Boom, Boom, Slam: Cubs Flip the Game in 5th, Shut Door Hard on Padres to Take Series Lead

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © David Banks-Imagn Images

The nervousness that creeps into Wrigley Field when the playoffs start to go wrong in the playoffs is familiar, and it makes a seasoned Cubs fan's skin crawl. Everything feels slightly wrong; you become aware of your socks. There have been too many near-misses and deflating setbacks crowded into the Friendly Confines over the decades. Those moments shoulder in and take standing-room places amid the present; the quiet of a loss settles over the crowd before the loss even has to be real. 

It was starting to get that way in the fifth inning Tuesday. The Cubs allowed just one quick, cheap run, in the second inning, when Matthew Boyd yielded a bloop double to Jackson Merrill and then a scalded line-drive two-bagger to Xander Bogaerts. By the bottom of the fifth, though, it began to feel like that might stand up. Nick Pivetta was cruising, with a fastball that was beating the Cubs' barrels so consistently he hardly went away from it. Chicago batters tried to sit on his breaking ball, at times, and when they didn't get it, they were lost. 

Then, like lightning striking twice—like a boxing combo, so sudden and forceful and carefully earned by all involved—the Cubs flipped the game. I mean, they totally flipped it. First, Pivetta made an error. In his first at-bat against Seiya Suzuki, he'd stayed away. He teased him with fastballs, then got him reaching, dipping, for a low curveball. We know that that doesn't work for Suzuki; he hit a lazy flyout.

The devilish thing about baseball, though, is you have to get a guy out more than once. The second time he saw the Cubs' No. 5 hitter, Pivetta wanted to show him something different, so he started pounding him inside. It was a case of trying to be too brilliant, with a twist of not having updated the scouting report recently enough. Suzuki did seem to be looking away to start the at-bat, but he quickly cottoned on and shifted his sights to the inner half.

That was a major problem for Pivetta, because although Suzuki had a bit of a hole inside for much of the second half, he'd closed it up during the final week of the campaign. If the ball had been above his hands, Pivetta might have been ok. It wasn't, and Suzuki sent a missile deep into the left-field bleachers. The quietude exploded and evaporated, and your socks receded into your subconscious.

That brought up Carson Kelly, which should have been good news for Pivetta. Kelly was one of his six strikeout victims through the first four innings, which the hurler accomplished by sticking to a simple plan: fastballs up and away. Kelly really struggles against heaters in that location, especially from righties, and the Padres clearly knew that. If you read our advance scouting guide to the series this morning, even you knew it: Kelly was not a good matchup with Pivetta, from the Cubs' perspective.

Chastened by the failed Suzuki experiment, perhaps, Pivetta and catcher Freddy Fermin (working together for the first time, with Pivetta's personal catcher Elias Díaz hurt; it seems a heinous oversight by the Padres not to have gotten the two some game action in tandem during the regular season run-in) decided to go after Kelly the same way they had the first time. And honestly, that should have worked. Kelly is one of those hitters whose swing really loses its juice when the ball gets into the upper third of the zone, and especially above it. He can't hurt you there, most of the time.

In fact, until Tuesday's fifth inning, Kelly hadn't hit a high four-seamer from a righty with any real authority all year. To find instances of him doing it, you have to go back to last July. Here's the thing, though: the previous examples should have been warnings. Here's Kelly swatting a very high, backspin fly ball just over the wall for a grand slam against the Twins last summer.

That, by the way, came against a pitcher (then-rookie David Festa) not at all unlike Pivetta in terms of pitch mix and approach. Here's a ball from a few weeks later, on which Kelly came up just shy of a scoreboard-flipping late bomb in Toronto.

Kelly is in a better position to generate power this season, with alterations to his stance and stride. That's why he had a better year at the plate this year. However, he also has something in him—a little bit of the timid hero. He doesn't swing for the fences at the top of the zone, almost ever. When the moment is biggest, though, he makes little exceptions. 

And sometimes those become very, very big exceptions.

To really understand what a twist that swing is, consider the chart on the left (of all his regular-season homers this year, by pitch location) and on the right (the chart for his at-bat in the fifth Tuesday).

Pitch 6, up there on the bar of the top of the zone, is not in his power zone, except when the adrenaline is flowing. Then, he can make it so.

That, as it turned out, was the game. The crowd stayed loud; the Cubs created some insurance; the bullpen was magnificent. We'll have more on this contest before the next one tomorrow afternoon, but for now, suffice it to say this: Suzuki and Kelly made excellent adjustments and met the moment in unexpected ways. That's the stuff of which memorable playoff appearances are made. That's what makes a baseball fan's socks roll up and down, without their even noticing.

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