At Home Plate - Diamondbacks Take a 2-0 Lead

Written by Jonathan Leshanski (Contact & Archive) on October 05, 2007

On paper the Chicago Cubs were the better team. They had better depth of starting pitching, they had better offense, they had more experience, and they had a skipper who wasn’t likely to make mistakes. So much for the paper; the games have to actually be played. The pitching didn’t hold up, the offense was outgunned, manager Lou Pinella has made mistakes and they are just a loss away from enjoying the experience of watching the rest of the playoffs from their off season homes. That’s not to say that the Cubs were never in this game. They managed to take their first lead of the season on a two run home run in the second inning by Geovany Soto - a guy with just 30 games of big league experience on his resume. And that was the highlight of the Cubs night. While they did manage to score another pair and threaten in the ninth the Arizona Diamondbacks accumulated enough runs by the fourth inning to deflate any Chicago hope. Diamondbacks hurler Doug Davis wasn’t at the top of his game, yielding four earned runs over 5.2 innings, but he pitched well enough and departed the game with a 8-4 lead.
That would prove to be the final score, as a quartet of Diamondback relievers would take over and scatter just three more hits over the final 3.1 innings. There wasn’t a lot of controversy tonight when Lou Pinella chose to pull his pitcher. Fifteen game winner Ted Lilly lasted just 3.1 innings and gave up six runs and seven hits - including a three run shot to Chris Young and a pair of RBI triples off the bats of Eric Byrnes and Stephen Drew. It was the second night in a row that Drew did the crucial damage with his bat. But the game wasn’t without controversy. In the fourth inning, Augie Ojeda bunted, then evaded a tag by Cubs first baseman Derrek Lee, by ducking, as replay clearly showed, out of the baseline. He was called safe and came around two batters later on Stephen Drew’s two run triple scoring the fifth and sixth run of the game for the Diamondbacks.

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