Official 2023 Chicago Cubs Season Thread Vol: (17-17)

PITTSBURGH -- They couldn't just win a postseason game for the first time in 12 years. They're the Chicago Cubs.

They couldn't just let the story begin and end with Jake Arrieta summoning his inner Bob Gibson-meets-Madison Bumgarner to fill up another scoreboard with zeros. They're the Cubs.
So we can't tell the epic tale of their unforgettable, 4-0 bludgeoning of a tremendous, 98-win team from Pittsburgh in the National League wild-card game by merely talking baseball. Oh, no.
Not on a night when benches emptied, choke holds were applied, Gatorade coolers were attacked and the most unhittable pitcher in baseball was surrounded by U.N. peacekeeping forces wearing Cubs hats.

Because here's what we learned Wednesday night at rocking, rolling, electrified PNC Park: Don't mess with these Cubs. Literally.

"You don't see that stuff happen in playoff baseball too much," said Jon Lester, after a wild evening that was part Jake Arrieta Masterpiece Theater and part "Wrestlemania." "I know people back in the day used to say that getting into fights or whatever used to bring their teams closer. But I don't think we need to be any closer. When you look around, the chemistry on this team is not really a problem."

Since he then stopped to look around, so did we. And it was quite a scene. If you ever wondered what sort of party your buddies might throw if you'd all waited 107 years to unleash it, this was it. Laughs. Hugs. Cigars. Literally hundreds of bottles of Korbel Brut, followed by an emergency case of Royal Cuvee, being sprayed in all directions. And on and on it went, into the night, for well over an hour.

OK, sold. Chemistry on this team is not a problem.

"Getting in a fight, I don't think that helps us," Lester went on, relishing one more moment that made him thankful to be a Cub. "But at the same time, I don't think it hurts us. We're going to stand up for our guys. And we're going to make sure that the other teams know we're going to stand up for our guys."

Well, especially if it was one particular guy. A guy named Jacob J. Arrieta, who is acting these days as if he isn't planning to give up another run until, like, mid-December.

On his way to a historic, 11-strikeout, zero-walk, four-hit shutout, Arrieta still managed to plunk two Pirates hitters with pitches. Francisco Cervelli got drilled by a 94 mph, up-and-in heat wave in the fifth inning. Then, an inning later, Josh Harrison took a clearly unintentional breaking ball near the shoulder. And if that was the yin, the yang was right around the corner.

So up marched Arrieta with two outs and nobody on in the top of the seventh to face reliever Tony Watson. And what unfolded over the next three minutes was a story better suited for Ring Magazine than the ESPN.com MLB page.

Watson's first pitch was a 93 mph fastball into Arrieta's derriere. Arrieta had a few thoughts he wanted to convey about that. Catcher Francisco Cervelli voiced several thoughts of his own. Watson stalked toward them. And next thing they all knew, the infield got kind of crowded.

"You know what was really awesome?" said Cubs special assistant Ryan Dempster with a laugh. "That, when that happened, our entire bench was out on the field before the Pirates even got out of the dugout. It was like, `Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You want to hit Jake Arrieta? What's your problem?'"

No need to run through the entire blow-by-blow. But at one point, Cubs catcher David Ross actually grabbed the throat of the Pirates' Sean Rodriguez, who then began firing haymakers in no particular direction. Which resulted in Rodriguez's getting ejected from a game he was already out of. Whereupon he took his delight out on an innocent Gatorade cooler that had no idea who Jake Arrieta even was.

Rodriguez portrayed himself afterward as pretty much the innocent victim, saying: "Somebody grabs you by the neck, do you really need an invitation [to start swinging] at that point?"
Hmmm. Decent alibi. But upon cross-examination, Ross pleaded innocence himself.

"He came charging at me," he said of Rodriguez. "I was trying to break it up, and I think he was, too. When he came at me, he put his hands on my chest, and my hands went straight to his throat. I didn't mean any bad intent. It just happened. It all happened so fast."

But as wild and crazy as it looked, there wasn't much doubt when it was over what got the Cubs so fired up. That was Jake Arrieta out there. And if there was a way they could seal him in protective, unbreakable glass until his next start, they'd be all for it.

