FIRST PITCH GAME PROGRAM
HOW THE MIDWEST WAS WON THE STORY OF THE 2019 SOUTH BEND CUBS CHAMPIONSHIP RUN By Max Thoma
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Please don’t drop this ball, please god don’t let my glove break, don’t let me trip, don’t blink, don’t sneeze, don’t cough, please for the love of god catch this ball… That was all that was going through my mind.” 144 games. 161 days. A perfect postseason. The season ended when Cole Roederer peered up into the Clinton night sky and squeezed a flyball in center field. For the first time since 2005, South Bend had won the Midwest League Championship. But how did this team get there? Before a single bottle of champagne was popped, the 2019 South Bend Cubs was a group of young men fighting just to scrape its way into the postseason. The Cubs finished the first half of the 2019 campaign with a 39-32 record, putting them in fourth place in the Eastern Division, not good enough for a postseason berth. The Cubs started the second half weakly. Going into game two of a doubleheader in Beloit on July 21 the team was just 12-16, the furthest below .500 they had been all year. Jeff Passantino, one of the teams five all-stars, had already been promoted to Myrtle Beach, and South Bend’s highest rated prospect (and fellow all-star) Brailyn Marquez would be promoted to Myrtle Beach in just a couple weeks on August 6. So, with 46 games left they needed to make a run, and that’s exactly what Buddy Bailey’s men did. A couple familiar faces rejoined the fray: South Bend’s 2018 closer, Brian Glowicki, and
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fellow right-handed reliever, Brendan King. “I just had a chip on my shoulder,” Glowicki said. I could either let this affect me for the rest of the year or I could just go out there, compete, and get back to who I am and what I do on the mound, and that’s what I did.” Glowicki and King locked down the backend of the bullpen down the stretch and South Bend not only won game two of that doubleheader vs. Beloit but won nine of their next ten games to close out July. The Cubs clinched a wildcard playoff spot on August 30 and rattled off a 27-14 run to end the regular season. Two days after clinching a spot in the postseason, on the penultimate day of the regular season, the team activated Brennen Davis and Levi Jordan from the IL. “To be out for close to two months I just kept itching to get back and start doing baseball stuff again,” Jordan said. “And following the team knowing they were making a playoff run it was even more exciting for me to start getting healthy again to try to get back and contribute at the right time.” The Cubs first round matchup pitted them against the team they just beat twice consecutively to end the season, the Bowling Green Hot Rods. Game one was an old-fashioned pitcher’s duel at Four Winds Field. The first inning ended with the Cubs up 2-0, but they wouldn’t score again the rest of the night. Faustino Carrera tossed five scoreless frames and the Hot Rods didn’t plate a run until the eighth. With the lead cut to one, Glowicki retired the last four batters he faced and punched out Nick Schnell to pick up his 23rd career save with South Bend, moving him into a tie for seventh on the all-time franchise record list. After the win the men hopped aboard the team bus and traveled 368 miles to southern Kentucky for game two. South Bend fell behind 2-0 and came back to tie the score twice but headed into the
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