Cubs (Imanaga) vs Cardinals (Gray): 8/10/25, 6:10pm

[Rcal10]

2 hours ago, Geographyhater8888 said:

It’s not about being negative, we’ve pivoted from World Series contenders to just get in the playoffs and anything can happen. The bar is getting lower and lower. As it stands barring catastrophe the Cubs will be seeded in the playoffs but until they pass the eye test and Tucker is the big star bat who can pick up a slumping offense, they’re not that much different of a team from the last couple years. Better, but by how much if Tuckers finger is still ailing him?
 

Will PCA Seiya and Busch find their home run stroke and their OPSs will start to climb back up or at least stagnate from nose diving since the all star break and all go on a heater in unison back to their breakout year paces, or will it continue to dip? We’re seeing a regression to the mean and Tucker hasn’t been able to pick up the slack until proven wrong.  

it’s healthy to question their capability of making a deep playoff run. They’ll have to slug and hit if they have any chance of going far. It’s not negativity for the sake of it. 

But it kind of is. Reality is the Cubs have a 95% chance to make the playoffs. I think we all would have been happy with that before the season started. We have some suggesting they will be lucky to get in and be stomped out immediately. Others suggesting this is an 83-86 win team. Again, that’s just negative commenting. Once the playoffs start the best team probably has a 15% chance of winning it all. The worst team maybe a 6% chance. Bottom line is, now and has always been, get in and hope to get lucky. Because even the best teams need to get lucky to be playing well when they get in. 

[17 Seconds]

tucker is on his way to another 5 win season. i get being annoyed at his slump, but i think the complaining over him is excessive and will just make it easier for the cubs to let a great player walk

[soccer10k]

29 minutes ago, Jason Ross said:

To be fair to Tucker, most of the "awful" has been from August 1st - August 10th. His July wRC+ was a 107. 

.675 OPS in July so still not very good. He drew 21 walks so maybe pitchers were still respecting his bat. He’s only walked 2 times in 8 games so far in August. 

[muntjack]

The Cubs were starting to look like the team to beat prior to this stretch, so I can understand how some people are a bit crestfallen.   

There were some 2015 vibes happening and it stings to have those slip away. 

[Soul]

Take heart.  We could be the Yankees.  I'm sure Boston fans have the Bellinger "throw" on repeat today.  Yikes.

[Tangled Up in Plaid]

Isaac Collins has a 167 wRC+ since June 1, lol.

[Jason Ross]

20 minutes ago, soccer10k said:

.675 OPS in July so still not very good. He drew 21 walks so maybe pitchers were still respecting his bat. He’s only walked 2 times in 8 games so far in August. 

wRC+ > OPS for this very reason - OPS does not properly weight his OBP and he was getting on base. He was 7% better than league average using the superior metric, so while the slugging has been down, he was a decent offensive performer in July. I'd obviously like that number much higher, but Freeman, Alonso and a lot of other really good hitters have months that sat below 60 wRC+. These things happen. 

On the respect aspect, I'm not sure that's true. He's seeing a little more than his average in the zone, up around 4% in August. But because we're at such a small sample size, if you just cut August 1st from the sample, it drops 2% and you're well within standard deviation, so I'm not sure that pitchers are really doing that. His two highest zone% were two of the first three games of the month.  At this point we're just micro-slicing data into unusable sample sizes.

The biggest issue I've seen is that his timing has just been a bit off. He's hitting a lot of things to CF instead of RF right now. Whether that's due to his finger (though he hurt the finger a month before the backslide, so I am unwilling to fully jump on the correlation bandwagon there), a bad month that just happens, a bit of mental frustration himself...I am unsure. Beyond that, most of his other stuff is pretty normal. The bat velo is down a bit too, but that's mostly over August and not really something we see happen with the finger injury in June, either. 

 

[We Got The Whole 9]

3 minutes ago, Jason Ross said:

wRC+ > OPS for this very reason - OPS does not properly weight his OBP and he was getting on base. He was 7% better than league average using the superior metric, so while the slugging has been down, he was a decent offensive performer in July. I'd obviously like that number much higher, but Freeman, Alonso and a lot of other really good hitters have months that sat below 60 wRC+. These things happen. 

On the respect aspect, I'm not sure that's true. He's seeing a little more than his average in the zone, up around 4% in August. But because we're at such a small sample size, if you just cut August 1st from the sample, it drops 2% and you're well within standard deviation, so I'm not sure that pitchers are really doing that. His two highest zone% were two of the first three games of the month. 

 

Zone% similarly doesn't tell the whole story. Have you compared the heat maps?

[Jason Ross]

17 minutes ago, We Got The Whole 9 said:

Zone% similarly doesn't tell the whole story. Have you compared the heat maps?

They're pitching him slightly more off the center of the plate. But they did that in March through April too (more in and over the plate May-July) and he crushed then, so there is nothing in the heat map to suggest pitchers have just thrown their hands up in the air and said "pitch him like he's Nick Madrigal!" or that he should particularly struggle with this zone-attack. He's getting a pretty normal distribution of strikes, both in the zone and based on his heat map.

