Monday Morning North Sider: May Is Over, Happ Is Hot, Horton Is Hurt, And More

The Cubs went 10-18 last month. I’m not sure about you, but watching the Cubs go from a war for first place in the NL Central to fighting to stay around .500 has not been fun. The pitching, particularly from the young arms in the rotation, has remained excellent this season, but the bats reached another level of ice cold in May. We trudge forward nonetheless, but the season is slipping away before our eyes.

As usual, we’ll focus exclusively on baseball in this edition of MMNS. Let’s dive right into things.

• Let’s get it out of the way up top: thank goodness May is over. Things got BRUTAL down the stretch of last month, and the Cubs immediately responded to the calendar flipping by putting up seven runs against the Reds on Saturday.

• The schedule is starting to ease up on them (White Sox to start the week!), so hopefully, the offense can continue to climb out of the abyss they’ve dug for themselves.

• The lineup will do that by getting superstar-level contributions from its best players. Ian Happ isn’t always thought of that way, but he’s performed like it the last few weeks.

• Over the last two weeks, Happ lifted his season OPS from .674 to .702. His power has awoken now that he’s playing some division rivals (namely the Reds), and he’s inarguably the hottest hitter on the team.

• Hopefully, guys like Seiya Suzuki and Dansby Swanson (who hit home runs in the Cubs’ win on Saturday) can return to form and offer much-needed support for Happ, Cody Bellinger, and Christopher Morel.

• On the flip side of Happ, Nick Madrigal has drawn the ire of nearly every Cubs fan who’s paid attention this year. The team finally capitulated to the raucous call of the Wrigley faithful by sending him to Triple-A Iowa, recalling old friend David Bote to take his place on the roster.

• Madrigal’s time in Chicago may be up at this point. His StatCast chart is plain ugly. He’s always had one blue-chip tool - his contact rate - and his defense has been solid the last couple of years, but he hasn’t improved much in his time with the Cubs. 

• Some tough news: Cade Horton, the Cubs top prospect now that Pete Crow-Armstrong has graduated, is out with a lat injury. He was placed on the seven-day injured list this weekend.

• Some fans may remember when Adbert Alzolay went down with the same injury in 2018 (when he was one of the Cubs’ best pitching prospects) and missed the rest of the season. That’s a worst-case scenario outcome, but with how little is known about Horton’s injury, caution is the only approach worth taking.

• The Cubs’ rotation has been the most consistent piece of the team all season long, so Horton’s absence won’t be season-ending for the major league team by any stretch. Still, Horton is knocking on the door of The Show, and it’s tough for an injury to interrupt his development at Triple-A Iowa.

• Ben Brown played Jekyll and Hyde this week, throwing seven no-hit innings against the Brewers before getting lit up by the Reds on Sunday for five runs in five innings.

• Bumps in the road are expected for the young starting pitcher, and the fact that his strikeout numbers continue to impress (ten against the Brewers, six against the Reds) is a good sign. He’s earned himself a long leash in the rotation, and Brown’s emergence is a godsend in the wake of the Horton news.

• And last but certainly not least, everyone’s favorite umpire, Angel Hernandez, has officially “retired.” 

• Hernandez didn’t exactly leave the game on his own terms, as he reached a financial settlement with Major League Baseball and the umpires union that led to his exit. In other words, the league was so desperate to get rid of Hernandez that they are paying him not to umpire games.

• There isn’t a single fan, player, or coach that will miss the most notorious official in the game. Hernandez’s biggest flaw wasn’t that he was a terrible umpire (which he was) but that he wanted the game to be about him. He thrashed the integrity of baseball with his fragile ego, constantly trying to thrust himself into the center of the action. His short fuse will live on in infamy, but his desire to be the star of the show earned him his ignoble distinction of “Worst Umpire in Baseball.”

Everyone has their favorite reaction to one of Hernandez’s patented blown calls, though the one that lives rent-free in my head is the incorrect third-strike call to Kyle Schwarber in an April 2022 game against the Brewers. You can even see Josh Hader smirking as he turns to the infield, knowing that the pitch was well off the plate (and, I’m sure, he was enjoying Schwarber’s reaction like the rest of us).

That’ll wrap it up for this week, folks. The floundering North Siders are off tonight, and then they’ll host the historically bad Chicago White Sox for a two-game, crosstown series. They also get the Reds again after that, heading to Cincinnati for a weekend set. In no uncertain terms, the Cubs have to go 4-2 or better this week against that pair of last-place teams. The May swoon is over, and June has to bring better fortunes if the team is going to compete past the All-Star break this year.

Have a good week, everyone! Go, Cubs, Go!