At that moment when a furious Ted Lilly violently slammed his glove to the ground, there couldn’t have been a Cubs fan on earth who didn’t relate to how he felt.
From thousands of miles away, it didn’t require much of an imagination to picture grown men and women in Cubs caps screaming “No!” at a TV set, banging the palm of a hand on the counter of a neighborhood bar, groaning, moaning, cursing the luck of this accursed team.
You couldn’t blame them.
It was only the second inning of Thursday night’s playoff Game 2 at Chase Field against the party-pooping Arizona Diamondbacks, a team that doesn’t care one whit how many centuries it takes for a Chicago team to win a National League pennant.
Theodore Roosevelt Lilly, the namesake of a man who was still active in politics when the Cubs last won a World Series, was looking to protect a 2-0 lead his catcher, Geovany Soto, had given him in the top of the inning with a two-run shot.
The left-handed Lilly was laboring, though. It had taken him 25 pitches to get through his first inning and a total of 41 merely to record a fourth out.
By the time Lilly ran the count full to Diamondbacks leadoff man Chris Young with two gone in the second and two D’backs on base, his pitch count was far beyond the point that would permit him to work a complete game.
This was not good news for manager Lou Piniella or the Cubs, who have such a short-handed pitching rotation that they came into this series expecting Carlos Zambrano to carry them through two of the first four games and Lilly to shoulder Games 2 and 5.
Lilly is not overpowering the way Zambrano is. He needs his control to be pinpoint and his breaking stuff to be sharp. For him to be effective, Lilly has to be able to persuade hitters to lunge and flail at his slow, jughandle curves.
Young wouldn’t do it. A 24-year-old outfielder who came to Arizona from the White Sox in a trade for Javier Vazquez, he has a keen batting eye and a knack for laying off poor pitches that is not shared by older leadoff batters who should know better, the Cubs’ Alfonso Soriano among them.
Young had coaxed a walk out of Lilly his first time up. And in the second, with his team down a couple of runs, Young refused to bite when Lilly tried to tempt him with three consecutive breaking balls.
Under a crescent moon, the count was full.
Lilly looked in to Soto for a sign. He stretched, took a backward look at Chris Snyder leading off from third base and Justin Upton straying off second, then delivered to home plate a gopher ball that the Diamondback sent screaming into the left-field seats.
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Young could be seen on TV in the Arizona dugout a short while later, telling a teammate about the pitch.
“Fastball,” he said.
Meanwhile, on the mound, the man who served up that fastball was far from happy about it. While the fans in the stands were concentrating on the flight of the ball, Lilly, not by nature a demonstrative man, totally lost it.
He yanked the glove off his right hand and spiked it like a football.
This must have been the angriest Lilly had felt at a baseball game since one day as a Toronto Blue Jay when he and his manager, John Gibbons, argued very publicly on the mound. They later had to be separated after Lilly took out his frustration on equipment in the clubhouse.
Cubs fans know how he felt.
It was not what they expected, having to watch their 1-2 pitching punch, Zambrano and Lilly, go into the desert and come up so high and dry.
The hollow sound of Piniella’s words from the night before, “Look, guys, we’ve got a lot of baseball left,” had to have been ringing in fans’ ears as they saw Lilly absorb a pounding and the Cubs stumble to an 8-4 loss.
A night after wondering why Piniella pulled his star of a starting pitcher too soon, it wasn’t hard to wonder why the Cubs manager left his ace lefty in so long.
Or to wonder, protestations aside, if Piniella privately did rue Wednesday’s decision to keep Zambrano fresh for a Game 4 that possibly wouldn’t be played.
What he and the players and their anxious fans needed desperately was a miraculous rally of some kind.
Kerry Wood came out of the bullpen to try to keep the Diamondbacks at bay, four years removed from the last playoff game played at Wrigley Field, that Oct. 15, 2003, night when Wood was the losing pitcher in a game that cost the Cubs a rare trip to the World Series.
And fans crossed their fingers, no longer as angry as they were at the moment when Lilly flung his glove, simply hopeful now that somehow the Cubs still have something else up their sleeves.
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