Saturday, August 4, 2007

Lilly snaps skid, improves to 12-5

After a personal seven-game winning streak was snapped against the Phillies earlier this week, Ted Lilly made sure that the Cubs wouldn't lose three games in a row and attempted to start a new winning streak.

Going 7 2/3 strong innings and giving the bullpen some much-needed time off, the left-hander improved to 12-5 as he was backed by a six-run third. All six runs in that third inning came with two outs after Ryan Theriot kept the inning alive by legging out an infield single, even though replays showed that Theriot may have indeed been out at first base on the bang-bang play.

With the Brewers struggling on the road and winning more than two-thirds of their games at home, you almost want to try to just keep pace with the Brewers when they are playing at Miller Park. Earlier this week, both the Cubs and Brewers returned to their respective home parks with the Brewers up by 1/2 game. If the Cubs can end the homestand down by just 1 game, you'd imagine that there's a pretty good chance we can jump into first place during the road trip.

And with just one game each left before the two teams at the top of the division hit the road, the only way the Cubs can be further than 1 game out is with a Cubs loss and Brewers win tomorrow. With that having been said, I feel pretty good about the chances of staying within 1 game until Monday, even though the Cubs square off against Tom Glavine in the series finale.

Besides, Glavine doesn't have to be a tough opponent.

Glavine may be a soft-tossing lefty, but he's certainly not unfamiliar to the Cubs bats. The four main power threats in the Cubs lineup have all done well against the future Hall of Famer, with Derrek Lee leading the charge with 15 lifetime hits (in 52 AB, .288). Soriano is 7-18 (.389), Floyd is 13-33 (.394) and Ramirez has hit Glavine the hardest: 11-22 (.500) with 3 homeruns.

Four Cubs have multiple homeruns off of Glavine in their career, five have multiple extra-base hits, and nine have multiple hits off of the Mets' left-hander.

Glavine is on the brink of history, but hopefully he'll have to try again for win #300 five days from tomorrow.

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