It did not smell of desperation in the visiting clubhouse at Chase Field in the wee hours of Friday morning. Actually, it smelled a little like the salmon Cubs players were picking at quietly in a somber postgame meal.
But desperation?
“Definitely not,” Mark DeRosa said of the Cubs’ need to win three straight against the Arizona Diamondbacks, beginning Saturday, in the best-of-five National League Division Series. “We’re more than capable of taking three games from anyone in baseball. I don’t want to say it’s time to push the panic button, because it’s not. But we do need to play perfect baseball.”
Perfection may not be necessary. But something above a batting average of .179, the Cubs’ cumulative effort in Games 1 and 2, undoubtedly is.
“We’ve been kind of funny all year offensively,” said Derrek Lee, who’s 2-for-8 with a walk and four strikeouts. “We can break out for seven runs in an inning real quick, but then we can have a couple of games like this. We’re looking for that breakout we need, but this offense is capable. We have the guys in here who can do it. We just have to get it done.”
While no National League team in the wild card era has come back from an 0-2 deficit to win a best-of-five division series, it has happened four times in the American League, including 1995, when Lou Piniella’s Seattle Mariners did it against the Yankees. And teams coming back from a two-game deficit certainly isn’t unheard of in postseason play, although it’s obviously more common in best-of-seven series.
Lee might want to give his teammates a pep talk based on his own experience. He was a member of the 2003 Florida Marlins who came back from a 3-1 deficit to beat the Cubs in a National League Championship Series that’s memorable for all the wrong reasons in Chicago.
But Lee acknowledges it will not be easy.
“Give them some credit,” he said of the Diamondbacks. “They play good baseball, they put pressure on us with their speed. We see why they have a good team over there. They play well.
“This isn’t how you print it up when you go into a series, but it is what it is. We’re backed into a corner, so we have to come out fighting.”
The Cubs are hoping a return to Wrigley Field will give them a boost. Although they have not been invincible at home this season (44-37), September matched July for their best month at Wrigley (9-4), and they did win five of their last six at home.
“Hopefully, having the crowd at our back will help,” Aramis Ramirez said. “We’ve played pretty good the last 2 1/2 months at home so, hopefully, we can take two.”
In Phoenix, players on both sides were surprised by the raucous home crowds in a city not known for having passionate fans.
“It’s got to be an advantage,” DeRosa said of returning home. “They have to come to our park and play in front of our fans. It’s tough in a postseason going into an opposing team’s place. Arizona brought out a lot of people, and they were rowdy. Hopefully, it’s the same at Wrigley Field.”
Ramirez, 0-for-9 in the first two games with four strikeouts, said the D’Backs “don’t get enough credit.” He also believes the Cubs have been pressing.
“You just have to relax and try to do less,” he said. “When you try to do more, you won’t do anything, and that’s what we’re doing now. We’re trying to do too much. We just have to go out and play.”
Lee does not necessarily agree.
“It’s hard to say,” he said. “We want to win. We’re going out there and giving it everything we have. If you call that pressing, maybe we’re pressing. We’re just not hitting, and that’s the bottom line. We’re not swinging the bats well.
“It’s the postseason. When you have two bad games, it gets magnified. We all understand that. We all thought we were going to come out and get through [Thursday], but it didn’t work out that way and there’s no rhyme or reason for it. We just need to do a better job.”
The old take-one-game-at-a-time philosophy will be in full force this weekend, and if desperation works as motivation, then so be it, DeRosa said.
“You’d rather be 2-0 and playing loose as a goose, but we dug ourselves this hole,” he said. “We’ve got no one to blame by ourselves. We just have to go out and get it done.”
And if they still need reason to be optimistic, there’s always this rationale from shortstop Ryan Theriot:
“It could be worse — we could have lost two at home. We’ve got to look at the positive and go forward. It’s not over yet.”
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misaacson@tribune.com
