6/17 Get him a bat

You can have your 1-0 games. Lou Piniella likes to see hitting.

“I think the fans like to see hitting in a baseball game,” Piniella said Thursday. “Now, if you’re going to go watch a Sandy Koufax pitch or Fergie Jenkins, a great pitcher, you want to see what he does best.

“If you come to the ballpark and you want to have a few beers and eat a few hot dogs, you want to get up and down your seats a few times,” he said. “You want to see some action.”

That doesn’t mean he didn’t like Ted Lilly’s 1-0 win Sunday over the White Sox. But Piniella is keeping an eye on the scoreboard flags at Wrigley Field. If they’re blowing out, you can usually expect more offense.

So far this season, the wind has blown out for five games and the Cubs have scored 34 runs for an average of 6.8 runs per game. When it’s blowing in, which it has done for 23 contests at home, they have scored 85 runs for an average of 3.7. There’s been a crosswind for four games, which means the wind blows from the southeast or northwest, and the Cubs have scored 20 runs in those.

“We have a fly ball hitting team here in a lot of ways and it doesn’t really help when the wind is blowing in a lot,” Piniella said. “It helps the other team, too, we understand that [when the wind blows out]. We don’t have the quickest team so getting the ball up in the air and letting it sail into the stands or over these stands, it’s good for us.”

On Thursday, the wind was blowing in from the east at 12 mph.

– Carrie Muskat