Silence is Golden

One of the writers tonight asked me what we can do for an encore after the way we won Game 1 of the Division Series against the Cubs. We just have to wake up tomorrow and get ready to do it again.

Of course tonight, we’re going to enjoy this one. It was one of those games where the score wasn’t indicative of all that went on down on the field. We had many chances tonight and we didn’t take advantage of them and earlier in the season, that would have been costly. Then all of a sudden Dempster makes a mistake and James crushes the ball to center and the game completely turned around.

And the thing I remember before that was the buzz in the stadium from the Cubs fans. You could just feel the energy. And then you could just feel the energy get sucked out when James homered and the place got so quiet. It’s a great feeling doing something like that on the road, because the home crowd gets real quiet but everybody in our dugout is going crazy.

And the Cubs still had an opportunity to come back, but D-Lowe pitched his way out of it in the bottom of the sixth. Then we added even more runs and put it away.

Tomorrow we face Zambrano and they’ll be ready to play. We’ll have a game plan, but the playoffs are a different mentality and you don’t know for sure how he’ll come at you. We just have to be aware of the flow of the game and let it come to us.