
Brewers Beat Cubs and Suddenly, Ron Santo Seems Quite Articulate
Things have gotten so bad with the Cubs that Ron Santo's heavy sighs and plaintive wails and exclamations of "C'mon!" and "No!" actually capture precisely the way I now feel while listening to or watching the action.
Tuesday night the Cubs fell to a season-worst 15 games under .500, losing their seventh in a row, 4-3, to the Brewers. (Lest we forget, the Brewers had lost five in a row before this series began.)
Thomas Diamond, the starting and losing pitcher for the Cubs, was making his first Major League start and wound up tying Mark Prior's franchise record for strikeouts by a pitcher making his Cub debut with 10. Diamond also managed to keep the Cub bullpen on the sidelines until the 7th inning, throwing 122 pitches in the process, which was the highest pitch count by a player making his first MLB appearance since 2001.
The Cub offense provided the usual mix of flat-out failure—1-for-11 with RISP—and comic ineptitude. The game essentially ended right after Starlin Castro drove in Mike Fontenot with the Cubs' third run in the final inning. Castro slipped while trying to stretch his single into a double and was thrown out in a rundown between first and second. Derrek Lee then fanned for the final out.
Aside from dropping seven games in a row, the Cubs have now gone 49 innings without even having a lead.
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