The Chicago Cubs weren't gloating about a 2-0 victory that hurt the playoff hopes of the San Francisco Giants.

That's because President Theo Epstein and general manager Jed Hoyer insisted they wanted to play all nine innings. A brief but convincing rain shower of about 15 minutes, combined with struggles to cover the infield, resulted in a bizarre set of circumstances that eventually led to the game being called after 4 1/2 innings with the Cubs declared winners at 1:16 a.m. Wednesday -- after a total delay of four hours, 34 minutes.


Cubs manager Rick Renteria and Giants manager Bruce Bochy agreed the conditions were terrible, but Bochy wasn't in the mood to say whether the Giants would file an official protest.

"Look, I'm frustrated, beside myself," Bochy told Giants beat writers. "It's probably not in the right frame of mind. It's my last (recourse). I hope they listen and watch how what happened there because in this day and time it shouldn't happen, can't happen, I think, with the importance of these games. I'm going to leave it at that."

Bochy wasn't sure what recourse the Giants had.

"It was a 15-minute rain there, and they couldn't get the tarp on in time," Bochy said. "I just think with this day and time, something should have been done a little bit more."

All parties -- the Cubs, Giants and umpires -- were in agreement that there was constant dialogue among themselves and with the Commissioner's Office. The fact that the Giants are battling for a National League West title and wild card berth placed extra emphasis on attempting to have the game completed to its entire nine innings.

"The biggest takeaway over the last four hours was respect for the game, and these guys (the Giants) are in a pennant race," Hoyer said. "No one wants to win a game, a 2-0 game. They hit five times, we hit four. It doesn't seem like a real game in a pennant race, and obviously there were issues with the tarp coming out and how that went and contributed to it, and that's the organization's responsibility.

"So we tried to wait as long as we possibly could because the Giants are in a pennant race, and because we felt an obligation to do that."

But the Cubs, on the strength of a two-run home run by Anthony Rizzo in the first inning and Tsuyoshi Wada's crafty pitching, led after the minimum 4 1/2 innings needed for an official game.

"We exhausted all efforts to get this game played," Hunter Wendelstedt, home plate umpire and crew chief, told a pool reporter. "It was a very important game with playoff implications involved."

The controversy started shortly after a mist started to fall with two out in the fifth, and the mist turned to light rain as shortstop Starlin Castro caught a pop by Buster Posey for the final out.

The Giants took the field as the rain turned into a torrential downpour before Wada came to the plate and Wendelstedt called time at 8:42 p.m.

Grounds crew workers hurried to cover the field, only to have difficulty pulling the tarp over the infield. Fans booed before chanting "pull, pull, pull" and then got warm applause after they covered the field.

But the infield resembled a bog, and a mini lake appeared behind second base. The rain stopped after 15 minutes, and workers poured dozens of a drying compound onto the infield. At about 10:20 p.m., Renteria, Bochy and Wendelstedt inspected the field, only to deem it not yet playable.

So workers resumed their duties until another inspection occurred at 11:15 p.m., with Carl Rice, the Cubs vice president of ballpark operations, involved.


Hoyer and Rice went to the umpires' room shortly after midnight. After a brief inspection of the field one hour later, the game was called.

Epstein said there was no way the game could be deemed suspended and resumed later because of rules governing tarp malfunction issues.

"Had it been an automatic tarp malfunction, that would have been grounds for a suspended game," said Epstein, who was in constant contact with MLB officials. "The fact that it was a manual tarp, we had issues covering the field , the rules don't allow for a suspended game. We tried every way possible for the sake of fairness and equity to get to the point of a suspended game and allow the teams to play nine (Wednesday), but the rules don't provide for that.

"Both teams , the umpires and MLB wanted to do the right thing. We wanted to get nine innings in, but the rule was specifically written, and it doesn't provide for the circumstances we had tonight, so maybe it's something that's addressed in the future. But for 2014, those are the rules that covered it.''

Hoyer didn't blame anyone because of the suddenness of the storm, and Wendelstedt espoused similar comments about the unexpected volume of rain in a short period.

"It was a flash storm," Hoyer said. "(U.S. Cellular Field) didn't get any rain whatsoever. It really showed up on the radar really late, and it was much harder than we thought. The storm was much harder, and the volume of the storm was much harder than we expected. So the tarp probably started getting on the field later than it usually does.

"Listen, those guys (grounds crew workers) do an incredible job. Our grounds crew is fantastic and in Chicago, there are so many storms that pull us off so often that it's a rare thing to happen. It was the bad confluence of events that led to that."

However, the Giants could have taken care of their own business sooner. They stranded runners in scoring position in three of five innings against Wada, who led the Cubs earn their first three-game winning streak since they won four straight on June 30-July 4 -- Jeff Samardzija's final days with the Cubs.

With the loss, the Giants fall 4 1/2 games behind the Los Angeles Dodgers in the NL West and are in a virtual tie with the Atlanta Braves for the second wild card spot.