{"id":14650,"date":"2015-10-20T08:03:27","date_gmt":"2015-10-20T15:03:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/cubs-focused-on-game-3-against-degrom-mets\/"},"modified":"2015-10-20T08:03:27","modified_gmt":"2015-10-20T15:03:27","slug":"cubs-focused-on-game-3-against-degrom-mets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/cubs-focused-on-game-3-against-degrom-mets\/","title":{"rendered":"Cubs focused on Game 3 against deGrom, Mets"},"content":{"rendered":"

CHICAGO<\/strong> \u2014 Kris Bryant, Kyle Schwarber and Jason Hammel played hacky sack with a baseball, and manager Joe Maddon chatted amiably with his players and staff as he made his way around Wrigley Field on Monday afternoon.<\/p>\n

Down 2-0 to the New York Mets in the NL Championship Series, the Chicago Cubs are sticking with what worked for them during a breakthrough season.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll come out tomorrow, we\u2019ll be ready to play,\u201d Maddon said. \u201cOur guys are always ready to play.\u201d<\/p>\n

It might not matter if the Mets continue to pitch as well as they did in New York. Matt Harvey and Noah Syndergaard shut down Chicago\u2019s powerful lineup in the first two games of the series, putting New York in an ideal position to make it to the World Series for the first time in 15 years \u2014 a quaint little drought compared to the Cubs\u2019 seven mostly empty decades since they last played in the Fall Classic.<\/p>\n

According to STATS, the winner of the first two games of a best-of-seven series in the baseball playoffs has advanced 83 percent (63 of 76) of the time, and the Mets have Jacob deGrom heading to the mound for Game 3 on tonight.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have a lot of confidence,\u201d manager Terry Collins said. \u201cAny night that he pitches, we\u2019ve got a good chance to win.\u201d<\/p>\n

DeGrom is coming off a pair of impressive victories in the NL Division Series, albeit for different reasons.<\/p>\n

The 27-year-old was dominant in Game 1 at Los Angeles, striking out 13 while pitching seven scoreless innings in New York\u2019s 3-1 win. Then he came back for Game 5 and worked six effective innings despite not having his best stuff.<\/p>\n

The reigning NL Rookie of the Year matched Bartolo Colon for the team lead with 14 wins this year, but it was the gutsy start against the Dodgers that really cemented his place among the best young pitchers in the game.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe second game was definitely a battle,\u201d deGrom said. \u201cI feel like it was more impressive just because it wasn\u2019t easy. When you have your best stuff, it\u2019s a lot easier to pitch.\u201d<\/p>\n

While deGrom has struggled in three career starts against Chicago, Harvey and Syndergaard provided a roadmap for the right-hander in the first two games of the series. Harvey and Syndergaard pounded the strike zone, getting ahead of the Cubs\u2019 young sluggers and keeping them off balance.<\/p>\n

The Mets started the Cubs with a strike in 43 of 68 at-bats in New York, according to STATS. They threw 177 of their 274 pitches for a strike, a 64.6 percent success rate.<\/p>\n

Those are important numbers against the patient Cubs, who finished second in the majors to Toronto with 567 walks this season. St. Louis, Chicago\u2019s opponent in the NLDS, threw a first-pitch strike 56.3 percent of the time and had a 59.9 strike percentage for the series, and the Cubs clubbed 10 homers and walked 15 times.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t want our guys to change based on an umpire in the previous game, it could change in the next game,\u201d Maddon said. \u201cRegardless of the fact that the strike zone is a static or supposedly a static area, it\u2019s not. It\u2019s just depending upon the guy.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo I prefer that we just stay with our normal patterns, and then we have to adjust sometimes during the course of the game. That\u2019s it. You just have to make adjustments, but you don\u2019t necessarily want to change,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Bryant, who had two hits and drove in Chicago\u2019s only run in Game 2, said everyone on the Cubs just has to stick to their own approach.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve gotten pretty far just the way we\u2019ve been going,\u201d he said. \u201cI think it\u2019s a matter of, we\u2019ve hit some balls hard and they haven\u2019t been falling. That\u2019s the way baseball goes sometimes.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Harvey, Syndergaard and deGrom rely on their electric stuff, Kyle Hendricks, the Game 3 starter for Chicago, is more dependent on location for his success. The Dartmouth graduate threw six shutout innings in each of his last two starts of the season, but was yanked in the fifth inning of his Game 2 start at St. Louis in the division series.<\/p>\n

Job No. 1 for Hendricks against New York is stopping Daniel Murphy, who is one away from matching Carlos Beltran\u2019s record of homering in five straight postseason games.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s swinging a hot bat,\u201d Hendricks said. \u201cSometimes the best thing to do is pick your spots. See when guys are on base, when they\u2019re not, when you can pitch around him. Regardless, when he comes up, you\u2019ve definitely got to be careful. You can\u2019t make any mistakes with him.\u201d<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Jay Cohen can be reached at http:\/\/www.twitter.com\/jcohenap<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CHICAGO \u2014 Kris Bryant, Kyle Schwarber and Jason Hammel played hacky sack with a baseball, and manager Joe Maddon chatted amiably with his players and staff as he made his way around Wrigley Field on Monday afternoon. Down 2-0 to the New York Mets in the NL Championship Series, the Chicago Cubs are sticking with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-14650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14650\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14650"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=14650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}