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LOS ANGELES — At a moment like this, as they face real adversity for the first time in their charmed season, the Chicago Cubs could reach for a trusty slogan from Joe Maddon, their wise and irreverent manager.
They must not let the pressure exceed the pleasure. They must embrace the target. And they must remember that they still have a chance to “Meat Loaf” these National League Championship Series games at Dodger Stadium — as in, “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad.”
But to conjure that old Meat Loaf song, and win the last two games here to take a series lead back to Wrigley Field, the Cubs need to score. They did not do that in Game 3 on Tuesday, falling by 6-0 to the Dodgers. They lost by 1-0 to Clayton Kershaw in Game 2 and have hit just .185 in the postseason.
The Cubs outscored their opponents by a staggering 252 runs in the regular season. But their offense is disappearing at the worst time.
“Joe always says that anytime you have that pressure, or whatever that word is, attached to things, that means there’s something good at the end of it,” third baseman Kris Bryant said. “We’re embracing it. We’re having fun with it. It’s going to be a challenge, but if we’re able to do it, it’ll make it that much sweeter.”
Through all of their empty postseasons since their last World Series title, in 1908, the Cubs have never had a scoring drought this long. But their struggles against the Mets last October came close. The Cubs hit .164 in that N.L.C.S. sweep, and scored only eight runs in four games.
They matched that output in Game 1 of this series, with half the runs coming on a grand slam by Miguel Montero off a hanging 0-2 slider from Joe Blanton. Otherwise, the Cubs have been feeble.
Anthony Rizzo is 2 for 26 in the postseason. Addison Russell is 1 for 24, Jason Heyward is 2 for 19 and Ben Zobrist is 4 for 26. The Cubs are not the Cubs.
“You have to be able to push back mentally as much as anything right now,” Maddon said. “Because when it comes to work, you don’t need any more batting practice or video study or data information. You just have to mentally hang in there and keep pushing back until you get it.”
He continued: “It’s just about hard contact. Over all, the at-bats haven’t been bad. We’re just not striking it well, so we’re making it easy on the defense.”
The Dodgers left-hander Rich Hill flummoxed the Cubs for six innings in Game 3, baffling them with various arm angles and a barrage of curveballs that made his ordinary fastball seem harder than it was. Blanton retired the side in the seventh, and Grant Dayton and Kenley Jansen took care of the rest.
The Cubs advanced only one runner to third, in a second-inning rally largely of the Dodgers’ making: two walks, a stolen base and a passed ball. Russell and Montero stranded the runners.
“We need to get things going a little bit more, maybe take our walks, maybe play the little game — move the runners over, get a ground ball to second base and get the runner in, a little small ball rather than trying to hit homers,” Montero said.
“I feel like we all are trying too hard. That’s the difference, like they did today: They stole second. They got a base hit to right field, scored a run. They get things going just like that. Solo homers won’t kill you. Little rallies, little things — that’s what really kills you.”
Rizzo did work deep at-bats in Game 3, running the count full his first three times up and then reaching on a broken-bat infield single in the ninth. He has two hits and a walk in six plate appearances against the Dodgers’ Julio Urias, the Game 4 starter who faced the Cubs twice this season. He lost to them in his second career start, on June 2, but beat them here with six sharp innings in late August.
Urias, who turned 20 in August, will be the youngest pitcher ever to start a postseason game. He seems unlikely to last very long — he has never reached the seventh inning in any of his 15 career starts — but Dodgers Manager Dave Roberts has expertly deployed his bullpen all season.
“They just keep running out pitcher after pitcher that’s pretty good,” Bryant said, but he added that the Cubs would be confident. He had to say that, of course, just like he had to dismiss comparisons to the Mets series last fall.
“New team, new season,” Bryant said. “I haven’t really thought about last year at all. It was a very different situation, too. I felt like last year the pitching just beat us. Right now, we’ve had some chances. We’re only down, two to one. Last year, at this time, we were down three, and that’s obviously a tough hole to climb out of. We feel fine.”
The Cubs face the same challenge as the 1998 Yankees, another team that coasted through the regular season but fell into a 2-1 hole against Cleveland in the championship series. On the road in Game 4, Orlando Hernandez and the bullpen shut out the Indians, and the Yankees never lost again, going on to sweep San Diego in the World Series.
The veteran John Lackey will try to play Hernandez on Wednesday against Urias. The Cubs need his best, or they might have to face Kershaw in Game 5 with their season on the line. The best approach, Montero said, would be to ignore all that.
“To be honest, I just live in the moment,” he said. “I try to have fun and play the game the right way, like we were little kids. We were so excited to get the game over just to get ice cream, right? That’s not the case — but, I mean, it’s a game. Don’t forget about that. It’s just a game. We’ve just got to have fun doing what we love to do. Simple as that.”
