CHICAGO — At just the right instant, Jake Arrieta put a foot down.
Josh Harrison’s fourth-inning grounder glanced off Arrieta’s shoe and caromed clean to the Chicago Cubs’ second baseman Ben Zobrist. Rather than bound over the mound to lengthen the Pirates’ lead, the baseball was whipped around the diamond for an inning-ending 1-4-6-3 double play to thwart the rare rally against the reigning Cy Young Award winner Arrieta.
And so a game of inches turned on a foot.
The Cubs erased a two-run deficit in the bottom of the fourth on Anthony Rizzo’s three-run homer that rode a strong North Sider breeze out to the right-field bleachers.