Three Strikes: Kluber, Kipnis deliver in Game 4 to put Indians on brink of title
The Indians are one win away from their first championship since 1948. On Saturday night, Cleveland’s offense busted out to stun a sellout crowd at Wrigley Field to drop the Cubs, 7–2, in Game 4 and take a 3–1 series lead. Once again led by Corey Kluber, the Indians stymied Chicago’s frozen hitters to put a chokehold on the series.
Slumbering No More
After three games of frustrating at-bats and squelched rallies, the Indians’ offense finally came to life in Game 4. Saturday night’s effort was a long drink of water after days in the desert, as Cleveland put up seven runs that must have felt like 70 after Game 3’s tense, dizzying 1–0 affair. This one was close early and even featured the series’ first lead change, with the Indians falling behind 1–0 after one but scoring twice in the second. Things relaxed significantly in the middle innings, as Cleveland beat up the soft part of Chicago’s bullpen to build a comfortable lead that it wouldn’t relinquish.
As much as the likes of Kluber and Andrew Miller and Terry Francona’s ultra-aggressive bullpen management have been the story of this World Series, so too has the dearth of offense on both sides of the ball. The Indians were hitting just .237 coming into Game 4, albeit with the only home runs of the Fall Classic; the Cubs were at an even more miserable .202. But while Chicago continued to flounder on offense, Cleveland found its stroke, ripping John Lackey and a parade of ineffective relievers for 10 hits, including two more home runs. Both were no-doubters: Carlos Santana’s solo shot in the second erased the Cubs’ early lead; Jason Kipnis’s three-run blast to right in the seventh was the dagger.
Francona pushed all the right buttons. His choice to start Santana at first base instead of Mike Napoli—relegated to the bench thanks to the National League’s obsolete insistence on making us watch pitchers hit—paid off with three hits. Called upon to pinch-hit in the seventh, Coco Crisp delivered a double to start the three-run rally that iced the game the night after he won Game 3 with an RBI single off the bench. Now Francona, who is 11–1 in the Fall Classic in his career, just has to get his team to win one game out of the next three to clinch his third World Series championship. A newly awoke offense can only help that quest.
I, Klubot
After a Game 1 start that drew breathless comparisons to the best the sport has ever seen, Kluber was far from perfect in Game 4. He gave up a quick run in the first on a bloop double by Dexter Fowler and a single by Anthony Rizzo. He put a runner on in every inning but the fifth and had to extricate himself from a two-on, two-out jam in the third and a leadoff double by Rizzo in the sixth. He gave up multiple hits to Jason Heyward, who spent the first two games of the World Series coming out of deep frost in a morgue.
But Kluber was good enough, and more than anything this postseason, that’s all the Indians have needed from their starter: good enough. A day after getting 4 2/3 shutout innings from Josh Tomlin, Terry Francona got 18 outs out of Kluber—working on three days’ rest—before once again subjecting the Cubs to the terror that is Andrew Miller. Just as it did in Game 3, that plan worked to perfection, with the lanky lefty nailing down six late outs to help give the Indians the Series lead.
None of that is to suggest that Kluber pitched poorly, though he wasn’t quite the superman who left the Cubs reeling in Game 1. His two-seamer—a darting, swerving bullet in his first start—was merely average; his slider was eminently hittable. He hung pitches, and two in particular—a deep drive by Ben Zobrist in the first and a scorched fly ball by Fowler in the fifth—might have done more damage (if not left the Friendly Confines entirely) were the wind not blowing in from the outfield.
In the sixth, Rizzo led off the frame with a bomb to left on a middle-middle fastball that banged off the wall. But Kluber made his pitches when it counted and got strikeouts in the biggest spots. Down a run and with Wrigley screaming behind him after Rizzo’s RBI single, he retired Zobrist on that long fly ball to left, then fought Willson Contreras for six pitches before striking him out on a curveball. With two on and the Indians clinging to a two-run lead in the third, Kluber fed Zobrist a steady diet of cutters and curveballs that the Cubs’ veteran leftfielder kept pulling foul. Finally, Kluber threw a curveball by Zobrist to end the threat. After Rizzo’s double in the sixth, he got Zobrist to pop out weakly to left, whiffed Conteras on a slider and induced a soft grounder from Addison Russell to third to end the threat.
Should the Cubs climb out of the hole Kluber has dug for them, they’ll find him waiting in Game 7, ready to push them back in for good. Kluber will be again on short rest should the Series reach its final and deciding game. But as he proved in Game 4, short-rest Kluber is more than good enough.
For everything that went right for the Cubs in the postseason so far—big hits, late rallies, the Dodgers turning into the Washington Generals in the final three games of the NLCS—nothing has gone to plan in the World Series. Save for Game 2, when Jake Arrieta bulled his way through Cleveland’s lineup, Chicago has looked nothing like the 103-win world beaters who were all but anointed as the champions when pitchers and catchers reported in February. The offense has been stagnant; the relief has been anything but; save for Arrieta, the starters haven’t shown much.
Game 4 was a microcosm of Chicago’s series-long issues. Lackey—who you are legally required to refer to as “playoff-tested veteran John Lackey”—struggled to command his fastball early, with the Indians spraying line drives all over the field. He settled down to retire his final eight hitters without incident, but it was far from an inspiring start. The bullpen then came in and put the game as far out of reach as possible. Oddly enough, despite a deficit in both game and series, Joe Maddon stayed away from his top troika—Pedro Strop, Hector Rondon and Aroldis Chapman—and stuck to his less-than-inspiring middle relief options: Mike Montgomery (appearing for the third time in four games and a second straight night), Justin Grimm and Travis Wood. That trio combined to give up four runs in two innings, with Kipnis’s bomb off Wood breaking things open.
Not that the Cubs’ offense was up to closing any lead. Fowler became the first man this postseason to get to Miller, tagging him for a solo homer in the eighth, but that proved to be a mere chip taken out of a monolith; Miller retired his six other hitters without breaking a sweat. The opportunities the Cubs were given earlier—and there were more than expected against Kluber—were largely wasted. Rizzo’s RBI single was Chicago’s lone hit with runners in scoring position; aside from that, the Cubs went 0 for 5 with three strikeouts. Save for Zobrist and Rizzo, no one is hitting. Contreras and Javier Baez, sources of youthful energy in the Division Series and NLCS, have just three hits in 30 at-bats between them to go with enough embarrassing swings and misses to last a season. Kris Bryant has more errors (two, both on throws in Game 4 and both of which led to runs) than hits (one).
This is not the first hole the Cubs have found themselves in this postseason—recall their 2–1 deficit against the Dodgers in the NLCS—nor the first time they’ve had to rally back from disappointment. But the situation is direr than it has ever been: a shaky rotation, an offense producing terrible at-bats, a defense struggling to convert batted balls into outs. All of this against an Indians team that doesn’t make mistakes, puts immense pressure on a defense with its aggressive base running and features a shutdown bullpen duo that can turn any game into a five-inning affair.
The turnaround will need to come in less than 24 hours at what has been Chicago’s personal postseason house of horrors; with the Game 4 loss, the Cubs are now just 2–13 all-time at Wrigley in the World Series. Fox’s broadcast from the seventh inning onward was a children’s compendium of sad Cubs fans, each more heartbroken than the last. Both they and their team will need to find a second wind on Sunday; if not, the title wait will add one more year to its seemingly interminable counter.
This article originally appeared on 
