Travis Wood's impressive performance wasted today as Cubs shut out by Giants; Preview of tomorrow's Draft Day

The Cubs were shut out 2-0 by the San Francisco Giants today, which was their 15th loss in their last 18 games played.

Travis Wood started for the Cubs and threw four hitless innings while facing the minimum 12 batters before Angel Pagan doubled with one out in the fifth inning.  Wood was impressive and threw seven strikeouts, which was one shy of his career high of eight strikeouts.  He allowed one run on three hits over seven innings pitched.  Today was Wood's best performance of the season, although it ended up being wasted with the weak Cubs offense.

Travis Wood had his best outing of the season as he allowed just one run and three hits over seven innings today (photo from espn.com)

"It's the same press conference every day," Cubs manager Dale Sveum said.  "It's a broken record.  I don't even know what to say to come up with something different.  It's just frustrating.  I mean, golly.  We hit a few balls good ..but other than that there weren't a lot of good at-bats."

On another note, tomorrow is draft day and the Cubs have the number 6, 43 and 56 picks.  Cubs' president of baseball operations Theo Epstein, scouting chief Jason McLeod and GM Jed Hoyer are the best in the business of drafting and developing talent, which some say makes this the biggest draft in Cubs history.

"We're looking for impact players, and you'll hear that from us a lot," said McLeod, who spent six seasons with Epstein with the Red Sox, five as scouting director, and held the same position the last two years with the Padres.  "We're trying to get impact players.  Pitching is always important if the pitcher is great, but we're not taking one position over another." 

Sveum said, "I think Theo, Jason and Jed, they've had a whole different system in the draft, and obviously it's worked pretty well."  Let's hope it continues to work well!

Live coverage of the 2012 First-Year Player Draft begins with a one-hour preview show on Monday at 5pm CT on MLB.com and MLB Network.  You can also keep up to date by following @MLBDraft on Twitter and using the  #mlbdraft hashtag.

In other Cubs news, Marcos Mateo, who has been on the disabled list since April 5th due toproblems with his right elbow, had a setback and underwent Tommy John surgery on Friday in Chicago.  He is expected to be out for the rest of the 2012 season.

Tomorrow the Cubs and Giants will play the last game of the four-game series at AT&T Park at 2:45pm CT.  Jeff Samardzija will start for the Cubs and try for his sixth win of the season.