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Chicago Cubs top Pittsburgh Pirates 4-0 in NL Wild Card Game

By Tim Haberin

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For the second straight night, the road team blanked its host to advance in the MLB postseason. The Chicago Cubs, led by a complete game shutout performance from Jake Arrieta, downed the Pittsburgh Pirates by a score of 4-0 in the NL Wild Card Game.

Regular season, postseason. It didn’t seem to make much difference to Arrieta. The Cy Young contender has been masterful since the beginning of August, and that did not change tonight in a single-elimination scenario. He held the Bucs to just four hits on the night while striking out 11. Arrieta has allowed only four earned runs over 97.1 innings since August 4.

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If Pittsburgh was to have any chance in this game, it was going to need its own ace Gerrit Cole to match zeroes with his Chicago counterpart. Those hopes went awry early, as the Cubs jumped out to a 1-0 lead in the first inning on a Kyle Schwarber RBI single.

One run would be all they needed behind Arrieta’s gem, but the Cubs added a few more over the next several innings. Schwarber struck again in the third, belting a two-run homer. Dexter Fowler supplied a solo shot in the fifth to move the score to 4-0.

Cole exited after the fifth, and though the Pirates bullpen provided four scoreless frames of relief, the damage had already been done. Fowler and Schwarber, the first two hitters in the Cubs lineup, delivered virtually all of the team’s offense. The outfielders collected five of Chicago’s seven hits and drove in all four of its runs.

Though the scoring was over by that point, things did not get dull. Far from it. Tempers flared in the top of the seventh inning when Pirates reliever Tony Watson hit Arrieta with a pitch in apparent retaliation for the Cubs hurler plunking two Bucs batters earlier in the game. Benches and bullpens cleared and the two squads briefly met at the center of the field before the situation defused.

The Pirates’ Sean Rodriguez was ejected after the incident, but before heading into the clubhouse he let a poor, unassuming water cooler know exactly how he felt.

After the game resumed, Arrieta finished off his foes without much further trouble. His only real obstacle of the evening occurred in the sixth inning when he wriggled his way out of a bases-loaded, one-out jam.

Of the eight winner-take-all Wild Card clashes since the new postseason format was introduced in 2012, six have now been claimed by the road team. The Cubs will move on to do battle with another division rival, meeting the St. Louis Cardinals in Game 1 of the NLDS at Busch Stadium on Friday. They went 8-11 against the Redbirds this season and will look to vanquish the familiar adversary in their continuing quest to capture their first World Series title in over a century.

Next: Astros victorious in AL Wild Card Game

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