No one had to explain anything. The sight was there for everyone to see.
Brant Brown dropped a fly ball off the bat of Milwaukee’s Geoff Jenkins to let three runs score in the bottom of the ninth inning. His error handed the Brewers an 8-7 victory over the Cubs and overshadowed another clutch performance by Sammy Sosa.
Sosa hit two home runs to tie Mark McGwire in The Greayt Home Run Race at 65 in a game which left the Cubs tied with the Mets in the wild-card playoff race with just three games remaining.
“Everybody in the ballpark knows what happened,” Sosa said. “Brownie has been with us all year long and he has been doing a great job. What happened to Brownie today can happen to anybody who plays this game. He has a lot of support from this team. We have to forget about it today and keep going.”
Brown entered the game as a defensive replacement in the eighth inning and offered no excuses for his costly error.
“It’s just something that happened,” he said. “I don’t know how to explain it. It just stopped a little short on me and I wasn’t able to catch it. It was just a routine fly ball, nothing troubling about that. You can say it was the wind, or the sun, but those are elements we play with every day. Hopefully it doesn’t cost us that much.”
The Cubs now go to Houston for a three-game series that begins Friday and will determine whether they go to the postseason for the first time since 1989. There was little time to reflect on the crazy way they gave the game away.
“What the heck. There’s no use worrying about it or crying about it,” Mark Grace said. “It’s not going to bring it back. It’s still going to be a loss. We just have to do our best to put it behind us.”
Sosa hit his 64th homer into the right-field bleachers off Rafael Roque in the fifth to increase the Cubs’ lead to 4-0 and break his 0-for-21 slump. Coincidentally, Roque also served up No. 64 to McGwire last Friday.
Sosa came up again with two outs in the sixth and, after missing badly on a Rod Henderson curveball to fall behind 0-2, evened the count and lined a home run 410 feet to straightaway center field. His homer caught McGwire for the first time since he had hit his 62nd on Sept. 13 at Wrigley Field.
Sosa’s 12 home runs against the Brewers is the most by any player against one team since 1961 when Roger Maris hit 13 off White Sox pitching and Willie Mays hit 12 off the Milwaukee Braves.
“This is my lucky team,” Sosa said.
The National League record is 13, shared by Cubs outfielder Hank Sauer (1954 vs. Pittsburgh) and the Milwaukee Braves’ Joe Adcock (1956 vs. Brooklyn). The all-time record is 14, set by Lou Gehrig against Cleveland in 1936.
Steve Trachsel, who likely would pitch in the wild-card tiebreaking playoff game against the Mets on Monday, was cruising into the seventh with a two-hitter and a 7-0 lead. But he gave up four singles and a walk before finally being removed after Brian Banks’ RBI single that made it 7-4.
With two outs in the eighth, Sosa came to the plate one more time with a chance to take the lead with No. 66. But right-hander Eric Plunk threw a 3-2 pitch over Sosa’s head, handing him his third walk of the afternoon and starting an exodus of fans at County Stadium. Little did they know what was about to happen.
The Brewers scored once off Matt Karchner in the eighth to pull within two.
In the ninth, Jeff Cirillo’s one-out double off Rod Beck put the tying runs on second and third with one out before manager Jim Riggleman decided to issue an intentional walk to Cub-killer Jeromy Burnitz, who had homered in his last four games against the Cubs. Beck induced Marquis Grissom to pop up to third for the second out and then got Jenkins to lift a slicing fly ball to deep left.
After the ball bounced out of Brown’s glove, Burnitz, who hesitated between second and third, turned it on to score the winner.
Grace crouched in disbelief.
“When you see the fly ball go up,’ Grace said, “and you have a great athlete out there to catch it, you think: `We have this.’ But the thing that hurt was all three runners scored. I was like, `The game is tied,’ and then I saw Burnitz go around and went `Oh, no, we’re walking off.’ But that’s baseball.”
Does Sosa believe in a jinx?
“I believe in God,” Sosa said. “I believe in my teammates. I believe in my manager. If it is meant for us to win it, we will do it. . . . We haven’t given up yet.”
