Standards and Practices: Cubs Blow Chance at Playoff Clinch After Bad, Familiar Mistake

Before we talk much about this, let's watch a few things together. This is one of those times when emotions are high and no one's going to be happy about anything that's said. At such times, it's more important than ever to show, rather than tell. We're going to watch a sequence unfold, with Matt Shaw at the plate; runners on first and second; nobody out; and the score tied in the latest stages of a crucial game.

Not the latest one, though. No, let's go back to September 8, in Milwaukee. The Cubs had lost a devastating game the previous day against the Brewers, but there they were in the top of the ninth, with a chance to turn the tide of the series and pull themselves out of what had been a flat and costly few weeks of shakiness. Brewers closer Trevor Megill was on the mound, and because Shaw is a bad bet to get a hit against the likes of Megill (who boasts good control, and was therefore unlikely to walk his unthreatening opponent), Craig Counsell asked Shaw to lay down a sacrifice bunt. Here's the first pitch of the sequence.

That's not good baseball. It's forgivable—any hitter might, on a given offering, fear that they're at risk of popping up the bunt, or simply misidentify a fastball as a breaking ball—but it's not good. Shaw took a strike in a very buntable location; he pulled back a bunt that probably would have been successful. Again, though, it's just one pitch. Here's the next one.

Hideous. Not only did Shaw try to bunt the most classically understood "tough pitch to bunt" (a high, rising fastball) and go above the zone to do it, but his mechanics were atrocious. This is a major failure of fundamentals. No one is calling for a return to the frequency with which the league laid down bunts in the bad old days of the 1980s, but hitters like Shaw—who has zero clutch hits all season—need to at least be ready to try one when called upon. He looked like a player who has always been the star of his teams and was never asked to bunt, and who therefore never bothered to learn. In the modern culture of the sport, it's understandable that he was never tasked with giving himself up. In no culture of sport is not learning such a simple finer point acceptable.

Third pitch, with the bunt sign now begrudgingly lifted:

Shaw's love affair with the shoulders-high fastball is a problem for his career writ large, but it's especially galling to give in to the temptation of it on the very next pitch after twice failing the instruction to put down a bunt. It shows poor strike-zone judgment, and if you were in an ungenerous mood (as, admittedly, many Cubs fans always are when it comes to Shaw, for reasons that have little to do with his actual performance), you could read it as selfish. It wasn't clearly selfish, but it hinted at that. And selfishness turned out to be right around the corner.

That's embarrassing, for Shaw and for the team. That's bad baseball from nose to toes, and it looks like a player who didn't put their all into the self-effacing task assigned to them, then tried way too hard once they had the at-bat back and were offered a chance to achieve their own glory. I'm not sure that's what really happened. Another way to read the whole at-bat—a simpler one that still links together all four pitches, logically—is that Shaw was not seeing Megill well at all. He might have just felt like a 10-year-old facing their college-aged brother on spring break; that's very much how he and Megill match up physically.

In a way, Shaw was bailed out that night. Michael Conforto drew a walk, and Carson Kelly cracked a go-ahead two-run double that should have given the team a desperately-needed win. Alas, they gave the game away on a two-out, two-run, game-tying homer by Jackson Chourio in the bottom of the ninth, and then they lost in in extra frames. But in all that activity, Jacob Webb (and Seiya Suzuki, who made an out on the bases in the 10th) were fitted for goat horns, and it got easier to forget about this ugly sequence from Shaw.

Maybe too easy, especially for Shaw. In he stepped in the bottom of the 10th inning Tuesday night, with a chance to put the Cubs right on the doorstep of clinching a second straight playoff berth. It required only that he avoid making the worst kind of mistake a player (or person) can: one he'd made already. 

Not offering at a ball outside the zone is no sin, even when you've been asked to give yourself up. Shaw probably could have gotten this one down, but the pitch being away from him meant there was a real risk of pushing it right to the first baseman, imperiling the lead runner. No problem here; good take.

This is another no-fault take, and even in real time, it was fair to wonder whether bunting was still the right call. On average, a team who has runners on first and second with nobody out will go on to score at least one run in an inning 65% of the time. Put the runners on second and third with one out, and that number rises to 70%. That's why even statheads are in support of this bunting situation. Still, no one would have been calling for (or even ok with) a bunt from Pete Crow-Armstrong or Seiya Suzuki in this spot.

Well, the league is hitting .263/.509/.458 in all plate appearances that reach a 2-0 count this year. Shaw is a career .239/.535/.435 after 2-0. Give him a 2-0 head start, and Shaw is a better hitter than either of those teammates starting from scratch. After Michael Busch drew a walk to lead off the inning, in particular, this start to the at-bat strongly suggested that right-hander Jack Ralston was out of touch with the zone. Maybe giving him an out, at that point, would just be charity, even if it also put the winning run 90 feet away. You can make a perfectly solid case for taking off the bunt sign. That the Cubs didn't is on Counsell. Shaw, however, is responsible for executing what his superiors tell him to do.

