Dempster down after loss

Ryan Dempster likes to joke around as much as any player on the Cubs, but he chose not to crack any jokes after his team's latest loss.

Dempster surrendered six runs in seven innings as the Cubs lost for the seventh time in their past eight games. He tried to put his finger on the team's failures after the game.

"There's not a guy in there that’s very happy with the way we’re playing right now," Dempster said. "But we’ll continue to fight our way and get back on the winning track. That’s just reality.

"We've lost games before, we’ve been in some tough situations before, and we've continued to battle," he said. "We’ve got a lot of guys who want to win really bad."

But wanting to win has not equaled actual wins for the Cubs lately. The Cubs dropped to 19-33 against teams who entered Thursday with records above .500.

"Everybody wants to search for answers, including ourselves at times," Dempster said. "I think you want to try and figure out, are we not playing smart enough? Are we not playing hard enough? Are we not executing enough?

"Sometimes when you try to search for so many answers, you end up doing a little too much," he said. "I think if we just keep going back to the basics and just tackle one inning at a time, one pitch at a time, [we can] get back out there and win a ballgame tomorrow."

-Tom Musick