at the plate.