If Shaw worked on bunting at all over the last fortnight, it doesn't show, does it? This, like that first one back in Milwaukee, was a very buntable pitch, and he didn't even come close to getting it down. If he had his manager's mentor for a manager, he'd have been told this was piss-poor; Pat Murphy slaps that cliche on plays that rankle him by showing a lack of refinement or awareness. It's just one strike, though.

Botched. Badly botched, again. Shaw made the same mistake he made against Megill in Milwaukee, following a high fastball right up to chin height. He got what he deserved: the bottom half of the ball and a quiet, head-down jog back to the dugout.

That's unacceptable. It's unacceptable when it happens in one big game; it's inexplicable and inexcusable when it happens in a second one less than two weeks later. The Cubs should have come down on Shaw like a ton of bricks after the first screw-up. They should have assigned him extra bunting practice, too, until there was no risk of this same thing costing them a game.

To Counsell's credit, the fact that we didn't see any real reaction to that sequence doesn't mean there wasn't one. According to a source with knowledge of it, "there was a conversation" with Shaw in the wake of those failures against the Brewers. He had started that night; he didn't start another game for a week. None of that amounted to a benching, because he wasn't a regular part of the lineup or an important piece off the bench at the time, but it did reflect a real dampening of Counsell's trust in him. 

There's no surer way to feel the gap between who you are and who you want to be, though, than to look over at someone you think of as being like you and see them doing what you can't. The Brewers had a crisis just like this late last month. Cooper Pratt failed to get down a bunt in the same situation, in a very similar sequence. He didn't get the bunt down on his first try:

And he didn't even deign to make the second attempt, on a buntable pitch.

Three pitches later, Pratt tapped back to the mound and into a fielder's choice, losing the chance to advance the runners. Later in that same game, he also got a slightly late start out of the batter's box after being jammed on a pop-up down the right-field line. When Pratt got back to the dugout, multiple veteran Brewers players (led by Jake Bauers and Christian Yelich) got in his ear about the dual failures. Murphy took Pratt out of the game at the end of the half-inning. It was only a three-inning benching, but it was the third or fourth time he had sent a message that way this year.

In Milwaukee, situational baseball is practiced even early in games, so a young player messing up in that situation can't immediately cost the club a game. If there is a mistake, though, the team is as proactive as it gets with that player. They're not making a show of embarrassing youngsters, but they're not assiduously hiding it when those players face the gentle justice of being benched for playing the wrong way, either. The standards of execution and excellence, under Murphy, are non-negotiable. They will be met before a player takes the field for the team. If they cease to be met, the player will be removed.

Between and before games, the coaches reinforce this. Down in the minors, they reinforce this. When Andrew Vaughn was traded to the Crew after several frustrating years with the White Sox, the difference between his old club and his new one was made clear as soon as he arrived at Triple-A Nashville. The team told him, bluntly, that he would never play for them if he didn't make better swing decisions. He made the changes required to merit playing time, and has batted .306/.384/.466 in his Brewers tenure. 

Since his three-inning exile, Pratt has batted .314/.367/.400. That's made it unnecessary for Murphy to call for many bunts, but when asked to do so, Pratt has gotten it down. He got down a squeeze bunt in Cincinnati on September 6, scoring a run and opening the door for a big inning after a bad throw broke the play open. He got down another one the next day to set up an early RBI single by teammate Garrett Mitchell. That was the day before Shaw's first mess-up; the run Pratt helped manufacture came at the expense of the Cubs.

This is no celebration of bunting. Getting a bunt down only very rarely decides a game in the majors, these days, and that's for the best. When the time comes to execute one, though, the players whom the team asks to do so have to be capable of it. If they show themselves incapable, they have to be trained and re-trained until that changes, or they have to be demoted.

Nor is it an indictment, per se, of the Cubs' coaching staff. It's certainly an indictment of Shaw, whose game sometimes seems to be made entirely of rough edges. The organization rushed him to the majors last season after failing to replace Isaac Paredes at third base, and it shows. Still, he's responsible for his own development, especially now that he's in the bigs, and he's not meeting the standard the team should be setting or practicing well enough to avoid repeating mistakes. Such problems are common on many teams in the league, but they're not common in Milwaukee. Tuesday night's excruciating loss offered a neat distillation of why the Cubs keep losing division races to a team with half their payroll. Somehow, they have to break the cycle of repeated and rhyming miscues and achieve genuine growth, which means real change. They have to better enforce standards. At least they don't have to look far to see how it's done.

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