LOS ANGELES—The Los Angeles Dodgers had the Chicago Cubs right where they wanted them Wednesday: down two games to one in the National League Championship Series and, based on 18 consecutive scoreless turns at bat, witness to the construction of a national narrative that the Team of the Century was about to spiral down the drain of irrelevance. The Cubs looked tight, and the whiteboard inside the Dodgers’ clubhouse seemed to confirm the diagnosis.
In red marker, a Dodger wrote, “If We Keep Having Fun, They Won’t.”
In the last hours of golden Southern California daylight Wednesday, as the Cubs practiced their batting and their insouciance in the face of their own twilight, Chicago general manager Jed Hoyer was asked where the offense might come from on this dormant team.