I remember reading an article that featured very in-depth interviews with Chicago Cubs fans. The people featured in the article were very diverse. One was blind and in his nineties, while another was Billy Corgan, front man of Smashing Pumpkins. All of these people had a couple of things in common —their love of the Chicago Cubs and their belief that this was the year the Cubs would end their World Series drought.

Now it’s only a couple of days into October, and the north side of Chicago is looking at another long, dark winter of second-guessing and wondering what went wrong.
The Cubs finished the regular season with the best record in the National League. They won 97 games. Only the Los Angeles Angels had a better regular season record than the Cubs.

The Cubs had excellent starting pitching this year. Ryan Dempster had the best season of his career, Carlos Zambrano threw a no-hitter, Ted Lilly reached a career high in wins and Kerry Wood did a decent job of being dominant as a closer.
These Cubs had a valid rookie-of-the-year candidate in Geovany Soto, who put up good numbers as Chicago’s catcher. They had solid hitting and only the Texas Rangers scored more runs than they did during the regular season. They scored a National League leading 855 runs, 56 more than second place Philadelphia.

Yet, here we are with another botched October. The Cubs are home until the start of spring training while October baseball carries on without them.
The fact that the Cubs are sitting on their couches, watching the Championship Series and World Series on television is their own doing.
In late August, the Dodgers were five games under .500. There were eight teams in the National League that had a better record, and yet here they are, going to the Championship Series against Philadelphia.
The Cubs could have, and should have beaten the Dodgers. The Dodgers do have good starting pitching, and they have a couple of offensive gems, but they are not as good as the Cubs.

First of all, the Cubs made several managerial mistakes. Piniella started a struggling Kosuke Fukudome in the first two games, and got a solid 0-8 batting show out of him. The man who finished the regular season 17-9 with a 4.09 ERA, Ted Lilly, was put in the fourth starter position for the Division Series. His last four starts in September had earned him wins, with three of them being quality. Zambrano on the other hand had one quality start in his last four starts, which was his no-hitter. The other three starts featured him getting lit up on the mound. Somehow Zambrano started game two.

Another problem the Cubs had was nobody could work together at the plate. In game one, Chicago managed to strand 14 runners on base.  That’s 14 times someone came up to bat and managed to get an out, leaving someone standing on base.
Alfonso Soriano went 1 for 14 in the series. Aramis Ramirez was 2 for 11 and Geovany Soto was 2 for 10. In the snap of a finger, Chicago’s offense went from being a powerhouse to all but dead. Mark DeRosa hit the Cubs only home run in the entire series in game one.

Additionally, the defense was sloppy. In game 2, the Cubs committed a whopping 4 errors, one by each infielder. Zambrano was pitching well enough, but the errors led to several unearned runs which blew the game wide open.

The Cubs lost it in the blink of an eye. They went from being a dominant September team to a team with home field advantage that got swept in the first round of the playoffs. The Cubs have nobody to blame for this but themselves. Every part of that ballclub stepped down at the end of September, and that’s why the drought is going
to continue.

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