Our long national nightmare is over. The Cubs beat the Pirates 6-1 in a rain-shortened game at Wrigley. The win ends the Cubs eight game losing streak which started on April 17 against Houston.
Sean Marshall pitched well, going five innings and giving up just four hits and an earned run. He also chipped in an RBI single.
The offense continued to pound out hits, picking up where they left off on Monday. Micah Hoffpauir and Mike Fontenot contributed two hits apiece, including a double each. Kosuke Fukudome hit his fifth homerun of the year, a solo shot off Ian Snell in the first inning.
That’s two games in a row that the Cubs offense has come to life. It could just be a fluke (or it could be Pittsburgh’s pitching), but at least there’s cause for optimism.
Unfortunately, there are still plenty of members of the sub-.250 club. Here they are for today:
Today’s sub-.250 hitters include;
- Ryan Freel .125/.176/.125
- Milton Bradley .196/.322/.373
- Aaron Miles .204/.250/.265
- Geovany Soto .214/.331/.277
- Mike Fontenot .219/.306/.383
- Reed Johnson .238/.319/.333
- Derrick Lee .248/.314/.416
The Cubs take on the Bucs again today at Wrigley. Carlos Zambrano (3-2) takes on Zach Duke (5-4) in the final game of the series.
In other Cubs news, Ted Lilly was thrown out of Monday’s game against the Pirates for arguing balls and strikes. Oddly, Lilly was not pitching. He was yelling his objections from the bench. When Lilly was ejected, he jumped over the dugout barrier and came on to the field to argue with umpire Bob Davidson. After the game, Lilly clained that he did not curse at Davidson, but instead just told him to “concentrate.” Lilly also said that Davidson made physic al contact with him during the confrontation.
According to Davidson, everything Lilly said is a lie. Davidson said that Lilly was using expletives before he was kicked out of the game. He also said that he and Lilly never got close to each other and that no physical contact was made.
I’m sure MLB will look into this, but the one thing I know is that Bob Davidson has a bad habit of making things worse than they have to be. During the game, Ryan Dempster questioned a call, but immediately turned around and shut his mouth. That wasn’t good enough for Davidson. He had to stop play, remove his mask, step toward the mound, and make sure that everyone in the stadium knew that he was in charge. Most umpires would have let Dempster have his say and not done anything about it. Instead, Davidson had to make an issue out of it.
In my opinion, umpires need to always play a role in the background of the game. The less talk there is about the umpires, the better. But umpires like Bob Davidson too often try to play a central role in the game and expand their visibility much farther than it should be. Even if MLB doesn’t do asnything to discipline Davidson for “bumping” Lilly, they should have a word with him about his other antics.
