SAN DIEGO — The soothing strains of Bob Marley played softly in the Cubs’ clubhouse after a 2-1 loss to a last-place team Wednesday, every word audible from every corner in an otherwise silent room:
“Singin’ don’t worry . . . ’Cause every little thing gonna be alright.”
Don’t believe it.
At least not yet.
Good luck finding anything
going right for the Cubs as May drifts into June and their record sinks to two games below .500
after a confidence-battering 0-6 road trip through Los Angeles and San Diego.
“It’s part of the game,” said stoic outfielder Jason Heyward, who had the only two multihit performances by a Cub in any of the losses to the Padres in the last three days.
“I’m not going to say anything negative. If you try to get me to say anything negative, I’m not going to say it.”
He didn’t have to.
The negative spoke for itself:
υ It’s the Cubs’ first winless two-city trip since they went 0-6 in the same cities in August 2012, the year they lost 101 games.
υ They’re two games under .500 for the first time since they finished 2014 in last place.
υ They suffered their third and fourth sweeps, matching their
totals in three-game series for the last two years combined.
υ They scored just nine runs in the six games in California, going 28-for-184 (.152), managing three hits or fewer in four of the games (including Wednesday) and going an awful 3-for-40 (.075) with men in scoring position.
υ Until Jake Arrieta’s six impressive innings in a no-decision Wednesday, the starting pitching went 0-5, lasted just six innings once (Arrieta) and gave up 26 runs, 31 hits and 10 walks in 23‰ innings (9.89 ERA).
Even before the latest no-show against second-year Padres starter Luis Perdomo, first baseman Anthony Rizzo said, “We came in [to the season] very confident, but we’ve gotten punched in the teeth the last two months.’’
‘‘You’re either going to get up, or you’re going to stay down,’’ added Rizzo, whose only two hits of the trip were against Clayton Kershaw on Sunday. ‘‘It’s up to us to decide what we’re going to do. I have full confidence that we’re going to get up and sprint and get this thing going sooner than later.”
Arrieta’s outing, which would have gone into the seventh if his spot in the order hadn’t come up in a 1-1 game with a man at third, at least offered a chance to get off the mat.
But in the eighth, Franchy Cordero hit a one-out triple off Koji Uehara
and scored the go-ahead run when he slid under the tag on the throw home on Yangervis Solarte’s grounder to second with the infield in.
“With what we accomplished last year, obviously the expectations are really high, and they should be,”
Arrieta said. “And we’ll take it. We’ll deal with the criticism and continue to move forward. It’s been magnified because we haven’t been doing really anything collectively well.”
Players have talked about it,
Arrieta said. And he and other veterans, such as Rizzo and Heyward, talk about setting a confident tone with younger players.
“What good is the opposite going to do?” Arrieta said. “If you panic, if you’re worried, we’ve still got to show up and play a game every day. So there’s no time to panic. If that happens, especially at this point in the season when we’re 2, 2½ games out of first place, it’s going to work against us.”
So bring on the Cardinals, starting Friday. And don’t forget the Bob Marley mix.
“There’s no magic potion,” Maddon said. “We’ve just got to keep playing and believe in our guys, which I do 100 percent, wholeheartedly. These are good young players. They’ve shown it in the past. They’re going to show it to you again.”
Follow me on Twitter @GDubCub.
Email: gwittenmyer@suntimes.com
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