Cubs are cursed. They didn’t just lose this series, they completely and totally collapsed. It’s one thing for a single aspect of your game to struggle in a given stretch, it’s quite another when everyone on your whole team becomes totally worthless. Unbelievable.
These are the saddest of possible words:
The Cubbies, they don’t have a chance.
Ramirez the Dodger, and Broxton the blur,
The Cubbies, they don’t have a chance.
That’s the most stunning and thorough playoff upset I’ve seen in a long time. I’m trying to think of the last one I saw that was like that.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Broxton was hitting 101 on some of those fastballs. Methinks Saito is going to collect some more bench time.
What a waste of fucking time and energy it is being a Cubs fan. Fuck this team. I’m absolutely sick of losing year after every motherfucking year.
It has been true for several years that the Cubs’ last World Series win is closer in time to Napoleon’s march on Moscow than to the present day. The 2011 target is the battle of Trafalgar.
The fucking White Sox better lose tomorrow.
I’m going outside now at 130am to take down my Cubs flag so no one sees it tomorrow.
Fuck this.
Why? Who cares what the Sox do. They could go on and win the Series for all I care at this point. All that matters is the Cubs have, yet again, utterly collapsed in the post-season. The last time I saw the Cubs win a playoff game was 1989. (I was outside the US in '98 and '03 and missed those games. edit: I guess '98 doesn’t count since they got swept then, too.)
The interesting thing is that Accuscore had the Cubs only at a 57% chance against the Dodgers. They gave the Angels better numbers (63%), and it looks like LA is going down, too.
Dealing with my friends that are White sox fans is going to be bad enough. I don’t need to give them extra ammo.
Back home from Dodger Stadium. Great party at Chavez Ravine tonight…the first winning playoff game I’ve ever gotten to watch in person (I had tickets to Lima Time in '04 but ended up having to go out of town that day).
So, on the way home listening to the post-game show, the announcers were saying that all of the talk about the Cubs Curse and all of that was nonsense – the Cubs were simply beat by very good pitching in this series. Errors from Thursday aside, I tend to think this is true, but my opinion is obviously biased.
Any outside observers care to weigh in? Were the Dodgers truly the better team in this series? Or was it just a Cubs’ collapse?
Of course the Dodgers were the better team in this series. The Cubs completely forgot how to pitch, field, and hit. I think the Cubs, overall, are the better regular season team, but post-season, they have had absolutely no production in the last two years. I don’t know what happens to them, but they completely forget how to play baseball come October.
I don’t like the Cubs at all, and, personally, I was hoping that eventually they’d be eliminated just to keep the legend in tact. But to see them go down like that, without a fight or anything to make their fans happy, is truly depressing. My condolences to all the Cub fans.
More importantly, though, is the Phillies loss to the Brew Crew. Tonight was not good. The Phillies continue not to hit–all of their runs so far have occurred in three innings. Pedro Feliz absolutely destroyed a ninth-inning, bases loaded no-out rally by hitting into a double play on the first pitch.
Luckily, we get to face Jeff Suppan tomorrow, a mediocre right-hander whom we should crush. (Unfortunately, I was thinking that about today’s game, too, against Dave Bush.) This is a must, must, must win for the Phillies, since I can’t see them beating CC twice this series.
I had a ticket for Sunday’s game, which I thought for sure would have been played. I guess I’m happy for the Dodger’s sweep though.
The Cubs are built to win a long season, not a short series. If this were the regular season they would shrug this series off, secure in first place, and move on. Unfortunately this is the playoffs and the Cubs were ill-prepared.
If this round were the best of seven they may have had a chance.
Dropping the first 3 games of a best-of-7 series gives you little chance.
Patent nonsense. The Cubs had the best rotation in baseball. The Cubs had a difference during the season of runs scored to runs allowed of +184 (!), which was substantially more than any other playoff team not named Boston, and more than three times what the Dodgers managed. The Cubs have both heavy hitters and a good lineup top to bottom. In short, they were arguably the best team in baseball this year, and certainly the best team in the NL, and were put together in a way that should have won any 5 game series.
But they didn’t PLAY that way. Their putative ace, Dempster, gave up walk after walk, yielding run after run. Zambrano wasn’t any better (though in his defense, that 5-spot had some errors behind it), and Harden gave up 3 runs himself, when he had produced a 1.77 ERA during the 12 games he pitched for the Cubs! So they sucked in pitching. Then, they scored six runs in three games, three of which came after they had already been put away in the second game. So they weren’t hitting, and weren’t scoring when they did hit. They committed errors galore, and they were one of the better fielding teams in baseball this year.
Now I’m not a baseball genius, but if you don’t pitch well, if you don’t field well, and if you don’t hit well, you freakin’ ain’t gonna win ANY series. If the Cubs had played this way all year long, they’d have been in fourth place or worse.
A team that is built for the long haul, but not for a series, is a team that is hit-or-miss, with slumps from time to time, but then with unpredictable ability to go wild. That’s not the Cubs this year.
I actually have a different thought, which has been something percolating through my mind for a while now. I wonder if the current playoff format makes it hard on teams that sew up a division early? The Angels are having the same problems the Cubs are; not surprisingly, they didn’t have to play very well through much of September, either, to win. Could it be that the unconscious tendency to take one’s foot off the accellerator pedal in such situations makes it hard to slam the gas pedal down again when the playoffs arrive? Can someone look at the stats and see if teams that have large leads in September are generally doing poorer in the playoffs than teams that have to continue to play hard to the last week of the season?
Oh, and in fairness:
[del]CUBS[/del]
I was going to say. I don’t really like the best of 5 format, but there’s no way we Cub fans can blame our loss on the length of the series.
The one positive thing I could say about a sweep is that I actually prefered it to the Cubs taking the two in LA and then blowing game 5 at Wrigley. That would have crushed me even more.
But it can be done. 
Indeed. I feel sorry for the poor Cubs fans. Lucy has pulled the football away yet again.
Maybe so, but he was the MVP of the 2006 NLCS.