A's (Jump) vs Cubs (Taillon): 6/2/26, 7:05pm

[Brock Beauchamp]

The A's have cooled off considerably after a surprisingly hot start, this *should* be a time for the Cubs to take advantage, but... you know. The Cubs and all that.

	THU	FRI	SAT	SUN	MON	TOT
Trent Thornton	22	0	0	28	0	50
Ryan Rolison	0	0	0	34	0	34
Phil Maton	0	15	0	14	0	29
Jacob Webb	0	0	19	0	0	19
Hoby Milner	21	2	0	0	0	23
Ethan Roberts	0	22	0	22	0	44
Daniel Palencia	0	0	13	0	0	13
Caleb Thielbar	27	0	0	0	0	27

[Bertz]

This will be the Cubs' fifth series of the year against a team that is as of today under .500

[chibears55]

1 minute ago, Bertz said:

This will be the Cubs' fifth series of the year against a team that is as of today under .500

Next 7 series (22 games) are against teams under 500, As Giants(2) Rockies(2) BlueJays Mets. Combined 42 games under.

If they cant turn it around completely here, not sure they will afterwards. 

[Jason Ross]

10 minutes ago, Bertz said:

This will be the Cubs' fifth series of the year against a team that is as of today under .500

Fangraphs wrote an article about this today. They highlighted some of the struggles, but also again the pitching the Cubs have faced. They've had a pretty brutal stretch of pitching lately, on top of getting a ton of breaking balls. They made mention that  the Cubs struggle against spin isn't unique to them; it's a league wide issue.

Hopefully an easy stretch here should even things out again.

[We Got The Whole 9]

2 minutes ago, Jason Ross said:

Fangraphs wrote an article about this today. They highlighted some of the struggles, but also again the pitching the Cubs have faced. They've had a pretty brutal stretch of pitching lately, on top of getting a ton of breaking balls. They made mention that  the Cubs struggle against spin isn't unique to them; it's a league wide issue.

Hopefully an easy stretch here should even things out again.

Pitchers abilities to throw these ridiculous pitches for strikes these days or put em pretty much right where they want them is amazing absurd. We know velocity has exploded but the command of secondary piitches has leveled-up tremendously over the last 2-3 seasons. And this always seems to be the issue that the Cubs face around May and June, when the fastballs start disappearing. Not enough of our guys can punish a curveball IMHO. I also wish we had more guys use the opposite field on sweepers and feel like too many times we pull pitches on the outer edge that can probably be an easy oppo hit. 

 

The approach has been the same against the Cubs for years, but for some reason each year they forget.

 

 

[Jason Ross]

29 minutes ago, We Got The Whole 9 said:

Pitchers abilities to throw these ridiculous pitches for strikes these days or put em pretty much right where they want them is amazing absurd. We know velocity has exploded but the command of secondary piitches has leveled-up tremendously over the last 2-3 seasons. And this always seems to be the issue that the Cubs face around May and June, when the fastballs start disappearing. Not enough of our guys can punish a curveball IMHO. I also wish we had more guys use the opposite field on sweepers and feel like too many times we pull pitches on the outer edge that can probably be an easy oppo hit. 

 

The approach has been the same against the Cubs for years, but for some reason each year they forget.

 

 

Well, to be fair to the Cubs, they have a positive run value against breaking balls this year. It's just that the league is terrible against breaking balls. We have to get used to a norm; we focus so much on the velo that we forget how nasty breaking balls have gotten and how much harder they are to hit.

Are the Cubs good against breaking balls? No. But the league is so bad at them, they hold a positive outcome against them relative to the rest of the league. The issue is that in the May particularly the Cubs have faced a historic amount of breaking balls. So being slightly better than average against them isn't really helping when everyone is just so bad against them.

Fangraphs Link
Mike Petriello's look at Cubs and breaking balls