"I'm trying to keep guys off our starting pitcher," said David Ross. "It's late in the game. You've got a high level of intensity going on. It's a crazy environment. We've got a four-run lead. The last thing I want to do is fight. But I don't want anybody messing with the guy who's dominating the game."

And that would be because all Jake Arrieta does these days is dominate every game. He's on a roll right now that feels even more rare than a Cubs World Series parade. To say it's historic doesn't even capture it. It's practically unprecedented:

• In this game, he became the first pitcher ever -- right, ever -- to throw a postseason shutout with double-digit strikeouts and zero walks. Look it up.

• He also became just the fourth pitcher ever to strike out 10 or more and throw a shutout in a winner-take-all postseason game. Perhaps you've heard of the other three to do it: Sandy Koufax in the 1965 World Series, Justin Verlander in the 2012 ALDS and Madison Bumgarner in last year's wild-card game in this very same park.

• Over his final nine starts of the regular season, Arrieta went 8-0, with a 0.27 ERA and a .132 opponent batting average. And the Elias Sports Bureau tells us that since baseball began keeping track of earned runs over a century ago,no pitcher has ever had an ERA or opponent average that low of a batting average over a span of that many starts. And after this game, those numbers sit at 0.24 and .132. Unreal.

• Since Aug. 1, 269 pitchers have allowed at least four earned runs in an inning. Meanwhile, Arrieta has also allowed four earned runs -- in two months. Over 13 starts. His 0.37 ERA over that span is the lowest in history by any pitcher, over that many starts, since the invention of earned runs.

• And if the Cubs are starting to get the impression he's the closest thing there is to unbeatable, this might be why: Over Arrieta's past 14 starts, they're 14-0. Over his past 19 starts, they're 18-1. Is that even possible?

So you can understand why, when the Cubs found a way to score a run Wednesday night before the wild-card game was three hitters old, they were thinking life was good. After all, it's now been three weeks since their starting pitcher has given up a run. That last run was 31 innings ago, in case you'd lost track.

"I played with Clayton Kershaw last year," said Arrieta's rotation mate, Dan Haren. "And I thought that was the most amazing season I've ever seen. It's hard for me to compare because I've only been here for two months, since the trading deadline. But since I got here, he's given up four earned runs. So it's not just me who's never seen anything like this. Nobody has ever seen anything like it."
But you might be shocked to learn that it wasn't even that shutout that Arrieta was most proud of Wednesday night. One pitch after the brouhaha subsided and action resumed in the seventh inning, he took off for second and roared in with the fifth stolen base by a pitcher in postseason history.

"I might like that more than the CG," he chuckled afterward. "So I'm going to try and stack up some more against St. Louis."

So Yadier Molina, you're officially on alert. Jake Arrieta is coming. An awesome Cardinals-Cubs NLDS is just over the horizon. And now everybody knows what that means:

Don't mess with the Cubs.
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According to some very reliable crazy people on the Internets, the world was supposed to end Wednesday night. It was something to do with the blood moon and the prophecies of an old Christian radio host. Proving that something beyond human understanding was afoot, the Chicago Cubs won a wild-card, win-or-go-home playoff game in Pittsburgh. But the odds are that fate or the universe is just playing us all for suckers. The world will not end until the Cubs are one strike away from winning the World Series. The last pitch will be halfway to the plate and the asteroid will come to call. Blood moons and superannuated radio preachers are one thing. The Chicago Cubs and postseason baseball are a whole different and deeper level of cosmic burlesque.

So the inevitable global cataclysm that will occur should the Cubs get close to their first World Series title since shortly before William Howard Taft was hoisted into the White House by forklift will have to wait for another day. On Wednesday, for the second year in a row, a visiting pitcher took the air completely out of PNC Park. Over all nine innings, Jake Arrieta threw 113 pitches, 77 of them for strikes. He gave up four hits. He struck out 11 Pirates and walked none of them. Last year, it was Madison Bumgarner of the San Francisco Giants. He also beat Pittsburgh. He also pitched a shutout over nine innings. He struck out only 10, however, and he actually walked a guy. Slacker. By the time Arrieta got a double-play grounder to escape his only real jam, a bases-loaded situation in the sixth inning, a familiar sense of airless resignation had swallowed the lovely ballpark by the bridges.


