In the heat of the night in the Valley of the Sun, the Cubs collapsed from a seventh-inning stroke.
A decision that Lou Piniella made in the pressure cooker of the playoffs blew up in the manager’s face Wednesday night and cost his guys Game 1.
“Let’s not gloom-and-doom this thing,” Piniella requested after he and the Cubs gave away this one.
But the gloomy fact is, Lou, you made a move to save a pitcher’s strength for your game coming up Sunday and now there might not even be a Sunday.
The opening game of this series began so late — thanks, TBS — that not everybody back in the Central time zone could stay awake to see how it ended, which was 3-1 in the Arizona Diamondbacks’ favor.
When fans back home go to work or school Thursday morning, many will ask the same thing:
“Why’d he take out Zambrano?”
It was a 1-1 ballgame when a shirt-sleeved crowd of 48,864 on a 91-degree night at Chase Field stood for a seventh-inning stretch. Much to the astonishment of, oh, a good 48,000 of those in the house, the Cubs sent out the wrong Carlos.
Carlos Alberto Zambrano had been cruising along, making only one mistake — Stephen Drew hit it out of the park — and defanging one Diamondback after another.
Carlos Agustin Marmol came in to relieve him, however, even though Zambrano had been permitted to bat for himself with the bases full in the sixth inning.
It was a curious move, one that went unexplained on TV while the game was in progress.
Piniella took out Zambrano, the man the Cubs pay millions to, the man who won 18 games for them, the man who had previous experience pitching in the playoffs.
He put in Marmol, who had never pitched in a game this important in his life.
You could understand it if Zambrano’s arm was hanging by a thread, if he already had thrown 110 or 120 pitches and was totally gassed.
You could comprehend it if Zambrano was suffering from cramps again, as he had in a couple of recent starts.
You could even fathom it if Piniella had warned everybody that he was going to go easy on Big Z, even though this is no time of the season for any Cub to go easy.
But no, that wasn’t the case. Before the game Piniella assured everybody that everything was hunky-dory.
The manager was “keeping the door open” that Zambrano might come back Sunday to pitch Game 4 at Wrigley Field, he said before the game.
“That means probably that we won’t let Zambrano throw all that many pitches tonight — 105, 110, we’ll shorten him up. One hundred pitches, whatever it is,” Piniella said. “We’ve got a good bullpen. We believe in it.”
More Top Picks Meters Soil
He was asked if he had any concerns about going with a three-man rotation, about asking Zambrano to work two of a series’ first four games.
“I don’t have any concerns about anything,” was Piniella’s response.
He does now.
Zambrano did not throw 110 pitches, or 105. He did not “shorten up” to 100.
He threw 85.
That was his night’s work — 85 pitches in the biggest game of the season, the biggest Cubs game in years.
Piniella pulled his ace. Then later he couldn’t understand why anyone couldn’t understand it.
“I took a shot. It didn’t work. Period. End of the story.”
Somebody asked the Cubs skipper if he might be accused of looking ahead.
Piniella bristled. “I’m not accused of anything, sir,” he said.
He didn’t seem to think — as everyone else in room and in the southwestern United States seemed to — that lifting Zambrano and having Marmol get lit up was the story of this ballgame.
“The reason we didn’t win was we scored one run on four hits,” Piniella claimed. “That’s really the story of this ballgame.”
One big hit could have changed the complexion of this game when the score was 1-1 and with Zambrano hooked up in a beauty of a pitching duel with Brandon Webb.
But these are the playoffs, where hits can be hard to come by.
All the Phillies could manage were four hits in a loss to the Rockies. All the Angels could muster were four in a loss to the Red Sox.
Webb did not have the Cubs eating out of the palm of his hand, exactly. They mounted serious threats against him in the second, third and fifth, then put a run on the board off him in the sixth.
“Pitchers are controlling this game right now,” Arizona manager Bob Melvin said midgame on live TV.
They were. But then the Cubs changed theirs. Big Z got the rest of the night off.
“Anytime he comes out of a game, it’s kind of a sigh of relief,” said Arizona third baseman Mark Reynolds, who welcomed Marmol to the playoffs with a tie-breaking home run.
Piniella decided to keep Zambrano fresh for Game 4.
There had better be a Game 4. If not, Cubs fans will be talking about this move for years to come.
———-