We remember this feeling
It had been a long time since the Cubs won a playoff game. It never gets old.
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It's been a long time coming for the Cubs, and to a slightly less important extent, us. It's not just that the Cubs have been unsuccessful for the past seven years at winning games in, or even making the playoffs, but in the brief respites they've provided us from postseason-less baseball they just never scored any runs.
And it looked like an old, tired, overly familiar scene was playing out in front of us again. The Cubs had looked hapless in four innings against good, but not great, Padres starter Nick Pivetta. They'd managed just one hit, and the first nine Cubs combined to strike out five times. To make it worse, the Padres had fashioned a familiar, and all too true, seemingly insurmountable 1-0 lead.
When Seiya Suzuki stepped in to lead off the fifth inning, the Cubs were working on a mind numbing 18 inning scoreless streak (dating back to game one of the 2020 playoffs that actually happened, against the Marlins). They had only scored one run in the last 22 playoff innings they'd played in. And incredibly, they hadn't scored more than one run in a postseason inning since Willson Contreras and Javy Baez homered in the second inning of game four of the 2017 NLCS against Alex Wood and the Dodgers. If you count the 2018 play-in game against the Brewers as a postseason game, it had been 55 innings without the Cubs scoring more than once.
Seiya, it turns out, was tired of this shit.
