A Failure on Every Level: How Bad Fundamentals and Bad Roster Construction Cost Cubs Saturday's Game

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © Patrick Gorski-Imagn Images

The first problem is that Tyler Austin got hurt. That's outside Jed Hoyer's control, except in that signing a player who was compelled to seek his baseball fortune on another continent half a decade ago and who's now well into his mid-30s was an embrace of some injury risk. Austin's knee injury in spring training left the Cubs without the backup first baseman Hoyer thought he'd provided to Craig Counsell, and Jonathon Long's minor injury during camp was enough to scupper the option of bringing him north when the season began.

Hoyer continues to build bad, dysfunctional benches, and the lack of a true utility man—Matt Shaw fills that role on a healthy version of the roster, while Scott Kingery does so for this injury-diminished one, but neither is quite as versatile as the ideal do-everything guy—is on him. However, he caught a bad break with Austin going down, and the best management of his young bats and his two incumbent catchers was the way he did things this winter. Let's assign him just 10% of the blame for the Cubs' needless and costly loss Saturday at Wrigley Field, and move along.

Counsell was left without great options, too. He faced a situation in the seventh inning of that game for which the only reasonable response was the move he made. The Cubs were rallying. After starting the game by falling behind 3-0, they'd battled back to make it 3-2, and the tying run stood at third base with two outs. Michael Busch was due, but the Pirates went to lefty reliever Gregory Soto, a brutal matchup for the platoon-vulnerable Busch. Moreover, Busch was mired in an 0-for-30 slump. You can't ask a player fighting his hitting demons that hard to try to win a left-on-left battle with the game on the line, when you have a competent alternative on the bench. Counsell went to Carson Kelly, gaining the platoon edge, even though Kelly is not one of those catchers with much experience as a first baseman.

Kelly didn't cash in the chance, but that was the right call by Counsell. Kelly looked fine while he remained in the game as the first baseman, too. The trouble really began in the ninth, when Kelly drew a two-out walk. He represented the winning run, so Counsell pinch-ran for him with Shaw, gaining much more speed. This could have come into play even in a small way, like beating out a would-be fielder's choice on a slow ground ball, so it was a worthwhile risk. Again, though, it didn't pay off. Alex Bregman extended the game with a tying single, but Shaw was stranded at third and had to take over at first base on defense in extra innings.

We can assign some blame to Counsell and his coaching staff, because somewhere during the spring—especially after the relatively early injury to Austin—they should have gotten in lots of extra work with Shaw or one of the other members of the bench corps at the cold corner. Kelly took most of those reps, but there are lots of ways a catcher can end up being unavailable in a moment like that. One option for the staff should have been to bring Conforto or Ian Happ in from the outfield to play first, with Shaw taking over an outfield corner. Failing that, Shaw should have gotten many more reps on the not-so-basic basics of first base. None of that happened. I assign 20% of the blame for Saturday's loss to the coaching staff.

The rest, though, must be divided between Caleb Thielbar and Shaw. The Cubs did a marvelous job in the top of the 10th inning, holding the visitors scoreless. They missed their chance to walk them off in the bottom of the 10th, but they were very close to getting out of the top of the 11th unscathed, too. With two runners on and two outs, Thielbar induced a dribbler from Pirates infielder Brandon Lowe, who looked overmatched in the left-on-left matchup. It should have ended the inning and set up the home side to even the series with a walkoff victory. Instead: calamity.

Everything two players can do wrong on a routine play, Thielbar and Shaw did wrong on this one. To start in a good place, though: they both had excellent initial reactions. Shaw, playing an unfamiliar position and surely positioned farther from the base than was comfortable with a lefty batter at the plate, broke quickly toward first on contact.

This is actually a good chance to heap another 5% of the blame on the coaching staff. With a lefty batter up and a key run at first base, playing the first baseman that far off the line is almost never correct. Maybe, with the lefty Thielbar on the mound, Lowe's spray chart told them to move the first baseman toward the hole, but Shaw is not 'the first baseman' when you're drawing up those spray charts and positioning plans. He should have been told to play closer to the bag. We'll soon see why that matters.

