I don’t want to say Ryan Dempster was laboring in the third inning Friday, but two midwives called the Cubs’ dugout to offer their services.
If you are a fan of the team from the North Side, you are in need of a little Catskills humor after watching your directional opposites, the White Sox, hammer the Cubs 10-3.
Dempster has had days like this before, just not this year. Not even close.
Admit it, Mr. and Mrs. Cubs fan and your 2.3 Cubs fan children: What concerns you, even if it’s somewhere deep in your subconscious, is that this version of Dempster, the one who gave up eight runs in 21/3 innings, is going to show up more and more in the second half of the season. The pitcher who showed up Friday might not be the real Dempster, your evil twin says, but neither is the guy who came into the game with a 9-2 record and a 2.63 earned-run average.
To which I say: Chill.
You don’t do what Dempster has done in the first three months of the season and be lucky. You can’t bluff your way to what he has done. He is not a creation of the Cubs’ mighty offense, nor is he a creation of friendly Wrigley Field, where he is 9-0. Going into the opening game of this three-game series at The Cell, he had a 2.48 ERA on the road, and opponents were hitting .194.
The good news is that nothing in his body of work this season suggests he’s going to lose it the way he did Friday. He has been so good and so consistent that there’s no statistical evidence in three months of work to indicate how he responds to a poor start. Before Friday, the most earned runs he had given up in a game was four. He had done that twice and won both of his following starts.
“It’s going to be a long four days,” he said of the wait until his next start. “But I’ll be itching. I’ll ask [manager] Lou [Piniella] to get me in there somehow. Let me get some action — run the bases or bunt or something.”
Dempster has a tendency to lose it for a few batters, which was part of his problem as the Cubs’ closer the last several years. But as a starter this season, he has kept the damage of those lapses to a minimum. Friday was maximum trouble for him.
The Cubs were trailing 1-0 when Dempster got Dewayne Wise to fly out to right to start the third. He did not get another Sox hitter out on the way to giving up seven runs. With the Cubs down 4-0, Dempster walked two straight batters, then gave up a grand slam to Nick Swisher.
“What it came down to was one bad inning,” Dempster said. “It was just a really, really bad inning.”
It was bizarrely similar to what the Sox’s Jose Contreras went through against the Cubs a week ago. Manager Ozzie Guillen should have pulled him earlier in that game, but didn’t, and the result was an eight-run inning against Contreras.
This was a little different. Given Dempster’s consistent success this season, Piniella kept waiting for him to right the ship. It never happened. And as Piniella pointed out afterward, the Cubs are down a reliever, thanks to Scott Eyre’s groin injury. The last thing he wanted to do was tax the bullpen.
Remember how good Cubs’ rookie Eric Patterson was against the Sox last week? Well, he was that bad Friday. Playing left field, he let a ball go through his legs on an A.J. Pierzynski single in that ugly third inning, allowing Pierzynski to advance to third. And the Sox ran on his arm all afternoon. Afterward, Piniella all but channeled Hawk Harrelson regarding Patterson’s near future in left field. He gone.
More than Dempster, what Cubs fans should be worrying about is the spate of injuries the Cubs have experienced of late. They’re without Carlos Zambrano, Alfonso Soriano and Reed Johnson.
“We’ve been dealing with it for a little bit now,” Piniella said. “So far we’ve been able to maintain, and hopefully we’ll continue to. We’ve shown resiliency. I expect us to play well, but at the same time, we can’t afford too many more of these things.”
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You have to wonder whether Zambrano’s absence makes Cubs’ starters press a little bit. He’s a security blanket. Without him, it has to be a colder, tenser place. But guess what? Championship teams deal with injuries and move on.
OK, back to worrying about Dempster. He says not to.
“I feel good,” he said. “Stuff-wise, that’s what’s disappointing, I felt like I had good life in my fastball. I just didn’t execute some pitches. I feel good, I feel strong and I feel like I can go out there every fifth day and give us the chance to win the game. [Friday] was one of those times it didn’t happen. There haven’t been very many this year.”
There haven’t. But this is a Cubs-Sox series, and the feelings are ratcheted up.
It wasn’t a total loss, however. Sox fans were kind enough to say good-bye to him in song.
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