Rozner: In the blink of an eye, Cubs and Nationals are tied up

For six hours and 16 innings of baseball, it was an unfair fight.

Cubs starting pitching was pounding Washington hitters inside with strikes, and low and away with unhittable off-speed stuff.

Meanwhile, Cubs hitters had the Nationals' staff on the ropes, jabbing them into submission in Game 1, and hammering them with uppercuts in the early rounds of Game 2.

The match looked to be over — as in, series over.

And then Bryce Harper and Ryan Zimmerman unloaded with home runs in the bottom of the eighth Saturday night, and with two bombs have tied the series after a 6-3 victory in Game 2.

Cubs manager Joe Maddon was prophetic before the first game when he discussed the inevitable bloody nose that was coming.

“I brought that up in the meeting,” Maddon said of addressing his team before the series began. “(Mike) Tyson said it best about having a plan until you get punched in the face.

“Everybody has it figured out until that moment arrives and it arrives in all of our lives.

“I definitely wanted our guys to be aware of that again, because it's going to happen. How we react in that moment is going to separate us once again.

“The biggest thing is once it does occur, you've got to get to that next moment as quickly as you possibly can.”

That next moment doesn't arrive until Monday at Wrigley Field when Nats ace Max Scherzer will — apparently — be ready to start Game 3 against Jose Quintana.

“If you live in that negative moment too long, then you're really giving that other side an advantage,” Maddon said before the series. “You want athletes or players or people that are able to take a really bad moment and file it as quickly as possible and get on to the next one.

“You want to be able to deliver the blow or the punch and hopefully the other team reels for a bit and you're able to take advantage. That's momentum. That's what momentum actually is.

“So I want it on the table. I want it up front. You know it's going to happen. When it does happen, how do we react to it? That's the separator.”

The Cubs' experience will be tested now. They went through it in all three series a year ago and they certainly won't panic.

Yes, they captured a game in Washington. That's what they went there to do.

But there's a difference between being tied at a game apiece and being tied at a game apiece when it looked to all the world — especially the visitors — like the Cubs were coming home up 2-0 in the NLDS.

“There's an upside and a downside,” Maddon admitted Saturday night. “Of course, you'd like to be going home 2-0. We played so well for two days.

“You're happy leaving 1-1 before the series began, but you'd really like to be leaving 2-0 leading in the eighth inning.

“That's not reality. The reality is we lost a game. They beat us and we go home at 1-1.”

There's no doubt that one team left for Chicago feeling very good and the other wondering what might have been, but once Game 3 starts, the team that pitches better will remove any feelings about what occurred previously.

Still, you can't deny that the Nationals went from dead and buried — from having 4 hits in 16 innings and thinking about another brutal offseason of answering questions — to knowing they're back in the series.

“It's kind of like, we've done this before, I know what we can do,” Maddon said before Game 1. “If this were to happen, we can react in an appropriate manner. I want to believe that.

“We are going to find out in the next couple of days. And again, not in a casual sense, but the fact that you have done it before should provide some knowing, which to me is how you define experience.”

The psychology of a short series is fascinating in that respect. The mood of the players changes from inning to inning, but the Cubs have been through it many times the last two years.

The third game of this series is a big game — it's a huge game — but the defending champs know to approach it as just another game.

There's something to be said for that.

brozner@dailyherald.com

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