Cubs and Pirates Go 15

The Cubs and Pirates thought it’d be a good idea to play six extra innings tonight in their roller coaster of a game. Win Expectancy suggests the Cubs pretty much had the game won on three separate occasions and lucky for them, that third time was a charm.

First, Kerry Wood blew his second first save of the season by allowing a game tying solo home run to Jason Bay. Then Kevin Hart blew a two run lead by serving up a two-run home run to Adam LaRoche. Finally, Felix Pie singled with the bases loaded, allowing Sean Marshall to preserve the two run lead and the Cubs to win!

Hidden in the blown saves was the very impressive performance of none other than Ryan Dempster. He struck out 5 and allowed only 2 walks and 1 hit in 7 innings of work. He has now allowed only 2 runs in 13 innings with 10 strikeouts and an uncharacteristically low 4 walks, which makes his BB/9 just 2.8 to a K/9 of 6.9.

Dempster also has a ground ball percentage of 56.3% on the season, which would make him an extreme ground ball pitcher. The problem is his line drive percentage of 12.5% is due for a bit of upward correction and is in turn inflating his ground ball percentage.

The real question will be whether Dempster can keep his walk rate down. He has lowered it in each of the past three seasons; down from an astronomically high 5.7 in 2004. Keeping it below 3 would be quite the jump, but so far so good for the former closer.