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| Sports ExtraFriday, August 24, 2007 3:32 AM CDT |
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Giants turn tables on Zambrano
SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco manager Bruce Bochy was asked Thursday if Giants pitcher Matt Cain managed to “out-Zambrano’’ Carlos Zambrano in a 4-1 victory over the Cubs. Cain came into the game with an .068 batting average but managed to hit a two-run homer off Zambrano while holding the Cubs to one run on eight hits over seven innings. “Yeah, he did,’’ Bochy replied. “I mean, pitching(-wise), and if you thought a pitcher was going to hit a home run today, I don’t think Cain would’ve been your pick.’’ The Cubs remained a half-game ahead of idle Milwaukee in the NL Central, continuing the logjam that might go on until the final days of the season. “I see a good race,’’ Cubs manager Lou Piniella said. “You never know about what’s going to happen, but it’s been close this long. I don’t see any reason why things would change. Hopefully we get hot.’’ Not yet. The Cubs hit .227 in the series and were dominated for the most part by Giants starters Tim Lincecum, Barry Zito and Cain. But they still won two of three. “Lincecum and Cain, especially, these guys are going to be good for a long time,’’ Derrek Lee said. “So it could’ve easily went the other way. They were in every game, but we pulled out these first two close ones, so we’ll take it.’’ Lee was 0-for-4 on Thursday and 2-for-12 in the series, continuing his second-half road funk. Dating to July 2 in Washington, Lee is hitting .163 over the Cubs’ last four road trips. Daryle Ward could commiserate with Lee, after a day in which he looked tentative in the field and lost on the basepaths. Ward committed an error in the first when he dropped a routine pickup of Dave Roberts’ single, allowing Roberts to take second. In the second Ward was picked off second by catcher Guillermo Rodriguez after straying too far with no outs. Piniella had no idea what Ward was thinking. “With two outs, you’d say all right, you’re trying to get a big lead and you’re trying to score on a base hit,’’ Piniella said. “But with no outs, I don’t know. If it was a base hit and it was questionable, he wasn’t going to get sent home with no outs anyway.’’ Ward said he was being over-aggressive. “It’s just one of those plays,’’ he said. “It really shouldn’t have happened. I should have thought about it a little bit differently, but when I’m out there, I want to score. I’m a big guy, I’ve got to get some (momentum) going, and they recognized it and picked me off.’’ Ward’s lack of mobility in right also prevented him from getting to a soft pop fly off the bat of Roberts with the bases loaded and two outs in the fourth. The ball fell in front of Ward for a two-base hit, giving San Francisco all the runs it needed. Ward and Jake Fox can be defensive liabilities in right in a difficult park like AT&T, and it showed. But Zambrano (14-10) could only blame himself for the loss. He hurt himself with three fourth-inning walks that set up Roberts’ hit, including one to Cain to load the bases on a 3-2 pitch in which Zambrano nearly hit the pitcher. “Walks. You can’t walk three people in an inning, walk the pitcher and face the front part of the lineup,’’ Piniella said. “You’re going to get yourself in trouble.’’ Zambrano admitted he made some mistakes but said he was “feeling good’’ and pointed to his velocity, which peaked at 97 m.p.h. His biggest mistake was a two-run homer to Cain in the sixth on a 1-1 sinker. “Anybody can hit a home run in the big leagues,’’ Zambrano said. “If you make good contact and have a little power, you will hit the ball out of the ballpark.’’ Now the Cubs face baseball’s newest Cinderella team—Arizona’s Baby Backs—in a three-game showdown in the air-conditioned comfort of a dome. “If we win two out of three the rest of the year I think we’re all going to be very happy,’’ Piniella said. “Let’s go to Arizona and try to do the same.’’ (c) 2007, Chicago Tribune. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. E-mail this story | Print this story | Search archives | RSS Show comments |  Hide comments | Hide comments on all stories |
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Read the... wrote on Aug 24, 2007 12:28 PM:
Crazy wrote on Aug 24, 2007 8:53 AM:
Love it!!! wrote on Aug 24, 2007 8:17 AM:
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