“Sometimes,” said Pittsburgh manager Clint Hurdle, who seemed to be chewing old leather as he spoke, “you get a tough bull. Second year in a row, we got a really tough bull.”

This year’s game was a bit livelier than last year’s, if only because there was some genuine bad blood coursing through the action. Sailing along in the fifth inning, Arrieta went upstairs on Pittsburgh catcher Francisco Cervelli, catching him on the hands as Cervelli hit the silk. Later, Arrieta would say, as they always do, that he wasn’t going to try to hit anyone in that situation. Later, Hurdle would say, as they always do, that Arrieta had such superb control all night that the idea that a pitch could get away from him the way it did was at best a fanciful notion and, at worst, a barefaced nonfact.

Everybody filed it away, though, as they did the sixth-inning breaking ball that pinged Josh Harrison, so that when Arrieta came to the plate in the seventh inning, and Pirates reliever Tony Watson drilled him, there was a bench-clearing discussion during which Pittsburgh first baseman Sean Rodriguez got tossed. Rodriguez responded by doubling up on his hooks to the body and knocking a Gatorade bucket senseless in the dugout. (If somebody hasn’t yet dubbed the video of Rodriguez with the dialogue from the Ernie Terrell fight scene from Ali — “What’s my name, ************? What’s my name?” — I will be very disappointed in the Internet.) Things eventually settled down. Even in the middle of a demi-brawl, the Pirates weren’t able to hit Arrieta.

“I just talked to them,” said Chicago manager Joe Maddon. “I think you can draw your own conclusions from what you saw. I don’t want to denigrate this entire moment for our team. I cannot be more proud of these guys than I was tonight. I have nothing but respect for the entire Pirates organization. I was a Roberto Clemente fan growing up. So, regarding anything you guys thought was inappropriate tonight, you guys be the judge of that, and ladies.”1

It should be noted that, in the course of his postgame remarks, Maddon also declared himself to be a fan of Joe Namath, of Bob Gibson, and of the St. Louis Cardinals, Chicago’s longtime rivals whom the Cubs now play in the National League Division Series starting Friday night. If the Cubs are going to break the universe this autumn, Maddon is the perfect sorcerer for the job. His team is young — almost ridiculously so — and has none of the historical baggage that hung on past Cubs teams like a dead raccoon around their necks. The comparison with the lordly Cardinals — who Play The Game The Right Way — is particularly stark. More often than not, listening to Cardinals fans talk about baseball is like listening to bishops talk about cathedral. Sooner or later, somebody has to start heckling from the choir loft. That’s Joe Maddon.

This is how Joe Maddon explained … something … before Wednesday night’s game:

“I love numbers. God, I love numbers, though I was horrible at math. Algebra III. Second semester of Algebra II was my Waterloo, to be honest with you. Algebra III and Trig could have been Latin or Greek, it wouldn’t matter to me, but I do love numbers. Beyond that, I really like people and humans and what makes [a] guy tick.”

Maddon had a nice run with young players in Tampa, but it was nothing like what he has going with the Cubs. His roster is the first great manifestation of what Chicago was looking for when it hired Theo Epstein to run baseball operations after Epstein’s remarkable success in Boston. (If Epstein manages to get the Cubs their first World Series title since 1908, after leading the 2004 Red Sox to their first since 1918, he should leave baseball for a lucrative second career as an exorcist.) The Cubs are loaded with young talent. One of those players, Kyle Schwarber, a 22-year-old who can catch and play in the outfield, introduced himself to postseason play Wednesday night by parking an ill-conceived fastball from Pittsburgh starter Gerrit Cole over the right-field stands and into the Allegheny River. That gave Arrieta a 3-0 lead that might as well have been 30-0. If anything, the Cubs are ahead of schedule.

