‘No preference’ in opponent: Cubs

Dodgers? Nationals? It doesn’t matter

SAN FRANCISCO• It is an unanswerable question, an unfair one really, but Joe Maddon was going to face it late Tuesday night as his Chicago Cubs celebrated in a clubhouse covered in plastic to protect it from the spray of Champagne and beer.

So Joe, Dodgers or Nationals?

“No preference,” Maddon said and he actually might have meant it. “It’s an organic situation and once you start wishing for something, you might get your wish — and it might be something bad.”

The Washington Nationals hosted the Los Angeles Dodgers Thursday in the fifth and decisive game of their National League Division Series. The Cubs, managed by Maddon, travelled back home Wednesday after — somehow, furiously and finally with a four-run ninthinning rally — ridding themselves of the San Francisco Giants in four games..

Before we check the records and try to figure out whom the Cubs should prefer to play, let’s check out a reminder of why the rest of this very piece may be irrelevant.

Last year, the Cubs played the New York Mets seven times during the regular season. They won seven times.

When those same two teams met in the NLCS, they played four games, the Mets won them all and the Cubs never so much as held a lead.

With that, let’s check how the Cubs fared against the Dodgers and Nationals. They won both season series, beating the Dodgers four times in seven tries, the Nats five out of seven. ( Indeed, the 103-win Cubs faced 20 different opponents this year and had losing records against only two (the Mets and, of all teams, the Rockies).

But let’s start with the Nationals. The context of Washington’s first matchup with Chicago, a four- game series in May at Wrigley Field: The Cubs were blisteringly hot. As one scout said, “It didn’t much matter who they were playing then.”

The Cubs entered that series with a record of 20- 6. And they blitzed the Nationals, a four-game sweep.

The defining element of that series was Maddon’s approach to Bryce Harper, who came into the matchup with 10 homers in his first 27 games. There are people who believe what Maddon did that weekend — walking Harper 13 times in 19 plate appearances — impacted Harper for the rest of the year.

The approach worked — Harper went 1- for- 4 with a single and sacrifice fly, scoring only three runs.

And when the Cubs visited Washington, they were something of a more typical team, still comfortably in first place, but having endured a stretch in which they lost six of eight, typical baseball stuff. The Nationals won two of three in that series, getting the lethal version of ace Max Scherzer in a seven- inning, two- hit, 11- strikeout performance in the first game, then winning the finale on Jayson Werth’s 12th- inning, lead- flipping walk-off double.

The Dodgers, like the Nationals, met the Cubs for the first time during the buzzsaw portion of Chicago’s schedule. In a four-game set at Wrigley Field in May, the Cubs took three of four from the Dodgers in a series in which Dodgers ace Clayton Kershaw did not appear.

Indeed, when the Cubs visited Dodger Stadium in late August, Kershaw was still on the disabled list with a back issue. So the oft-cited best pitcher on the planet, who would be in line to start Game 2 Sunday, hasn’t faced the Cubs all season. The Dodgers took two of three in that August series.

What does any of that prove? Not a heck of a lot.

For the Cubs, the good stuff has been happening against nearly every team in every setting all year long. This is, as Maddon said, an organic situation.