It leads me to, once again conclude, this isn't something pitchers are really doing to Kyle to cause this. It could be finger-related, but it could also be typical slump that even elite players are prone to (and slumps can be mechanical, mental, etc, as well). 

Full year:

March - April: 

May - June

July - Now

[Derwood]

Tucker's OPS wasn't great, but was REALLY boosted by walks. His OBP was higher than his SLG for several weeks

[BKHoo]

Bellinger has had a good year. I look at his numbers next to Tucker and they are very close. 

[Irrelevant Dude]

9 minutes ago, BKHoo said:

Bellinger has had a good year. I look at his numbers next to Tucker and they are very close. 

He is also hitting in a park that a 6th grader could hit home runs out to RF.

Edited August 11, 2025 by Irrelevant Dude

[Tangled Up in Plaid]

Tucker's still only barely ahead of Bellinger in xHR. https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/leaderboard/home-runs

[CubUgly]

1 minute ago, Tangled Up in Plaid said:

Tucker's still only barely ahead of Bellinger in xHR. https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/leaderboard/home-runs

Not sure how many Yankee Stadium homers Belli has with that very short porch, it was made for a hitter like Tuck just like the Crawford boxes were made for Paredes....but Tuck has not been hitting many long fly balls of late so not sure how many balls that died in right for him would have been Yankee homers.....but I'm sure someone could did that up. 

[chibears55]

19 hours ago, PeanutPunch33 said:

I still want to see them get in. You just never know what can happen in October. This team is definitely better than that Marlins team that won it all 

Theyll get in, I dont see this team totally collapsing nor do I see the reds going on any kind of run to overtake them.

[NorthsideAvenger]

1 minute ago, chibears55 said:

Theyll get in, I dont see this team totally collapsing nor do I see the reds going on any kind of run to overtake them.

September baseball does weird things. Mets can turn it around. The Reds can get hot. Who knows about the Padres, etc. 

[Rcal10]

4 minutes ago, chibears55 said:

Theyll get in, I dont see this team totally collapsing nor do I see the reds going on any kind of run to overtake them.

I agree. Reds have a brutal schedule to finish the season. I doubt they win more than 83 games. 

[Rcal10]

1 minute ago, NorthsideAvenger said:

September baseball does weird things. Mets can turn it around. The Reds can get hot. Who knows about the Padres, etc. 

so they can get hot. But the Cubs can’t? 

[I owned a Suzuki]

I would wager a good hunk of money that the Cubs make the playoffs. The offense will get back on track, not early season track but better than recent. 

[NorthsideAvenger]

20 minutes ago, Rcal10 said:

so they can get hot. But the Cubs can’t? 

I'm saying September baseball can be weird, sometimes in a fun way. Of course the Cubs can get hot, it is what makes September potentially fun. 

Edited August 11, 2025 by NorthsideAvenger

[CubinNY]

36 minutes ago, chibears55 said:

Theyll get in, I dont see this team totally collapsing nor do I see the reds going on any kind of run to overtake them.

The Marlins team that won it all was a very good team with a 19 year old Miguel Cabrera  on it. 

[BKHoo]

We are about to be 8 games up in the loss column to secure a wild card spot. Life is still good. 

[UMFan83]

4 minutes ago, BKHoo said:

We are about to be 8 games up in the loss column to secure a wild card spot. Life is still good. 

 

 

Edited August 12, 2025 by UMFan83

[Tangled Up in Plaid]

3 minutes ago, BKHoo said:

We are about to be 8 games up in the loss column to secure a wild card spot. Life is still good. 

Why does it feel so ******?

[Stratos]

7 hours ago, Rcal10 said:

But it kind of is. Reality is the Cubs have a 95% chance to make the playoffs. I think we all would have been happy with that before the season started. We have some suggesting they will be lucky to get in and be stomped out immediately. Others suggesting this is an 83-86 win team. Again, that’s just negative commenting. Once the playoffs start the best team probably has a 15% chance of winning it all. The worst team maybe a 6% chance. Bottom line is, now and has always been, get in and hope to get lucky. Because even the best teams need to get lucky to be playing well when they get in. 

Would be nice to skip the first round though!

Cubs have below average pitching (according to FIP and xFIP) + a top 5 or so defense which combined results in about average run prevention, plus an excellent offense.  We're still a good team.

The hottest team wins the World Series, not necessarily the best.   We were hot in April/May, the Brewers over the last month.  Let's get into the playoffs and set things up for us to have the best chance to perform well in the playoffs.

Biggest worry for me is the SP like Boyd and Horton who could hit the wall before or during October.  Expecting them to perform well over 7 months is insane, let alone 6.  Pushing them past what's reasonable risks fatigue and/or injury.  If they're going to risk an injured Boyd and/or Horton in 2026 to try to squeeze more wins in 2025 they're fools and it would be an organizational failure.

I really believe Boyd and Horton should be removed from the rotation after the Brewers series and given at least a few weeks of significantly reduced workload either in the pen or the minors, with enough time in Sept to ramp up again and get sharp for the playoffs.  I'm Verducci rule guy.  Boyd could get close to 200 IP at this pace if there's a deep playoff run.

Edited August 12, 2025 by Stratos