From Now On, It's Just the Cubs, Their Talent, and What They Can Manage to Do With It

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © Jeff Curry-Imagn Images

I hadn't taken a true, all-tools-down vacation since baseball writing became my full-time job in November 2023. After the trade deadline, though, my family and I had a long-scheduled week away in the northernmost reaches of our home state—and, since our home state is Minnesota, the northernmost reaches of the country. It took a day or so to feel any easing of the urge to check scores and second-guess managerial moves, but only that long.

Thus, I spent the last week playing cards with nieces and nephews, working on my backflip off the water trampoline, and hiking long trails in a fruitless but delightful quest to spot a moose. I also sat down for long stretches with baseball, but baseball as Roger Angell relayed it. I was attached to the world just long enough to wonder why Craig Counsell went to Caleb Thielbar for a second straight day in the eighth inning on Aug. 2, when Gunnar Henderson made him pay with a game-winning homer. Why didn't Counsell go to fresher-armed newcomer Taylor Rogers? I asked myself the question, then contented myself with the fact that it was beyond my control or comment, and turned back to my coffee. Since then, I've been largely unplugged.

Coming back, I can't say I'm surprised to find the Cubs lagging even further behind the Brewers than when I left. The 2025 Cubs are good, even if bum luck in the injury department and a prolonged offensive nonaplegia have made them look less so of late. They're scraping out enough wins to stay comfortably in playoff position. The 2025 Brewers are, simply, one of those teams made of special cloth. What they're doing should look familiar to Cubs fans. They have a trifle less power, but they're very much the 2016 Cubs in secondhand jeans. The Cubs were 4-4 while I was (mostly) beyond their reach, and while their two months' worth of water-treading is understandably frustrating, it's also admirable. They're bobbing and weaving and staving off the Padres, even after San Diego was much more aggressive at the trade deadline. They'll probably hold onto the top Wild Card position, at worst.

The real bad news for Cubs fans all came from Milwaukee, because the Brewers were 8-0 between my last two bylines. They're down their two best, most prodigious young players, and somehow, that doesn't matter. Their two best active hitters are a 28-year-old rookie they signed as a minor-league free agent and a draft bust plucked from the farm system of the worst team in baseball largely because his salary balanced the one the Brewers needed to offload due to low morale, and somehow, that doesn't matter. The Brewers won two or three games while I was gone that would be the best win of the season even for these Cubs. There's just something in the air up at The Ueck.

No matter. Saturday night was a vital sign, a sudden spasm of the formidable muscles of this offense, and Chicago is suddenly one Sunday night win from having taken two series out of three since the deadline passed. Just as importantly, Jameson Taillon, Miguel Amaya and Javier Assad are all on the verge of readiness to join the team, one that has missed them fiercely in their respective absences. Yes, the Cubs are 67-49 even though Assad has yet to pitch for them this year, but Ben Brown's -2.0 Win Probability Added almost all could have been eliminated if Assad were healthy enough to start the season in the rotation. They're just not as dangerous (36-28) since Amaya went down as they were when he was active (31-21), and they've struggled to replace Taillon in the rotation, too; they're 18-14 since he went down at the end of June.

Add those three to the mix, jettison Reese McGuire (whom Counsell has barely trusted at all over the last three weeks and who has a .250 OBP for the season) and send Brown to Triple-A Iowa for quick re-outfitting as a short reliever, and this team should begin to hum again. Kyle Tucker is a problem, habitually early, off-balance and too flat in his bat path, and Pete Crow-Armstrong's lack of plate discipline has become a glaring problem, but the team's depth will carry them forward from here. Cold hitters will warm up. Better health is on the horizon.

Better still, for this particular team, is to have the vague notion of outside help deleted from the ticker. I love the final two months of the baseball season, because it ceases to be about uncertain evaluations or breathless rumors. The story, every night, is on the field—sometimes in Chicago, or wherever the Cubs travel; sometimes on the scoreboard, wherever they keep the Brewers tally; and sometimes in Iowa, but always on the field.

For the Cubs to win anything worth taking, Matthew Boyd and Michael Busch have to execute better than they did Friday night, when they gave the Cardinals extra outs multiple times. Thielbar and Andrew Kittredge have to be the consistently strong middle relievers they're capable of being, and Counsell has to use them a bit more judiciously to make that easier. (Perhaps Rogers is a key to that, but so, too, could Brown be.) The offense has to get going again, and that's no longer a question of having any more of a catalyst added to their midst (Willi Castro should be an adequate one, especially with Matt Shaw rounding into form as his first season unfolds) or of Counsell needing to rearrange his lineup card. The hitters will hit, or not. The pitchers will execute, or not. The fielders will make plays, or not. And we all get to enjoy (or excruciate over) that binary.

What the team's prolonged flirtation with .500 has cost them is their margin for error. With the Brewers coming to Wrigley Field for five games next week, they could yet catch the Crew, but it's very unlikely. They're now fighting to hold onto the right to host a Wild Card Series, and that fight will be a hard one. Not since mid-June has the club seemed to be fully in touch with its talent. That will have to change. If it does, though, they can be every bit as dangerous as they could have been from the front of the pack. There are 46 games left to play before the postseason, and the Cubs can get there by winning just half of them—but all the joy and merit of the campaign will lie in the pursuit of something more than that. The national spotlight has rightly swung from the North Side of Chicago northward. The freedom, if you're the party left in the cold spot where the light once shone, lies in the fact that you're now competing not for others' attention, but for your own satisfaction and success on your own terms.

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