There's a version of Friday night in Cincinnati where Clay Holmes takes the blame and everyone moves on. He was cruising, more or less, until he wasn't. By the sixth inning he'd stopped finding the strike zone, walked the bases loaded, and handed the mess to Javier Assad, who couldn't clean it up before Jose Trevino lined a two-run single to right that turned a 4-3 Cubs lead into a game the Reds won 6-4. That's a normal way to lose a baseball game in September. Starters get tired, bullpens get lit up, final scores flip.
That's not the part of this game I can't stop thinking about, though.
With two outs in the ninth and the tying run at the plate, the Cubs tried to steal second. Michael Busch went, Trevino called a pitchout, and Busch was thrown out. Game over. Stolen-base attempts are a fine tool in a vacuum. Down two runs with two outs in the ninth, when the runner you're advancing isn't even the tying run, it's an aggressive call that has to work almost every time to be worth the risk. Cincinnati read it perfectly.
I get the counterargument: it's one decision in one game, in a season where Chicago sat at 85-69 and tied atop the National League wild-card picture the moment this one ended. Nobody's October was riding on a play in the top of the ninth against a Reds team that had just dropped a series to the Dodgers. Give the Cubs credit, too: the way the next few days of this series and the standings played out, they responded well and kept pace in that three-team wild-card scrum with the Padres and Phillies. It didn't sink the season.
But it's exactly the kind of decision that matters more, not less, as the calendar runs out. Michael Conforto had three hits and gave the Cubs a real shot to salvage the game late. Ian Happ's homer and Seiya Suzuki's bases-loaded single had built the lead in the first place. All of it got undone by a bullpen that let Eugenio Suárez and Elly De La Cruz back into the game, and then, in the last at-bat that mattered, by a decision that took the bat out of a hitter's hands with two outs and traded a real chance at extending the game for a long-shot try at manufacturing a run nobody needed manufactured yet.
Holmes will pitch better before the season's out, maybe even against these same Reds this weekend. Harder to fix is a dugout that, with the margins this thin in a wild-card race, keeps finding ways to spend outs it can't get back.
