All Hands, Make Fast: The Last Stand of the 2025 Chicago Cubs

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © David Banks-Imagn Images

The road map, this time, is pretty clear. There might be chances for Craig Counsell to get creative, or to be more aggressive than he would ordinarily be, but the Cubs will have to create them. For instance, though Quinn Priester is about average at controlling the running game, the Cubs won't be able to apply pressure to the Brewers starter unless they first put some of their speedy runners on base. We've already gotten a great breakdown of how the Cubs can attack Priester, from @Jason Ross, but having a plan and executing it against this Milwaukee team can sometimes be the difference between riding a horse and riding a horse fly.

A point might come, mid-game, when Kyle Tucker and his balky calf reach base, and Counsell gets a chance to pinch-run for him with Willi Castro or Kevin Alcántara. With Moisés Ballesteros looming as an option off the bench, Counsell should pull that trigger if Tucker represents a run of any importance, but whether he will actually do so is a less important question than whether Tucker can even pose the question by getting on in the first place. Counsell doesn't have any great options coming off the bench, so unless he makes the fairly radical choice to bench Matt Shaw in favor of Castro, most of the pressure to generate runs falls on his players.

On the other side of the ledger, Counsell has a bit more control, and the challenge will be for a slightly fidgety manager with a long history of quick hooks to stay his hand Wednesday and get some length out of Jameson Taillon. The Cubs' relievers just aren't so good that Counsell should be eager to remove Taillon in favor of them—not against this lineup, and not knowing that there are two more games left to win even if Chicago takes the one Wednesday. No Cubs pitcher has gotten 15 outs in a game during this brief postseason run; that has to change if the Cubs are to keep their season alive. Beyond Taillon, Counsell should take advantage of the fact that he's never anointed any particular closer by going to Andrew Kittredge and Brad Keller right away. If it comes down to it, Daniel Palencia can close out the game at the end, but the plan should be to maximize the number of outs spread among Taillon, Kittredge, Keller, and lefties Caleb Thielbar and Drew Pomeranz.

The first two games of this series were so lopsided that the Cubs couldn't even do anything that felt important in the second half of either contest. The electricity of the crowd at Milwaukee's Uecker Field overwhelmed them; the Brewers themselves overpowered and outplayed them. The challenge, of course, is to reverse that momentum and demonstrate the same capacity for intimidation and execution Milwaukee showed. It'll be interesting to see whether Wrigley Field is invaded by more Brewers fans, after Cubs fans made no appreciable dent in the atmosphere in Milwaukee. Either way, though, the team has to give the crowd a reason to feel confident and get involved. Just as neither the manager nor the players can use trickeration or fancy gambits to break the game, the crowd can't will a team to victory. In one tough at-bat and on one hustle play after another, the Cubs have to find enough self-belief and a smart enough approach to play their way back into the series, slowly.

It's been a peculiar season. The Cubs never won or lost more than five straight games, and now, they're very unlikely to. They only lost three or more in a row five times, though; they won at least three in a row 15 times. That sounds good, because it is. This team bounces back and stops the bleeding fast. They have a lot of ways to win games. The Brewers specialize in taking some of those avenues away, but if the Cubs are the team they think they are—the one they've strived to be all season—they have one more get-up left in them. 

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[KJTchoup]

A fairly "radical" choice to bench Shaw and play Castro?  Shaw is hitting .000 for the playoffs!