Power Outages and Continued Patterns

The lights went out at Wrigley last night causing an 18 minute delay. Strangely, there is a true dearth of fun puns surrounding the incident. No, “Darkness sets on the Cubs.” No, “Cubs don’t see the light.” Hell, not even a “Wrigley lights out, pitching not.” I was under a strong impression that a full 1/5 of newsroom staff were employed solely to come up with cheesy headlines. Instead we get:

Wrigley loses power, delays game
Lights go out at Wrigley, delaying Cubs game
Lights woes cause delay of game

You know the NYPost wouldn’t let something like this happen. Some of their current headlines are:

Yanks Turn a Twin Killing: Because the Yanks swept a double header against the Twins.
“Tak” of the Town: Because Hisanori Takahashi pitched good against the Phillies yesterday

I mean, is it really that hard guys?

Anyway, we did have a couple fun quotes come out of the game. First, from Blake DeWitt who walked at, like, the EXACT instance the lights went out:

“Thinking back, I wish I had hit a pop up,” DeWitt said. “It would’ve been a good time. I would’ve had an inside the park home run in the dark.”

Um, awesome.

We also got this gem from Lou:

“That’s something new,” Cubs manager Lou Piniella said. “That didn’t help either pitcher either, because they had to sit out there for 15, 20 minutes. That’s a long time.”

I don’t mean to nitpick (ed: I totally do), but this is just another in a series of factually incorrect statements that Lou seems to think he has to make. Ask him a question and he will give an answer that speaks unequivocally, but is not backed up by facts. “That didn’t help either pitcher either.” Really? I mean, I know conventional wisdom is sitting doesn’t help pitchers. I am sure statistics back that up. In this case though, it seems to have had no ill effect on the pitchers.

Gorzelanny gave up 5 runs before the lights went out in the top of the 4th. He was pitching badly enough that the TV announcers were OPENLY talking about pulling him so somebody could pinch hit for him with the bases loaded in the bottom of the third. Following the outage his next two innings went as so:

Strikeout
Strikeout
Strikeout
Ground out
Fly out
Fly out

Billingsley had an equally good 4th and 5th inning, facing one above the minimum and not allowing anybody passed second (while striking out three himself).

Very small thing for me to jump on, but, hey, this is my second post and I missed the opportunity to jump on a million other Lazy Lou quotes.

Two additional meaningless notes:

1. Enjoy the Blake DeWitt tag. Probably won’t be coming up much in the future.
2. Three game win streak ended. Sad face.

[Both quotes pulled from here]
[Picture: (Scott Strazzante/Tribune) found here]