Cubs 9, Astros 3
W: Ted Lilly (9-3) | L: Roy Oswalt (8-6)
AP recap
Footer gives her take
After typing up a long, tirade filled recap yesterday evening and losing it to cyberspace, this is now the condensed version, using mainly quotes from the Astros camp.
Roy Oswalt breezed through the Cubs lineup for the first three innings on a windy day at Wrigley, and had one out in the 4th when he lost his command, the lead, and eventually the ballgame seemingly due to a terrible call by home plate umpire Larry Vanover on a strikeout ruled as a foul tip.
“The first three innings went pretty well and then a questionable call on a (potential) third strike on Izturis and I kind of just let that get to me a little too much,” Oswalt said. “He swung at the ball and the guy said he tipped it. But the ball was so far away from him that he couldn’t reach it with his bat. It kind of threw the whole inning off. It would have been two outs with nobody on. It bothered me a little more than it should. I could have stayed in the windup in the fourth inning, two outs. Instead, I’m pitching out of the stretch for the first time in the game with the meat of the order up. There’s no time to get adjusted to the stretch from the windup after pitching 3 1/3 innings from the windup.”
“Larry said he fouled the ball, and he didn’t,” manager Phil Garner said. “He didn’t even come close to fouling the ball. He wasn’t within two feet of the pitch.”
“He seemed off,” Brad Ausmus said. “The first three innings, he was dead on. He was locating well, he was using all his pitches early. After that, the ball was drifting back toward the middle. Certainly, after that at-bat against Izturis, it seemed that he wasn’t clicking the way he had early.”
“The fourth, fifth and sixth innings were not like Roy Oswalt at all,” Garner said. “It didn’t look like he pitched bad. We just couldn’t get out of innings without giving up runs. The disappointing thing for me today is, on a day like today [with the wind blowing out], we didn’t answer offensively. We started off scoring a run, and then we didn’t do anything offensively. We did not hit the ball at all.”
Nothing much in the Game Zone to read.
Trying to avoid the sweep today, enough excuses.