The Chicago team that didn’t have the pope on its side is heading meekly into the offseason.<\/p>\n
Pete Crow-Armstrong and the Chicago Cubs came out to sunny San Diego and wilted like a tourist without enough sunscreen, swept out of the National League Wild Card Series by a San Diego Padres team eager for redemption and perhaps primed for a deep postseason run.<\/p>\n
The Cubs lost 4-1 in Game 2 on Wednesday night at Petco Park to exit the postseason. They came in with the highest-scoring offense in the majors and head home having scored only one run on eight hits.<\/p>\n
They were ushered out by the Reaper himself, San Diego’s All-Star fireballing closer Mason Miller who allowed Nico Hoerner’s one-out double \u2014 the Cubs’ only extra-base hit in the two games \u2014 before getting Carson Kelly to ground out to shortstop to end it. The No. 4-seeded Padres move on to face the NL Central champion and top-seeded Milwaukee Brewers in an NL Division Series.<\/p>\n
The loss by the fifth-seeded Cubs came several hours after the Chicago White Sox, who received a letter of support from lifelong fan Pope Leo XIV, swept the Houston Astros in Game two of an AL Wild Card Series.<\/p>\n
The Cubs beat the Padres 2-1 in a Wild Card Series last fall at Wrigley Field.<\/p>\n
Several Cubs players lingered along the dugout rail watching the Padres and their yellow towel-waving fans celebrate on a 69-degree night.<\/p>\n
Players hugged inside the quiet clubhouse.<\/p>\n
Crow-Armstrong, the frontrunner for NL MVP after becoming the first Cubs player to post a 40-40 season, struggled to find perspective while placing blame on himself.<\/p>\n
“None of it feels good,” Crow-Armstrong said. “That’s it. So I’m just feeling pretty disappointed in myself, but that’s for me to work on.”<\/p>\n
Crow-Armstrong and Alex Bregman, the Cubs’ 1-2 hitters, combined to go 0 for 15 with one walk and eight strikeouts. Crow-Armstrong had the walk in Game 1. Each of them struck out three times in Game 1 while Crow-Armstrong had a walk.<\/p>\n
Asked how he’d process his performance, Crow-Armstrong said: “That’s not really for me to answer right now. I mean, yeah, you can look at the scoreboard, you can look at the stat sheet, wherever you get your numbers from, and it is clear to see that I didn’t contribute. So, that’s not for me to feel about right now. I wouldn’t process that well if I was.”<\/p>\n
The Southern California native, who had 45 homers and 41 stolen bases, said the Cubs “showed a lot of heart and a lot of fight through all the challenge. But I mean, I would say to start, like, I show up. I show up when it matters in these games, you know? I think that would help us immediately, but that’s all I got right now.”<\/p>\n
The Cubs dominated the season series 5-1. The teams hadn’t seen each other since July 1, when the Cubs handed the Padres their worst loss ever, 23-3 at Wrigley Field as they hit eight home runs.<\/p>\n
“The San Diego group, they threw the ball really well,” Dansby Swanson said. “They didn’t miss spots often, and if they did miss, it was in good locations. It’s a really talented staff. They game-planned for us really well and we weren’t able to get traction. We gave ourselves a couple of chances here and there, but, we weren’t able to capitalize and keep anything going.”<\/p>\n
Said manager Craig Counsell: “You’ve just got to go play well and win games. In the end, we’re walking away unfulfilled and disappointed.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Chicago team that didn’t have the pope on its side is heading meekly into the offseason. Pete…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":912158,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[479688,64,63,591,85],"class_list":["post-912157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-479688","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=912157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912157\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/912158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=912157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=912157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=912157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}