Champagne Problems: One Week After Joy of Playoff Clinch, Losses and Bad Vibes Pile Up on Cubs

It's been one week since a sweep in Pittsburgh gave the Cubs their 88th win and the certainty that their season would not end after Game 162. That was a very good day. There were smiles, hugs, encomiums and hopeful proclamations about the things that still laid ahead of the team. They partied. The team felt that it had achieved something important, and they expected to do more.

Six full days have passed since, and the Cubs are 0-for-6 in their quest for a good one. They've gotten only mixed signals on their key injured players. It sounds like Daniel Palencia and Kyle Tucker will be activated some time this week, giving them each a chance to show that they're healthy before the playoffs begin Tuesday, but it's hard to sustain much confidence in either. Matthew Boyd and Shota Imanaga are healthy, but for fans (and club personnel) hoping to see them each stabilize and have strong starts after some recent struggles, there's been no succor. Nico Hoerner continues to rake, and Ian Happ is doing fine, but Michael Busch can't get untracked. Pete Crow-Armstrong and Seiya Suzuki remain, largely, lost at the plate. Dansby Swanson's defensive decline is a minor but real point of concern. Rookie third baseman Matt Shaw is distracted and unproductive.

On Tuesday, even Cade Horton—the most relentless source of positive feeling for this club since mid-July and the team's presumptive Game 1 starting pitcher next week—left his final start of the season after just three innings, dealing with tightness in his back. He hadn't pitched since the previous Tuesday, and has dealt with illness between appearances. It's possible the balky back was purely the result of the cough and shortness of breath he's dealt with for days, but that's only reassuring in a medium-term sort of way. If a week between starts didn't have him fresh and fired up for this one, who's to say whether another week will be enough to make him ready for that playoff appearance?

All of these things are real sources of concern, if your focus has swung toward the postseason, but in a funny way, you could compartmentalize them and worry less about them, if only the team would win a game or two. A successful regular season, for this team, was never going to be 162 games long. It was going to be 90 wins long. The difference matters. The grind gets rougher when the time between wins stretches out and a team has to endure the difficulty of playing the game without the reward of coming out on top. 

Even amid huge questions about how the team will score enough runs or find enough quality starting pitching to play deep into next month, if they'd won one or two of the last five games, it would be easy to shrug and fix one's vision on the horizon. Instead, after being within four positive results of securing home-field advantage for the Wild Card Series at the end of Friday's games, the Cubs have lived four long days without seeing that magic number come down at all. They have five games left; the Padres have four. If six of those nine games break against Chicago, it will be San Diego who hosts the nearly inevitable series between the two next week. That would be a bleak outcome. It'd be hard to imagine the stumbling Cubs coming out of it with two wins in the best-of-three.

This isn't supposed to happen to this team. Their identity has been tied up in this not happening. Jed Hoyer built one of the oldest rosters in baseball and paid Craig Counsell the (then-)highest salary among big-league managers to prevent lapses of focus and streaks of poor play at just the wrong times. Until Sunday, the team hadn't lost four games in a row all year. Now, they've lost five in a row. They have Justin Turner and Carlos Santana so that this doesn't happen. They have Drew Pomeranz and Caleb Thielbar and Boyd so that it doesn't happen. They paid Swanson $177 million and Jameson Taillon $68 million so that it doesn't happen. 

Now, they're dealing with a multi-system failure on the eve of the test on which their whole season will be judged. Some of that is bad luck. Even more of it is just fluff. They could, after all, lose out and still make the postseason, and sneak past the Padres and heat up against the Brewers and make everyone forget that they finished the regular campaign in a two-week fugue state. One benefit of having so many superannuated veterans around is that they can counsel everyone not to worry much about the natural letdown after a team achieves something they fought so long and fiercely to win. The playoffs are not fully random, as some would have you believe, but they're highly susceptible to randomness, and one form of that randomness is the sudden turn from slump to streak for an entire team. It happens.

On the other hand, this doesn't feel like a normal set of hiccups. They don't have a hot power hitter for the middle of their lineup right now. They've been batting Carson Kelly cleanup again lately; Kelly has a .669 OPS since Miguel Amaya got hurt in late May. The vaunted bullpen is hitting some very normal and generally non-worrisome speed bumps, but their offense, their starting rotation and even their fielding are faltering, exposing the degree to which they've been overly reliant on that pen as they've treaded water over two-thirds of the season.

After a June 3 win in Washington, the Cubs were 38-22, and had outscored their opponents by a whopping 102 runs. Since then, they're 50-47, and have outscored opponents by just 21 runs. They heated up impressively from mid-August through that clinching win in Pittsburgh, but a week's worth of lousy play since only underscores that this once mightily consistent team has gotten streaky lately—and not always in a good way. When you visit their Baseball Reference page, it's hard not to be awed by the collection of full-season numbers listed, especially in the WAR column—but that hides some ugly truths about this team.

Tucker, Crow-Armstrong, Kelly, Busch, Suzuki, and Boyd all were so good in the first half that their stat lines disguise how poorly they've played of late. Shaw, Imanaga, Swanson, Happ and Palencia took over to carry the team for various segments as the first group sagged, but three of those five now look to be slumping or hurt. Only Hoerner and Horton seem to be fully in stride at just the right time, and now, even that is in doubt.

There's an imbalance here that you can see in the full-season data (for instance, Cubs position players are far and away the best in baseball in Runs Above Average, according to Baseball Reference, but Cubs pitchers are fourth-worst in the league), but which gets distorted along the way. Really, the imbalance isn't between any two units or based on any kind of matchup, but between the first- and second-half Cubs, or the Cubs before and after Tucker began to be diminished by nagging injuries. At some point, this was a great baseball team—or it had the chance to be, anyway. At this moment, this is barely even a good baseball team.

That's unfortunate, because this is the moment that matters. As much as they might have felt they had while the champagne was spraying, the 2025 Cubs haven't yet achieved anything important. Winning one's division validates a season, on its own, but crawling across the finish line as a Wild Card entrant—a distant second to the Brewers, again, in the Central—doesn't do so. The Cubs failed to deliver a regular season that makes their season a success, so they have to prove themselves by winning at least one series in the playoffs. Their veterans need to communicate that. Their young players need to internalize that, and work hard to make themselves ready for the task ahead. The coaching and medical staffs need to make clear choices about the viability of their injured would-be contributors and plunge forward, with or without them.

To shake off the fug of a post-celebration losing streak and a lousy off-field storyline and a star going outside the organization for treatment of what seems like a routine injury, the team needs to get back to winning. They need to go out and win a few of their final five games, get that home-field advantage, and remind themselves what it feels like to be the best version of themselves. Unfortunately, that won't guarantee anything. They're still an old team, and it still feels like the best version of them might be unreachable—lost in the magic of that first-half power binge from Crow-Armstrong or the impossible efficiency of first-half Boyd. Still, it feels important. Five games from the regular season's conclusion, this team needs something to vault them forward and give them a running start on the postseason—or they might be beaten before they get up to speed.