But the best move Epstein made may have been convincing Maddon to come to Chicago and see what he could do. Then again, maybe the best move he made was swindling the Orioles out of Arrieta in 2013. “The thing that really impresses me is that it’s a pretty big moment,” Maddon said of his pitcher. “Jake is a different cat, man. He’s just a different cat. I could just think of Namath guaranteeing the Super Bowl victory. That’s all I could think of the last few days. Just sitting in that lounge chair by the pool with all those reporters surrounding him. I was a big Namath fan back in ’69.”

“I knew my team would be confident with me out there,” Arrieta said. “But with our lineup, with the young players we have, you don’t think that these guys are 21, 23 years old, because they don’t play like it. They have elevated their play to a level that’s beyond their years.”

For that, you need confident young players and a manager who’s willing to take chances with them, a guy who understands people. And humans.
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Jesse SanchezVerified account
‏@JesseSanchezMLB
Source: #Cubs have met Eddy Julio Martinez's asking price. Cuban OF has signed a $3 million deal with Chicago.
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Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm??????????????????????????



:eek
 
keithlaw ‏@keithlaw 4m4 minutes ago
Cubs have a potential agreement with Cuban CF Eddy Julio Martinez for $3 million, pending a physical.
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Holy **** :eek
 
Still really can't believe Theo got another one. Just unreal what he's doin.

Course, Giants "had" him for 24 hours, he could always pull somethin like that on us, but if he sticks......... Jesus.

Under 26 in majors

Rizzo, Castro, Bryant, Schwarber, Soler, Baez, Russell


Under 21 on the farm

Torres, Jimenez, Almora, Happ, McKinney, Contreras, and now Eddy Julio Martinez.


Good God. :x :hat
There's multiple pieces that can be sold to land more help at the trade deadline next July.

Theo can sign Price, and still have enough to add a bat or arm to the mix, plus bullpen help.

Embarrassment of riches.
 
Tonight is going to be good. Wrigleyville was insane when I was down there on Wednesday night.
 
From Keith Law:

The odd summer and now autumn of Cuban center field prospect Eddy Julio Martinez took another odd turn earlier this week when an agreement he sort of had with the San Francisco Giants fell apart, meaning that he was still a free agent and could sign with any club. He's a premium talent, so his market would be limited to teams with cap room left or the willingness to ignore the international cap and pay the 100 percent penalty that signing him would incur.

The Chicago Cubs jumped at the opportunity, agreeing to terms on a $3 million bonus, pending a physical, earlier Thursday night, according to a source close to Martinez.

I flew to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, on Tuesday and watched Martinez take batting practice, and he put on a very impressive display of bat speed and power. His swing is very fluid and simple with excellent hip rotation, and despite a minimal stride, the right-handed hitter makes loud contact to all fields, with easy power from left field over to right-center. I did not get to see him play in a game, so what I know of the rest of his abilities -- such as his potential to play above-average center field -- comes from scouts who have seen him. Based on that, the BP I saw and his very live body, I think he's worth well more than the $3 million the Cubs reportedly will pay him. In fact, I think he's much closer to the $10 million or so that pre-July 2 reports had him getting from the Dodgers. If he were in the Rule 4 draft class for next year, we'd be talking about him as the potential No. 1 overall pick, so the Cubs getting him for $3 million is a relative steal.
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Lester was terrific.

Have to do better than 2 hits. :{

Need a huge performance from Hendricks tomorrow.
 
Must win today. Need Hendricks to throw the game of his life.

Also, no Schwarber in the lineup, but he can pinch hit in a bit spot.

Lester was great yesterday, but when he pitches, it means his bat AND Ross's bat are in the lineup, both are worthless. It means the others have to be better, or we get shut out.
Ross is a great leader, but we need Montero's bat over his, especially during postseason.

Soler, Bryant, Rizzo, Castro heart of the order today, all struggling a bit.

Let's get some early runs like we did in the sweep in Aug.
 
Hendricks gives up leadoff homer, absolute money since. Cards going to 3rd pitcher by the 4th inning. :eek
 
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