Chicago Cubs Hitters Were Always a Poor Match for Their Own Pitching Staff

[RandallPnkFloyd]

Image courtesy of © Michael McLoone-Imagn Images

After another loss to the Milwaukee Brewers on Monday, the Chicago Cubs stand with the classic Avengers: Endgame protagonists; it feels like they have a 1-in-roughly-14-million chance of claiming victory. Such dire odds are not the result of being down 2-0 in a best-of-five series. They're also not due solely to the idea that the Brewers are simply a better ballclub. While both of those things may (objectively) be true, there's also an alignment issue within the roster. 

And while we're at it, here's another, less lazy pop culture reference. As far as partnerships go, Cubs hitters and Cubs pitchers feature the type of ill-gotten, questionable-decision-leading-to-disastrous-result structure that would make even our best horror directors squirm. Not in a darkly fun and chaotic John Carpenter sort of way, mind you, where the vibes and atmosphere don't leave you wanting for an ultimate outcome. You're just happy to be along for the ride. But rather in an Ari Aster sort of way, where you're unsure why you're consuming it in the first place and feel sort of gross afterward. 

This is all a fairly dramatic way of stating that the composition of this roster was never going to work in anything resembling a pleasant fashion, against a team like Milwaukee. 

On one hand, you have the Cubs pitching staff. They've been a fine group in 2025, composed of middle-to-low-tier velocity and reclamation arms. As a collective, they sat ninth in ERA (3.81) and paced the league with a 6.9% walk rate. The results were there, regardless of their own composition. Ahead of the National League Division Series, concern permeated two primary areas: their ability to perform at a high level while missing Cade Horton, combined with the need to feature a potentially burning-out Matthew Boyd; and their broader, further-reaching dearth of both velocity and swing-and-miss ability. 

The Brewers absolutely feast on teams with that combination of weaknesses. This is a team with the third-highest contact rate (79.6%) on swings, and when they don't have to battle high-end raw stuff, that contact can be authoritative. Against finesse pitchers (those with a low combined strikeout and walk rate, relative to the league average), the Brewers had a .274/.336/.417 line and a 105 OPS+, meaning they're substantially above-average. Their ability to generate runs via contact against the specific profile of the bulk of the Cubs staff was always going to lead to run production on their end. It wasn't about shutting down the opposition on the Cubs' end, but merely minimizing damage.

In short, the Cubs were going to be trailing, probably at many points, in this series. That left a certain onus on the hitters to be able to work their way back into games. That's where we begin to confront the issue we've seen unfold in the first two games of this series. Whether or not the Cubs are a team capable of coming back in games where they find themselves trailing is almost irrelevant—because whether they are constructed that way or not, it's not something they have done particularly well in 2025. 

One factor in establishing this idea about this year's group is in their splits when trailing in games. When behind, the Cubs lineup features a slash of .241/.321/.409. When ahead, they have an average 20 points higher and a slugging percentage almost 50 points above the trailing rate. Primary culprits in the shortfall of production when the team is behind include Pete Crow-Armstrong (.202/.270/.405), Seiya Suzuki (.236/.322/.433), Michael Busch (.207/.333/.377), Carson Kelly (.205/.302/.369) and Matt Shaw (.232/.279/.416). That's over half your lineup that scuffles significantly in a trailing situation. 

Then you toss in the leverage component: 

The most notable column here is in the runs added or subtracted due to leverage. Suzuki leads the way, but that's also on the strength of either his patience or a pitch over the heart of the plate. Ian Happ's is almost exclusively due to patience in his own right, as is Kyle Tucker's. Only Nico Hoerner offers something even remotely balanced in creating value in the leverage game. Everyone else is obviously on the wrong end of the spectrum in that regard. 

Nuance in this discussion runs incredibly deep—deeper than even these couple of factors, for sure. It's a team that has struggled against velocity, too. But as many different additional elements that we could include as part of this discussion, many of them lead to the same (relatively simple) idea: the Cubs were always going to be trailing at points during this series, and they lack the ability to overcome those scenarios. Whether that's a failure of construction or of execution remains to be seen. Either way, though, it's certainly something with which the Cubs' front office will have to reckon as they begin to turn their attention toward the 2026 roster.

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[Arlen]

Craig Counsell, God bless him.  Can we get David Ross back?