January 19

I was recently going through some files on my computer when I found this mock write-up for a Major League Baseball Division Series game from 2008. At the time I was applying for various jobs in the baseball industry and some of them required that I had a sample of my writing. I wrote about a game between the Chicago Cubs and the Los Angeles Dodgers.

As I reread through it, I realized how much my writing has improved in the short time that I've been doing this little project and I'm really excited to see how my January 1 post will compare with my December 31 post. I had titled the article "Cubs About to Pass the Century Mark" and here is the piece completely unedited:

Uh oh! It's been one hundred years since the Cubs brought a title to Chicago, but fans might be re-thinking their “This is our year” campaign. After winning 97 games during the regular season, northern Chicago is staring down the barrel of elimination at the hands of the suddenly red-hot Dodgers.

After losing Game 1 yesterday, the Cubs needed to even the series and turn the NLDS into a best of three series. The way the infield was playing, it looked as though the Cubs were thinking more about their next off-season game of golf. An error each for Mark DeRosa and Derrek Lee respectively in the second, another one by Aramis Ramirez in the fourth followed by an error by Ryan Theriot in the ninth capped a game in which every infielder botched a play allowing three unearned runs to score in a 10-3 victory for the Dodgers.

The game was set for a Cubs’ victory with the newest member of the no-hitter club, Carlos Zambrano at the helm for Chicago taking on the 24-year-old inexperienced Chad Billingsley. Zambrano got the Cubs off on the right foot by plowing through the first inning including striking out Manny Ramirez. Alfonso Soriano led off the second by drilling the first pitch he saw from Billingsley into left field for a single and then advanced to second on a passed ball by Dodgers’ catcher, Russell Martin. (Martin would kick four pitches around in the first inning, but only one resulting in an advancement by Soriano.) And that, folks was the end of the action for the Cubs.

Andre Ethier started the second inning off with a single to right and advanced to third on a hit-and-run by James Loney. Blake DeWitt followed Matt Kemp’s looking strikeout with a hard grounder to second baseman DeRosa. DeRosa was unable to handle it, allowing Ethier to score, Loney to slide in safely to second and DeWitt to make it safely to first.

Derrek Lee made only nine errors during the regular season, but chose a bad time to make his first of the postseason. Casey Blake’s grounder took a bad hop, hit Lee’s glove and was temporarily lost as the Dodgers loaded the bases. Luckily for Zambrano, he had a pitcher to deal with and Billingsley easily went down for the second out on three fastballs. With the bases loaded and two outs, the Cubs still had a chance to get out of the inning with minimal damage, but Cubs fans everywhere will be able to tell you that it never comes that easily and it didn’t tonight either. Rafael Furcal noticed how deep DeRosa was playing at second, so he sent a bunt single in his direction which scored Loney and kept the bases loaded. Russell Martin followed with a bases-clearing line drive double to left-center to clear the bases.

That was the story until the Dodgers tacked on another run in the fifth on Manny Ramirez’s second homerun in as many games and an RBI double by Kemp in the seventh. It wasn’t until the bottom of the seventh that the Cubs scored their first run on a Jim Edmonds’ RBI double to score DeRosa.

The Dodgers answered with two more runs in the eighth and another run in the ninth to bring their total to ten before the Cubs had their most exciting frame of the evening. Derrek Lee led things off with a double followed up by a single off of the bat of Aramis Ramirez. DeRosa then hit a double to plate both Lee and Ramirez, but it wasn’t enough as the Cubs couldn’t get anything else and finished the game with a two-game deficit to the Dodgers.

97 wins, home field advantage, a healthy Carlos Zambrano, but nothing to show for it but one game shy of elimination to a team who were three games under .500 at the All-Star Break. Winning three games in a row is not impossible, but unlikely in the postseason. Uh oh!