How the Cubs and Braves combined for best terrible inning ever

CHICAGO -- This is why you don't leave a baseball game early. Never. There is no clock. Hope is a vampire in this sport. It cannot die.

Not even in a mid-April blowout game at Wrigley Field on a mist-filled afternoon with wind chills dipping into the upper 20s. Not even when the home team has less than a one-in-a-hundred chance of winning. And especially not when the visitors show little inclination toward finishing a sure victory.

You don't leave early because you don't know if you will miss the best terrible inning in recent baseball history.

By the time the bottom of the eighth rolled around Saturday, the crowd at the Friendly Confines had thinned considerably. The attendance was announced…