Find a way to win a baseball game.
That’s all the Cubs can do as they try to fight back from a 1-0 series deficit to the Marlins and force a winner-take-all Game 3 on Saturday.
Throughout the regular season, the Cubs had to be resilient to overcome some of their deficiencies and staring elimination in the face, the veteran group will have to find a little more to save their season.
“I think we’ve done that as a group,” right fielder Jason Heyward said before Thursday’s postponement. “We’ve shown that we can rise to that occasion, collectively. I think we just need to continue to try and keep pushing and give ourselves a chance to play more baseball.”
“Throughout the whole year, we’ve obviously done enough in our division, a very tough division. … We’re gonna do our best to come out here and win today and your chance to win tomorrow But for me, it’s we got to keep playing more baseball, we got to continue to relax. The way you settle in is, you get more opportunities. We gotta earn that today.”
The Cubs’ main goal aside from winning Game 2 on Friday will be trying to find some offense and give their pitchers a chance to succeed. The team’s offense was only able to score one run against Marlins’ ace Sandy Alcantara and will face similar stuff in Game 2 against rookie phenom Sixto Sanchez.
“In the playoffs, runs are usually at a premium, but we have to do a better job than we’ve been doing,” first baseman Anthony Rizzo said.
Offense has been hard to come by for the Cubs in the postseason recently, scoring three runs or more in just two of their last nine playoff games.
“The feeling is [that] want to do our part on the offensive side,” Heyward said. “You understand at times you face good pitching. It is what it is, you tip your cap. But again, the fact is we obviously have to score runs to win and we’d like to go out there and give [Yu Darvish] one run to work with and give ourselves a chance.
“When we get ready for the fastball, it gives us the ability to command the strike zone a little better because you’re looking for it in one spot,” manager Davis Ross said. “But each one of these guys has their own plans of attack. These guys do a lot of homework. So you have to try to trust the ability of the guys in the lineup and just try to keep letting them know what you see.”
Darvish will take the ball for the Cubs on Friday and he’s going to have to play stopper if they expect to get to Game 3. Darvish has thrived in that role this year and is 6-1 with a 1.40 ERA in games after the Cubs lose.
That is exactly who the Cubs need him to be.
“He’s almost like an artist,” starter Jon Lester said. “He almost creates a painting every time he pitches. Like, maybe my slider’s not working today, so we’re going to go with my nasty split or this pitch that I invented two weeks ago that we don’t have a name for.”
