Never Quite In Sync, Cubs Risk a Season Lost Before It Can Be Found

It hasn't been a matter of winning blowouts and losing nail-biters--although, to be fair, it also hasn't been the other way around. Sixty-five games into the long grind of 162, the Chicago Cubs are at the bottom of the NL Central standings, and they've been outscored by 16 runs. They're below .500, and based on the runs they've scored and allowed, that's where they belong.

Most preseason projections had them a bit better than this, and many pundits projected them to be a little bit better even than those projections. There are some track records and some contracts and some tantalizing tools here, all saying that this team could be even better than the 83-win season they had last year. Not least among the evidence, of course, is that their runs ledger from last year said they should have won more than 83 games, anyway.

Alas, nothing is quite working in sync for them this year. When the offense has been able to push runs across relatively consistently, the pitching has faltered. When the pitching has hit its sweet spot (both healthy and competent), it's been the offense's turn to scuffle. The result is a lot of close games, but not enough wins.

All else equal, it would be slightly preferable to have things go the other way. More blowout wins would mean a greater ability to moderate the workloads of key relievers and injury-prone position players, and that might mean hanging tougher when both the offense and the run-prevention unit go out of phase at once. Running hot and cold as a team leads to better outcomes than doing so as individual units, moving separately.

That said, the real problem here is growing more obvious to everyone watching the Cubs closely, with each passing day: neither phase is quite good enough, and as a team, they're vulnerable to brutal stretches of play like the one they hit about a month ago. To avoid being that way, they'd need to do one simple but very difficult thing: be better, in one phase or the other.

This is where their unexpectedly deficient defense looms large, along with the pitching injuries that have depleted both their rotation and their bullpen for much of the season. As the offensive production has ebbed and flowed, the pitching's inability to hover around average during their toughest stretches has cost them some of the close wins they could otherwise have eked out. That was the story early in the season, even as the offense played very well and kept them well above .500, and it's been the story recently, as the offense has come out of what was a month-long fug of ineptitude.

Given a more competent Kyle Hendricks, a steadier Héctor Neris, or a healthy season for any of Justin Steele, Adbert Alzolay, and Julian Merryweather, the Cubs would have more wins right now. They might well on the right side of .500, and right on the heels of the Brewers. That's not how things have actually gone, though. Nor have the position players been especially healthy, and nor have the up-the-middle defenders around whom the team was theoretically built played according to preseason expectations or the team's needs. With all that happening, it shouldn't surprise us much that they're where they are. 

The fault, however, is not in the team's stars--or, in another sense of the word, it is. The front office, with its conservative approach to spending (especially on high-priced star players), exposed itself to the risk of this kind of frustrating underachievement. The Ricketts family, with its reluctance to spend the $250-300 million that should be their annual payroll budget, forced the front office to think like a more constrained club (think the Brewers or the Rays), knowing they aren't really set up to match those types of teams in terms of proactivity and ingenuity.

Eventually, the team might get into a groove, with both the hitters and the pitchers healthy and hot at the same time for a long time. That happened last summer, albeit only at the last possible moment to avoid a July sell-off, and it lasted until mid-September, giving them a good chance to win 90 games and claim the NL Central--though ultimately, they squandered that chance. Unless and until they do get synced up that way, though, they'll remain maddeningly below-average. It's a product of bad luck, but that bad luck is a residue of bad design.