What a painful way to lose, on a dicey replay review in the 9th inning, taking the tying run off of third base with nobody out. Maybe Addison Russell shouldn’t have even tried for third in the first place – never make the first out at third base and all that – but aggressiveness has otherwise suited the Cubs well this year.
Dang. Such a crummy loss.
Without question, there was some good and bad luck on each side in this one, but man alive … the Pirates got a two-run homer on a ball that maybe went 320 feet … Willson Contreras hit a ball 401 feet that didn’t leave the park … Jon Lester, Ian Happ, and Willson Contreras all hit rockets right at guys in the infield that otherwise would have been run-scoring singles.
Then you had the Cubs giving up what might have been a meaningless insurance run in the eighth, but it turned out to be the winning run after Addison Russell seemingly tripled with nobody out to score David Bote and get the Cubs within one … but a replay apparently showed that Russell came off the base, and he made the first out at third base as the would-be tying run. None of the replays we could see on the broadcast showed it, so I will assume for now that New York had an angle we did not. Because otherwise, there was NOTHING definitive to overturn the original call of safe.
That was just such a crappy loss and a way to end the Blogathon. I’ll take some deep breaths, and try to end it on a positive note. For now, for this brief moment, I’m very pissed, and probably not entirely coherent.