Piniella's short-rest decision on Zambrano short-circuits in seventh

Then, suddenly, it was as if the Red Sea parted.

"Then he threw me two bad sliders (for balls)," Reynolds said. "I figured he wasn't going to put me on base, and he came in with a fastball, and I barreled it."

The sliders-for-balls to Reynolds, and what they signified, rattled through the Diamondbacks dugout at light speed.

Ojeda immediately picked up on it, and it was no accident that Ojeda set up the inning's second run by sinking his teeth into another fastball.

Thing is, this series still has a long way to go. The difficult part of a best-of-5 series is that momentum swings are wildly dramatic, completely the opposite of the long regular season or even a longer, seven-game playoff series.

Every move is magnified, and a sense of urgency can arrive overnight.

Which had Piniella working overtime late Wednesday to douse that fire.

"Listen, you guys, this is only the first game," Piniella said. "There's a lot of baseball to be played in this series, OK? It's not gloom and doom, this thing."

Still, of all people, the Cubs looking ahead?

In October?

"It is kind of odd. I don't know what kind of strategy that is," said Ojeda, who admitted he wasn't aware the Cubs were planning a three-man rotation. "We just want to focus on one game at a time, on one pitch at a time."

An absolute cliché, yes.

But on this night more than any, if you're viewing things from the Chicago side, you understand how clichés become clichés in the first place.