Befuddlement

Baseball makes no sense. No one can deny this. But try to make sense of Randy Wolf getting shredded by Cubs bats on May 12, then tossing a shutout at Wrigley on September 3rd, and you really are going to have a thinker on your hands.

You would think jet-setting to 85-50, the best record the Cubs had had since 1945, would have been enough to take the sting out of losses like the ones in the last five games. It doesn't. It makes them worse. When Lou Piniella inexplicably goes to Bob Howry after Carlos Zambrano leaves the game after five (don't get me started on him) and Bob immediately puts the game out of reach. Or so you think, until the Cubs launch one of their famous comebacks, capped by Jimmy Edmonds finally going deep again to tie it. Then Geoff Freaking Blum caps a banner day of Gold Glove plays by hitting the game-winning two run homer in the 11th.

And then there was tonight's debacle, in which the only time the Cubs got a runner to third, it was on his way home to get thrown out at the plate. At 85-55, with a Baseball Prospectus-calculated 99.5 percent odds of making the playoffs thanks to a 10-game cushion on the wild card runner up right now, we shouldn't care. But we care more than ever.

Then there's Zambrano. Left injured after five. Claims to be hurt. Goes to the doctor today, skips the MRI portion of his check-up, then doesn't show up to the game. You'd think the Cubs would take better care of their 90 million dollar investment. You'd think Zambrano would have outgrown this ridiculousness by now. And you'd think that of former reliever Ryan Dempster, walking injury report Rich Harden, and Zambrano, that Z was the least likely to go down.

That's baseball.