The Cubs turned their season toward the home stretch earlier this month with a Tuesday-night game against the first-place Houston Astros. Up to then the Cubs had done an admirable job of simply staying in the National League Central Division race, especially with pitching ace Mark Prior on the disabled list, recovering from the bumped shoulder he suffered in a baserunning gaffe in mid-July. They briefly drifted below .500 a couple of times, falling a season-high five and a half games out of first following a two-game series sweep at the hands of the Philadelphia Phillies in late July. Then they took two of three against the Astros in Houston to begin a streak of four straight series wins, finishing with a three-game sweep of the Padres in San Diego in early August. They followed those wins by losing two out of three to the Dodgers in Los Angeles, salvaging only the finale, when Prior outdueled Kevin Brown with the help of a couple of mammoth Sammy Sosa homers. When they returned home to lose the Monday-night opener of a critical four-game series with the Astros–Kerry Wood had only one bad inning, but it was enough to cost him a 3-1 loss to Wade Miller–it dropped them three and a half back. On Tuesday night they were sending their third-best starter, Carlos Zambrano, against the Astros’ Tim Redding in a game that figured to dictate the course of the rest of their season.
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The wide-bodied Zambrano, however, pitched great. Displaying no-hitter stuff, he struck out five of the first six batters he faced. He didn’t do it with guile but with hard, low slants in which everything came in knee-high and moving fast. A friend with a view of one of the Wrigley Field pitch-speed screens later told me it seemed that every Zambrano pitch registered somewhere in the 90-mile-an-hour range. But his fastball was slicing in and down on the Astros’ right-handed hitters, and he mixed that with a biting slider breaking in the other direction and an occasional split-fingered fastball that dropped straight down.
These two evenly matched teams both sent their fifth starters to the mound the next day, and although both were given leads at various times, neither could get through the fifth inning to qualify for the win. The Cubs’ Shawn Estes walked five and blew an early 3-1 lead with a run in the third and two more in the fifth to put the Astros up 4-3. In the bottom half, the Astros’ Jeriome Robertson allowed singles to Lofton and Gonzalez to open the inning and was yanked for Dan Miceli. Miceli got Sosa swinging, but then Alou deposited one in the left-field bleachers to put the Cubs back on top, 6-4. The difference between the two teams on this day was in the bull pens. Baker paraded out a series of relievers–Antonio Alfonseca, Kyle Farnsworth, Mike Remlinger, and Joe Borowski–each of whom worked a scoreless inning, and the Cubs won.
It looked like the team that could put together a ten-game winning streak would coast home, but none of the three seemed capable of such a stretch. The Astros and Cards both struggled with their starting pitching, with respective aces Roy Oswalt and Matt Morris dealing with health woes; and while the Cubs had the pitching, their offense tended to sputter, even with Lofton at the top of the order and Sosa and Alou pounding away in the middle.
