CHICAGO (AP) -There are short leashes, and then there’s the one Cubs starter Ryan Dempster was tethered to.
“I just warned him,” general manager Jim Hendry joked before Tuesday night’s game against the Brewers. “Give up more than two hits and you’ve had a bad day.”
Dempster did – at least by recent Cub standards – scattering seven hits and two runs in six innings of work. But his teammates didn’t, handing Milwaukee rent-a-starter CC Sabathia his first loss in the National League, 5-4, and bumping the Brewers out of the wild-card lead for the first time in two months.
“I haven’t even had time to think about that,” Brewers interim manager Dale Sveum said. Considering he’d been on the job for all of 36 hours by that time, he was probably telling the truth.
The NL Central looked like it might be a tale of three cities just a few days ago, before Hurricane Ike sent the Astros reeling, the Brewers panicked and in a nifty little role-reversal after 100 years of stumbling and bumbling, the Cubs became cold-eyed opportunists.
on 14 of 15, the Cubs found themselves playing a distracted side and beat them twice on a supposedly “neutral” field in Milwaukee. And they didn’t just beat the Astros on Sunday and Monday; they got a no-hitter from Carlos Zambrano in the first game and a one-hitter from Ted Lilly and a supporting cast of relievers in the second. Those performances are what prompted Hendry to sidle up to Dempster and remind him, only half kidding, that a letup was the last thing he wanted to see.
“I had a lot to live up to,” Dempster said.
Major League Baseball shifted the Astros’ scheduled two-game homestand against the Cubs in Houston to Milwaukee – 90 miles from Chicago, virtually a home game for the Cubs – after Hurricane Ike slammed into the Texas Coast. While the Cubs were sympathetic to Houston’s plight, a Chicago team official pointed out that the Astros’ decision to stay home until the weekend left MLB with few options.
The rain that Hurricane Ike sent barreling northward meant the rescheduled games had to be played in a dome, and if that meant the Astros were worried about their families and friends back home, well, that wasn’t the Cubs’ fault. The Astros moved on to play the Marlins in Florida and managed just four hits in a loss, suggesting that strong as Chicago’s pitchers looked in that two-game set, Houston is in a tailspin and likely finished as a wild-card contender.
hetic when the Brewers came to town slightly less distracted, having just taken the unprecedented step of firing manager Ned Yost with a dozen games left in the season and the team in contention for a playoff spot. Alfonso Soriano lined a double off the bottom of the wall leading off the game to let Sabathia know it was on, and while closer Kerry Wood had another shaky ninth inning against Milwaukee, he sealed the win.
Cubs manager Lou Piniella didn’t want to speculate on how the managerial change would affect Milwaukee.
“We’ll have to wait and see,” he said.
Yost got called to his boss’ hotel room early Monday so general manager Doug Melvin, hardly the impulsive kind, could pink-slip him in person. But Melvin was simply acting on orders from Milwaukee owner Mark Attanasio, who insisted “Nothing at all we do is rash. It’s all reasoned and thoughtful,” which is probably true from a dollars-and-cents standpoint.
Attanasio is trying to sell season tickets for next year by offering buyers priority on playoff tickets for this one. And since the Brewers can’t afford to keep either Ben Sheets, the homegrown product who used to be at the front of the starting rotation, nor Sabathia, he’s desperate to sign up customers while he’s still got some leverage.
How long he keeps it might be another matter.
eir win total from last season and being 16 games over .500, they arrived at Wrigley just 3-11 for the month and off to an 0-4 start on a 10-game road trip that took them from Philadelphia to Chicago and then moves on to Cincinnati. They haven’t made the playoffs since 1982, and they’ll have to overtake Philadelphia with by far the lowest payroll of any NL contending team.
“We have 11 games left to get it back,” Sveum said bravely. “We were in this position last year, where we had to fight and claw right down to the last couple games of the year. Looks like it’s going to happen again.”
And likely with the same result.
A coin toss was held earlier Tuesday in case the Brewers somehow force a one-game playoff for the NL Central against the Cubs. They won, which means it will be played at Miller Park, where the Cubs are 4-0 against the hometown team and 6-0 against all comers – just one more indication this really could be their year.
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Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitkeap.org
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