Live Little Lies, Lose Big Games: Cubs Get Stern Reminder of Key Trade Deadline Need

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You could feel it coming. All night, in St. Louis Wednesday night, Pete Crow-Armstrong was just missing the big hit. He was getting off his 'A' swing, but not quite getting to his spot on time. In hitting, that's no small thing, but if you can generate the swing path and direction and bat speed that Crow-Armstrong was generating consistently Wednesday, you're dangerous. Eventually, as he has done all year, he was going to get that wrinkle ironed out and put an equally lethal swing on one, but not mishit it. It was just (pun intended) a matter of time.

When it did happen, his timing—in a broader, different sense—could not have been better. The Cubs slogged to a scoreless draw through nine innings in the third game of their four-game set against the Cardinals. It took some brave escape-craft from Matthew Boyd to gut out seven frames, then sparkling showings from two vital relief arms (Jacob Webb and Caleb Thielbar) to push the game to extras. The offense was utterly stalled, though, and needed someone to come up with a thunderbolt. All year, that's what Crow-Armstrong has done, and he did it again.

On an 0-1 pitch, Cardinals hurler Luis Gastelum got his changeup to dip just below the zone. It just needed to dip much farther. Crow-Armstrong sliced cleanly through the ball and hit a screaming, no-doubt, rising rocket of a homer to right-center. He knew it was gone the moment he made contact; he pimped the daylights out of it as he rounded the bases. He's earned every drop of that celebration, too. In late and close situations this year, he's batting .370/.453/.630, with three home runs, three doubles, and a triple in 64 plate appearances. Once he reaches base, in those spots, he's 6-for-6 stealing bases. In high-leverage at-bats, his OPS is 1.056. In medium-leverage ones, it's .996. Those types of splits don't tell us as much as we sometimes tell ourselves they do, about a player's character or clutchness, but it's a fact that Crow-Armstrong has been excellent when the team has needed him most this season.

Ah, but you could also feel it coming, couldn't you? Boyd had spun his seven great innings, and Webb and Thielbar had taken their turns. Even as Crow-Armstrong homered, Trent Thornton was warming up to pitch the 10th inning. Unfortunately, that made sense. Here's the whole Cubs bullpen right now, from most to least trusted by Counsell:

Rolison would have been working for a third time in four days, and the first two batters he would have faced (Lars Nootbaar and JJ Wetherholt) had just seen him Monday night. Hollowell and Ferguson also each pitched earlier in the series, so Thornton was the freshest of the three right-handed middle relievers. But Thornton isn't viable in high-leverage spots, and he rapidly showed why.

To be fair, he got a little bit unlucky, in that one can normally expect better defensive support from Nico Hoerner than Thornton got to start the inning. On a 2-2 pitch, he executed a 96-MPH fastball above the zone to Nootbaar, who flattened out completely to reach the ball and hit it straight down. He hit it sharply, but it was a high chopper that ran out of steam as it bounced past Thornton. Hoerner raced to his right, but he slightly misread the ball. Had he seen the way the ball was dying after the high arc of its initial bounce, he would have realized he could make the play on his feet, then turn or jump-throw to retire Nootbaar. Instead, thinking it would maintain its speed more, Hoerner dove. He was able to knock it down, but only that. Keeping the ball on the infield stopped the automatic runner from scoring, but that run didn't matter. The play was to get there without going to the ground, leaving time to retire Nootbaar. Because the Cubs had shaded Nootbaar to pull, Dansby Swanson even would have had a chance to flag the ball down and throw for the out, had Hoerner not intercepted the ball. That read all has to happen in the blink of an eye, though, and Hoerner was fooled.

The rest of the mess would be Thornton's own making. He walked Wetherholt, putting the winning run on base and the tying one into scoring position. After falling behind 3-0, he worked back to a full count with a pair of fastball strikes, but then he lost Wetherholt. He started Jordan Walker with two non-competitive misses, too, and this time, he got lucky: Walker bailed him out with a terrible 2-0 swing on a sweeper well out of the zone, then tapped out on another, much closer one, giving the Cubs one out and keeping the double play in order for Iván Herrera.

Thornton just isn't the right guy to get that twin killing. Instead, on the first pitch, Herrera laced a double to the gap in left-center, bringing around the tying and winning runs with one stroke. When Crow-Armstrong homered, this game had a chance to be one of the best wins of the Cubs' season. Barely 10 minutes later, it was one of their worst losses, instead.

The Sword of Mulholland has hung over Thornton all year. Entering Wednesday, he had a 2.50 ERA for the year, but his expected ERA was 5.13, because he has struck out just 15 of the 127 batters he's faced. Like former Cubs lefty Terry Mulholland, he just can't miss enough bats to be viable when the game is tight and the margin for error grows thin. That he's in the top half of the team's de facto bullpen hierarchy right now screams out the danger the team still faces.

This is not the same pleasantly patchwork kind of relief corps the Cubs have so famously cultivated over the last handful of seasons. They're simply bad. This feels like the kind of bullpen fringe contenders used to assemble during the years just after the rapid expansion of the 1990s. Webb, Thielbar and Rolison are credible big-league relievers. Civale, Woodford and Thursday starter Javier Assad are fine long relievers, and that's what Colin Rea can become if the team makes multiple upgrades to its starting rotation before the trade deadline, too. However, none of those four long men has meaningful upside if condensed into a short relief role, and modern bullpens need five or six guys you can trust in short relief. No good team in the history of the sport has needed three or four you can use to sponge up innings in blowouts.

Hollowell, Thornton and Ferguson represent the team's bigger batch of attempts to find a diamond in the rough for the year, and all of them (like Corbin Martin and Ethan Roberts, among others) have failed. From a playoff-ready bullpen, the Cubs are currently missing (approximately) the best, third-best and fifth-best arms. Adding a starter this week will allow them to shift someone into relief, but the Chicago front office has to add at least one high-end reliever and at least one supplemental arm capable of missing bats and/or keeping the ball on the ground in medium-leverage spots.

A heavy lift awaits that front office over the next 100 hours or so. They have to get this right, and it's not going to be easy. As Wednesday reminded them forcefully, though, there's no alternative. The Cubs' current pitching staff is just plain insufficient. They need a lot of help, so they don't waste huge hits like Crow-Armstrong's—or, widening the lens a bit, the huge season Crow-Armstrong is having and the opportunity that has given them.