SSK Javier Baez Q&A
A couple of hours before Fridays game, I watched Baez as he was escorted to a television interview. He was giggling into his sweatshirt. During batting practice, he could not stop laughing. Perhaps the moment was a parrot jabbering too fast in his ear. Before the game, his manager, Joe Maddon, a reluctant seer, acknowledged as much.
Javys tried to do too much, he said. The foots getting off the ground again, too high.
Sure enough, in the bottom of the ninth, in a game taut as a tarp, Baez ended up being a p**n when the Cubs needed a rook. On a 2-2 count, the final fastball of the game rode up between Baezs chin and his nose, which is to say it was a good foot out of the strike zone. As is true of so many of the young Cubs hitters, patience is not yet Baezs friend. He lifted his foot and unleashed that electric swing, trying to catch the pitch.
That was the definition of an impossibility.
Baez unpretzeled himself and walked to the dugout, and a stadium packed beyond capacity fell silent. The Indians pumped fists and exchanged leaping high-fives, celebrating a 1-0 win. To steal a Series game in an opposing stadium evokes the warmth that a pickpocket feels when he filches a wallet from a swell.
And the Indians have now done it twice, winning Game 4 on Saturday night by a 7-2 score that was as uncompetitive as the numbers suggest.
These Midwestern teams would seem to offer a striking contrast: the small-ball Indians, generally thriving with singles and doubles and running. And the Cubs, with their big-bopping kids, competing to muscle b***s into the jet stream over Chicago.
Francona, whose sore back gives him a penguins walk, is about happy pain. He talks of his anxiety and his penchant for second-guessing like a priest who has grown comfortable with his small sins. He noted that Series games in a National League park which thankfully come shorn of the designated hitter required more work of a manager. But he acquitted himself well in Games 3 and 4 even as he worried his strategy would blow up.
That was agonizing, he said after Game 3, describing how he had spent the last innings worrying the Cubs would tie the score and expose him. I always get nervous.
Before that game, Maddon blew into his news conference holding a steaming cup of coffee, Mr. Mellow Yellow in the flesh. He wanted to talk of his commute, the blue-clad Cubs fans with the names of old heroes on jerseys Banks, Santo, Williams who wandered into the street, oblivious to his car.
He dug the nuttiness of it all. The fact that people are flying in just to be at a bar, not even be at the ballpark thats pretty impressive, he said.
Maddon likes to stand on the top step of the dugout and peer into Wrigleys distant reaches. There is the last seat that I can see in the right-field corner, he said the other day. I love that that seat is filled every night. I think that is outstanding.
In the fifth inning of Fridays game, I set out to visit that seat. Decades back, I passed a few nights sleeping in the Calcutta train station; navigating the dark, intensely narrow, crowded and joyous aisles of Wrigley called that experience sharply to mind. If there was a fire safety inspector within four miles of Wrigley Field on Friday night, she must have willfully blinded herself.
I reached that chair, just beyond the foul pole in right, and told its inhabitant, a wiry steelworker named Mark, of Maddons observation. He shrugged. As if this surprised him?
How long has he been a Cub fan? Fifty-six years. How old? Sixty. Last name? He shook his head. I aint handing that out, he said.
I moved to another remote seat and found Donovan Arndt, 33. He was here with his older brother and father. His mother and his sister, for reasons not immediately clear, were sitting at the other end of the stadium. He pointed behind him, to old apartment buildings where fans pay premium prices to peer at maybe half the playing field.
Crazy, right? he said. Beers before the game, beers during the game, and beers after the game, and a Cubs World Series. Im living the dream.
I wound my way back to the crows nest that passes for Wrigleys press box. I got back in time to see an aging Indians journeyman with a delicious baseball name, Coco Crisp, drop a pinch-hit into right field to drive in the only run of the game. Two innings later, Baez stands in and then departs, despondent.
Maddon is riding a sometimes confounding horse. On a good night, his team can accumulate clumps of runs that make the score look like a football game. But his young sluggos can become too enraptured with slugging; they have been shut out twice in the first four games of the Series and have won only once.
Just check out these guys in a couple of years, Maddon told reporters.
His stab at playing Nostradamus could look smart in another year. In the 2016 Series, however, the Cub hitters, Baez in particular, swing mightily and most often take seats, where they watch slashing Indian hitters and crafty pitchers pile dirt on the Cubs grave.
Once Baez hooks a harness to his talents, he could well put up big numbers, but that may not happen during the rest of this Series. He spent Friday and Saturday evenings taking wild, futile, roundhouse swings, striking out and popping up.
Maddon had spoken after Fridays loss of the Cubs pressing need to shrink their strike zone. Its not really that complicated, he said.
After Saturdays loss, the Cubs predicament is not complicated, either. Their young would-be star Baez made the final out of the game, and with that the Cubs are one loss removed from deaths door.
Continue reading the main storySource: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/30/sports/baseball/javier-baez-chicago-cubs-game-3.html
