These guys shouldn't be this good
PHOENIX -- Some sports phenomena defy explanation.
Take the Arizona Diamondbacks, please.
Thursday night they beat the Cubs 8-4 to take a 2-0 lead in their National League division series.
The Diamondbacks pitching ace beat the Cubs' ace in Game 1. Their No. 2 starter beat the Cubs' co-ace in Game 2.
Their smallest starter, second baseman Augie Ojeda, outhit the Cubs' smallest starter, shortstop Ryan Theriot.
"Augie! Augie!" the Chase Field crowd chanted as if to rub in that Ojeda is an ex-Cub.
Those geeks on TV's new sitcom "The Big Bang" -- try it, you might like its quirkiness -- couldn't explain the D'backs.
They can tell you how large Einstein's brain was in relation to his belly button, but they couldn't tell you how the Diamondbacks win games.
It isn't as if Arizona runs you over and you ask, "What was the license number of that truck?" The D'backs are a truck without a license plate.
I mean, who are these guys and why haven't we heard of them before? They don't play great. They just play. They don't beat you. They just win.
The Diamondbacks finished the regular season 18 games over .500 despite scoring fewer runs than they allowed. That's as rare as a black and white rainbow.
The D'backs are the boxer who jabs you to death. They're the golfer who lulls you into submission by hitting every shot down the middle.
In other words, the Diamondbacks are a comfortable loss for opponents. You don't know you lost until you go home and watch the replays on "SportsCenter" ... or maybe not until you see it on ESPN Classic a decade later.
In Brandon Webb, Arizona has a pitcher few outside of Phoenix know even though he won the 2006 NL Cy Young Award.
One opposing general manager said of Jose Valverde, who led the major leagues in saves, "He has gotten everybody out this year ... whether he can do it again next year I don't know ... but he got everybody out this year."
Eric Byrnes, their most prominent offensive player, played for four teams in three years before landing here in 2006.
Everybody else is either too young to have been heard of or has been too mundane to be noticed.
Oh, except for Chris Young. Chicagoans might know him because the White Sox traded him for Javier Vazquez.
Young led the D'backs in home runs with 32 during the regular season and hit another Thursday night.
Call that Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf's joke on the Cubs.
The Diamondbacks qualified for the playoffs with a team full of rookies and much less expensive veterans than the Cubs purchased.
"Going into spring training," Game 2 winning pitcher Doug Davis said, "I didn't even know who was going to be on the 25-man roster."
Meanwhile, the Cubs reached the postseason by guaranteeing more than $300 million to free agents like Alfonso Soriano, Ted Lilly and Mark DeRosa.
"This year there was no talk with this group of World Series or postseason," well-traveled Arizona first baseman Tony Clark said of the D'backs. "It was, 'Do you know how to get from the hotel to the ballpark?'
"The entire dynamic was different."
Yet here the Diamondbacks are beating the Cubs in the playoffs and, in the process, defying logic.