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MILWAUKEE — Let me start by stating the obvious: This road trip has been a disaster and we’re just halfway through it. The Cubs are absolutely lost right now. Bullpen, offense, managerial decisions, personnel decisions, you name it. Other than the starting pitching, which has been rather excellent during this road trip, the Cubs can’t do anything else right.
Saturday night was the fourth time in five games on this trip where the Cubs had a lead going into the eighth inning, blew the lead, and eventually lost. Two such nightmares in San Francisco, and now two heart-breakers against division rival Milwaukee.
Pedro Strop, Steve Cishek, Tyler Chatwood, and Craig Kimbrel have each failed to hold a lead at some point on this trip. The bullpen still needs a lot of work and improvement; that much is clear. But there is a larger issue hurting this team.
The offense.
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Take this road trip as an example: The Cubs have scored four, four, four, two, and three runs on this trip. The last two in Milwaukee were started by the corpse of Gio Gonzalez and lifetime nobody Chase Anderson. And the Cubs were stymied in both games.
Sure, the Cubs took leads in both games and were in positions to win. The bullpen needed to nail down each win and they failed. I liken it to the Bears’ playoff loss to the Eagles in January. The offense needed to be better in the first three quarters, but they put the team in position to win and it was the Cody Parkey’s job to nail the last-second field goal. He didn’t. And the Bears lost.
But here’s where the Cubs are different and why the expectations should be different — they aren’t quite in Year 1 of an offense with a young QB playing in his first playoff game. The Cubs got themselves a hitting coach to replace Chili Davis and who would, in theory, allow hitters to get back to what made them successful before. The Cubs have an experienced set of hitters in their lineup, each individual immensely talented. Each capable of taking over a game and putting the team on their back. And each also capable of complementing one other in a “well oiled machine” type of offense. And yet, they aren’t. They haven’t for much of this year and the issue goes all the way back to the second half of last year. Over the last 365 days’ worth of games, the Cubs have not been particularly great.
For a team that employs Javy Baez, Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo, Willson Contreras, and the reborn Jason Heyward, you would think this team consistently cranks out five to six runs per game. No, I don’t mean averages five to six runs per game. I mean actually consistently scores plenty of runs. And looking at their slash lines and peripheral numbers, they’re all having pretty good seasons. So why does it feel like this team slumbers at the plate far too often?
Probably because some players the Cubs were counting on contributing just never developed at the plate quite like they’d hoped: Kyle Schwarber, Albert Almora, Addison Russell (who has far bigger problems), Ian Happ, and I guess you can include David Bote there too. They’ve had individual moments, sure, but who really wants any of them at the plate with the game on the line right now? Whom do you trust to get a big hit?
And with respect to the other high-profile guys like Bryzzo, Contreras, and Javy, while they’re incredible hitters and true baseball stars, they don’t seem to ever get ‘hot’ at the same time anymore. They’ll all have stretches of tearing the cover off the baseball at various points during the year, but it’s rarely at the same time. That renders the offense inconsistent and it’s why they’re unable to sustain a lengthy winning streak. Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer built the Cubs with the vision of a feared lineup that consistently outscores the opposition. For a while, it worked. But the days we took for granted in 2015, ’16, and ’17 seem long ago, don’t they?
Here’s the reality of the situation: The Cubs at this point are still in decent shape in the division. They’re tied for second place with Milwaukee and one game behind the NL Central leading Cardinals. The season is, by no means, over.
But the offense doesn’t seem like it’s on its way out of its slump. Hopefully they figure it out, but in the meantime, we should prepare to start coming to terms with a harsh truth about the Cubs, whose hitters can no longer be considered ‘young’: Maybe they’re just a collection of very talented and accomplished hitters whose sum is now just less than their individual parts.
