“No question, there’s a larger weight in Chicago,” Lee said after the Cubs were swept from the playoffs for the second year in a row. “I hate to call it pressure, because it’s hard to put more pressure on us than we put on ourselves. But you can feel it in the city. They want it bad. It’s understandable. But it’s all about how you perform on the field.”
The Cubs performed their worst when it mattered most. A year after scoring only six runs in a three-game sweep by Arizona, the Cubs produced the same meager output in another early exit.
They have lost their last nine postseason games, and some of the most unsightly were in this series. In Game 1, starter Ryan Dempster walked seven in four and two-thirds innings. In Game 2, the Cubs made four errors, one by each infielder. In Game 3, they went 1 for 11 with runners in scoring position.
The team that led the National League with 97 wins and 855 runs never gave itself a chance. As similar as the result was to 2007, this flameout was harder to explain.
It’s hard to hit and field when your hands are wrapped tightly around your own throat.
Balance can now be restored in the universe for another year.
You have got to love a team whose fans often bring signs to opening day which read “What ’til next year!”
We are starting a review of the Thirty-nine Articles. Perhaps as a theologian and as a Cubs fan, +KSH could recommend some reading on the topic of Predestination……….
There are no words. It’s black here in Chicago.
I never thought the Red Sox would ever win a WS. The Cubs also will win again one day.
My brother commented to me over breakfast this AM that the Heimlich Maneuver rarely succeeds when one is choking on a goat.
I can’t remember a season when the Cubs led with the best record in baseball and choked so quick in the playoffs.
I can remember lots of slumps, swoons, chokes and fades during the regular season, just not the season’s best record followed by the immediate plunge into the playoff abyss.
The Cubs have neither great speed nor great power. They tend to be a station to station offense. That kind of offense takes consistent hitting from at least four or five of your starters. Look at the pressure that players like Furcal and M. Ramirez and Rollins and Howard put on defenses. I just don’t think that the Cubs offense is built correctly.