Thielbar fielded the ball cleanly, and although it meant turning his back to the runner, he was in position to make a throw with plenty of time. Shaw, for his part, found the bag fast. That's your job, on a play like this, as the first baseman: get to the spot quickly and have your head up, ready for the throw.

Look at all the time Thielbar has. There's no need to rush here. There's also plenty of time for the move Shaw still needs to make. A highly seasoned first baseman might have aimed to get their right foot onto the base right away, but this is a perfectly acceptable way to do what we discussed a moment ago: find the base without staring down at the ground. You angle toward the bag, let your left foot locate the pillow, then quickly turn to put the right foot there instead, setting up to receive a throw by putting your left foot forward. That's where the trouble starts.

Shaw has his moment to get the feet right, but he doesn't take it. He's not used to being at first, receiving this kind of hard, time-pressured, high-stakes throw, and he's not comfortable turning his hips and shoulders the way a first baseman must, to be ready for a throw that's anywhere but right at you. It's easy to see some of that in the way Shaw freezes and carries his weight as he braces for the throw.

It's harder to see this, but I think it also becomes a problem for Thielbar, right about here. He's already rushing a little. He didn't appropriately calm himself in the moment it took to scoop the ball, and he's more worried about getting the ball there on time than he should be. But now, he's also looking at an unusual target. Shaw isn't set up correctly, and visually, it's much harder to pick out where you want the throw to go. A better first baseman is already bringing the glove up to set a target, but even without that, his body is telling Thielbar he's ready. Shaw's positioning is sending the opposite message.

Perhaps because of that (or perhaps just because he hurried it), Thielbar will drop too low with his arm slot and throw wide. This is a guy who comes way over the top, off the mound. Dropping down to throw like an infielder isn't usually a problem for him, but here, it becomes one. The ball is running away from Shaw, and the inexperienced infielder's footwork is going to cost him everything, now. Here's the last frame before the ball skips in the dirt, then off his glove.

It's a bad throw. I'm not sure he could have gotten the out if he'd set up better, except by inducing a slightly better throw. I think he could have, because he'd have been able to stretch diagonally toward the ball and cut it off as it tailed away from him. He'd have had a much greater range with the stretch, in general. This is why first basemen stretch with their non-glove foot anchored to the bag in almost all situations, in a nutshell. But certainly, it would have been a tough and impressive play to snare this ball and get Lowe. Take note of his foot being on top of the base, instead of shoved up against its edge, and you can also see that he had a bit more stretch available than it appears.

What should have been easy, though, was stopping the ball. If he has the right foot on the base, it's routine to come off the bag and collect the throw, even if he's ultimately unable to hold the base. As it is, the reach across his body necessitated by having the left foot there means he's going to fall down as he tries for this, no matter what. His stretch radius is cut way, way down, so he needed to give up the base early here and just snatch the ball up like a grounder. Out of position and out of his depth, he failed that, too. The ball skipped away and the winning run scored.

Even having made multiple layers of excuse for his being forced into duty at an unfamiliar spot and placed in the wrong spot to start the play, I have to give Shaw 40% of the blame for this loss. He had a difficult but doable path to getting the out on this play. He had a much wider and easy path to keeping the ball with him and holding the go-ahead run at third base. All it would have taken was better fundamental play, and a big-leaguer shouldn't have to be told which foot to place on first base when readying for a throw. He failed a simple test of either poise or baseball IQ, at a crucial moment in a divisional game.

The rest of the blame—25%—goes to Thielbar. It was a bad throw. He's an asset to a team battling major pitching injury trouble, and he made the first half of a fine play, but it was a bad throw at a dreadful time. Losses like Saturday's are symbolic of the team's failures on multiple levels, but ultimately, you have to leave most of the blame at the feet of two players who have to be better than that. If the Cubs want to get back to the postseason this year, they need to spend the summer building a more functional roster and getting healthy. They have to put their players in better positions to succeed. But most of all, they have to get these things right. They're not nearly good enough to go anywhere worth going while flubbing the fundamentals.

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