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On the penultimate day of the regular season, Cubs manager Craig Counsell said that in the playoffs, some conventional roles have to go out the window. Particularly, with his pitchers. Postseason games — especially those in a short series like the three-game wild card — can often hinge on one or two pockets within the game.
In the Cubs’ 3-1 win over the Padres in Game 1 of the National League Wild Card series, the most important moments came in the fifth inning. Until that point, starter Matt Boyd had done the job of keeping the Cubs in the game, limiting San Diego to one run. But when Boyd struck out Padres shortstop Jake Cronenworth and then gave up a single to catcher Freddy Fermin and the top of the Padres lineup coming up, Counsell saw the spot to make a change and handed the ball over to Daniel Palencia.
“That’s the outing of the game that was critical,” he said. “[Palencia] throwing up five outs in five hitters and going through the top of their lineup, the game made sense after that to me; know what I mean? There was a real path right there.”
Palencia got flyouts from Fernando Tatis, Jr. and Luis Arraez to end the inning and then carried his handiwork over into the sixth, mowing down Manny Machado and Jackson Merrill with his triple-digit fastball before putting a bow on his outing with a Xander Bogaerts flyout to Pete Crow-Armstrong in center field.
From there, the rest of the Cubs bullpen arms used in Game 1 — Drew Pomeranz, Andrew Kittredge, and Brad Keller — combined for three perfect innings, but it was the bottom of the fifth that ultimately turned the tides.
On the heels of Palencia’s two outs in the top of the fifth inning, Seiya Suzuki and Carson Kelly went back-to-back to shift the game from a 1-0 deficit to a 2-1 lead. Those were the first back-to-back postseason homeruns for the Cubs since Miguel Montero and Dexter Fowler did it against the Dodgers in the 2016 National League Championship Series. The Suzuki and Kelly homers were also their first in the playoffs in both of their careers.
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“It’s very special,” Kelly said. “You dream about those moments as a little kid, getting into the postseason and hitting the game-winning home run, right? And to have that happen today is really an honor.”
The fifth inning turned out to be the momentum shift that won the game. On the shoulders of Boyd’s solid outing, Palencia kicked off fourteen straight outs from the bullpen, and Suzuki and Kelly connected for homers on a day when the wind was blowing in from center and against Padres starter Nick Pivetta, who had almost completely stymied the Cubs offense up until those two at-bats.
Other than Nico Hoerner’s first inning single, the Cubs had not produced a baserunner before Suzuki led off the fifth, a stretch of eleven straight outs from the lineup that included five strikeouts. But at the top of the fifth and facing Pivetta for the second time, Suzuki came through with a home run several rows into the bleacher seats in left center.
“With the home run, I feel like it was a breakthrough moment where it was a decisive moment,” Suzuki said via Cubs interpreter Edwin Stanberry. “I think feeling the crowd and the passion they had and with the way Boyd was pitching, too, I think in that moment the fans really got behind us.”
Suzuki’s homer certainly lifted the Wrigley crowd’s spirits, the 39,114 who came to see the Cubs in a playoff game in person for the first time since the 2018 wild card game, but it was also a much-needed jolt for the guys in the dugout, too.
Up until that point, they were fighting to keep the game as tight as possible and were doing so successfully thanks to Boyd’s ability to keep limiting any potential damage from a potent Padres lineup. His efforts were buffeted by some trademark sparkling defense, including an over-the-shoulder catch by Dansby Swanson that held Machado on third base in the fourth inning.
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Swanson said it was a move he had practiced for years with his brother and sister when they were younger, when he would drag them out into the yard or a nearby baseball field and make them throw him fly balls over his head.
“We’ll give them some credit for helping me make that play,” Swanson joked.
In that spot, Swanson reaching over his head and bringing in what could have easily been an bloop single for an RBI that puts the Cubs down by two runs and extends the inning was perhaps the first slight momentum shift. A small catalyst for what would come an inning later when Palencia shut things down in the fifth and sixth innings and Suzuki and Kelly’s homers could put the Cubs in the lead instead of just tying the game.
“I mean, momentum is a real thing,” Swanson said. “And for us to be able to capture [the lead] in the bottom of the fifth there and then for [Palencia to just go right out and go right at guys was definitely a big lift for us.”
The hope is that this momentum carries over into Wednesday for Game 2, when the Cubs could win the wild card series and move on to the division series against the Brewers. The Cubs announced after Tuesday’s game that Kittredge will start Game 2. This is a move foreshadowed a bit by Counsell over the weekend when he talked about viewing his pitchers as “out-getters” in a collective task of getting 27 outs in a playoff game.
He has also used an opener before, namely during the regular season when Ben Brown was struggling in the first inning of his starts. And by tasking Kittredge with at least the first inning on Wednesday, Counsell is potentially limiting the number of times the next pitcher — likely Shota Imanaga — will have to face the top of the Padres’ order in Tatis, Jr., Arraez, and Machado.
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This could also be a decision motivated by Imanaga’s recent struggles with the longball. He has a 5.40 ERA in his last seven starts and gave up 10 home runs in September, the most in any month of his major league career. The weather is unseasonably warm in Chicago the week of the wild card series this year, and those conditions can often favor hitters, even without a starting pitcher who is lately prone to serving up homers.
That’s just one side of the coin when it comes to winning Game 2. The Cubs have already done a lot for themselves by taking the first game; since MLB went to a best-of-three wild card format in 2022, the team that has won the first game has won every wild card series. But along with needing the pitching formula to work like it did in Game 1, Counsell will need his offense to come through in the right moments, just like they did on Tuesday.
“We’ve got to create pressure in as many innings as we can and we’ll break through in one of those innings,” Counsell said. “But creating pressure absolutely is important. This is not a game where you try to get the starter up to a lot of pitches. That’s irrelevant. We’ve got to create base runners and pressure and make pitchers make pressure pitches.”
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