Cubs' Magic Number is 28, But They Don't Get to Count Other Teams' Losses

[Matthew Trueblood]

Since breaking out of a prolonged offensive fugue on the Fourth of July, the Cubs are 20-12. They have an easier schedule than most over the balance of the season. Can they really climb out of the hole they dug over the first three months of the season?

Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY Sports

When the old heads say that games in April count just as much as ones in September, this is the kind of moment they're anticipating. The Cubs made an impressive trade in the late stages of July, to close a month in which they asserted themselves as a better team than they'd looked like in May or June. They've started August impressively, too, and after being 39-48 on Jul. 3, they're now within a game of .500.

There are two distinct problems. The first is that, having lost contact with the division-leading Brewers and still lagging even the third Wild Card spot by three games, they have a narrower path to the postseason than a team with some chance of winning its division. Thus, their very soft remaining schedule is a prerequisite for any sort of dream of a playoff berth, rather than a nice bonus that they could afford to live without.

The second problem is that, during their long stretch of poor play earlier this season, the team lost their season series to Atlanta, the Reds, the Padres, the Mets, the Cardinals, the Pirates, the Padres, and the Giants. They split their season set with the Diamondbacks, but Arizona looks almost certain to win a higher percentage of their intradivisional games than the Cubs do, which would give them that edge, too. Thus, the Cubs have to be better than all but two of those, and can't afford to be tied with whoever's third.

Taken together, those things mean that the Cubs need to go 28-15 the rest of the way. They need 87 wins to reach the postseason, and that's a tall order. They have a lot of theoretically easy series left, but they also have three-game engagements with the Guardians, Yankees, Dodgers, and Phillies. If they split those 12 contests (which seems sufficiently optimistic), they'd need to go 22-9 in their other games to get to 87.

It's nice that this team is finally putting some pieces together. It's encouraging, especially because some of the engines of the recent run of success (most notably Pete Crow-Armstrong and Miguel Amaya) are players who figure to be important to the organization's future, one way or another. It's too early to get especially excited, because the damage done by the team's play from the end of April until nearly the All-Star break can't be easily wiped away.

One healthy way to experience the rest of the season might be to break it into two chunks. Starting Monday night in Cleveland, the Cubs play 21 games in which the only truly tough team will be the first one they face--the AL Central-best Guardians. If they go 14-7 or 15-6 in that stretch, they leave themselves a legitimate chance to win a Wild Card spot. Their home series against the Yankees the weekend after Labor Day will mark the turn into the home stretch, and if they get there in good shape, they'll be able to afford to go 4-5 against New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, although even then, they'll need to be phenomenal (10-3) in the other series left on their slate. If they go 13-8 or worse in these next 21, the light at the end of the tunnel becomes a pinprick, or winks out altogether.

Not having head-to-head games against many of the teams they're chasing means the Cubs will have to hope for help, and to avoid being reliant on that, they have to play like a 100-win team the rest of the way. It's fair, though, to be happy just to have this glimmer of hope, about six weeks after it looked like the season was over.

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