Chicago Cubs win 11-6 as offense comes alive

http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/baseball/cubs/chi-09-cubs-astros-chicago-apr09,0,2988538.story

This story was kind of a hybrid story, in a way. It really covers three topics all in one story.

The first topic covered was Kosuke Fukudome, the Cubs outfielder who became a platoon player this year. The article mentions how Fukudome has accepted his new role as a back-up, and also played his best game as a Cub with four hits, four runs, and a Home Run. Along with this, the nut graph also mentions the final score of the game, 11-6.

The article then moves on to the actual game itself, briefly mentioning Mike Fontenot and Aramis Ramirez, as well as Fukudome, and tells how the Cubs jumped out to a big early lead in the game. Here, there is a nice transition to the next topic of the article. The writer talks about how the team probably thought that they were in line for an easy victory, but that because of Ted Lilly's poor pitching, that wasn't the case.

After the transition, the article moves on to the poor peformance of Lilly. It does a good job of explaining why this is significant: because it is a trend that has continued from spring training, not just a bad day.

This article, contrary to many of the previous ones, doesn't use many quotes to tell the story. The reason for this is that most of the information is factual public knowledge. All of the stats, scores, and players are known. They aren't opinions or things that need to be confirmed by a reliable source or attributed to somebody. Therefore, the article is able to be written without many quotes.