The Cubs' New Identity Was on Full Display on Opening Day

There’s a little extra anxiety in following a team built on run prevention. On some level, one always knows that there will be moments, innings, and entire games in which the luck dragons will roar and even the best defense in baseball can’t vanquish them. Baseball is unlike every other major American sport in that way. Blocked shots don’t go into the hoop with any meaningful frequency. Nor do forced fumbles tend to lead to big gains for the offense. In baseball, though, a broken-bat blooper can be just as dangerous as a scalded line drive, and that makes building a team around anything short of a dominant pitching staff scary.

On Opening Day, though, the Cubs did their very best to eliminate all of that worry. Marcus Stroman, who will usually generate lots of weak contact but not as many whiffs, struck out eight, thanks (in part) to a strike zone that neatly fit his stuff and location profile. 

Keegan Thompson, Brad Boxberger, and Michael Fulmer picked up right where he left off, fanning four in three innings of relief. Obviously, no team can count on 12 strikeouts every day, but the Cubs are an especially unlikely club to do so. FanGraphs’s Depth Charts project them to have the fourth-lowest strikeout rate by starters this year, and they’re only slightly higher than that in the bullpen. If they meaningfully outstrip that projection, a lot of things change for the better, so we can mark that as something to watch, but it’s unlikely that this one game tells us that such a thing will happen.

In the meantime, then, there will be pressure on the fielders who come into play when the pitching staff doesn’t strike out 12 opponents. They passed all their early tests Thursday. Patrick Wisdom made a nice play ranging to his left, sliding to stop his momentum, and made a strong and accurate throw across the diamond for an out. Dansby Swanson had a similar play going toward the hole, the play I most wanted to see him make in this post-shift world, and (just as you’d hope) his extremely quick exchange and release made up for an arm that is no better than average.

The play of the afternoon, though, was in the top of the third inning. The game was still scoreless, but the Brewers had loaded the bases and Stroman was getting wild. The entire contest could have tipped in Milwaukee’s favor at that moment. I was watching on TV, but I can only assume that Pat Hughes told radio listeners that things had reached an early turning point. What happened next is, for my money, the most aesthetically pleasing thing in baseball.

The long 4-6-3, with the second baseman having to make a fairly long throw to the covering shortstop to start things, is gorgeous. The play seems to develop slowly, which can make you momentarily despair that the turn can be made. Often, that’s true, which is why it’s especially exciting when the defense does manage it. In this case, it helped that Rowdy Tellez was getting down the line, but there was still no margin for error. Nico Hoerner was lightning-quick on the pick and throw. Swanson was at the bag in time to set himself and fire the ball across, and Eric Hosmer made the slight stretch to sew things up. 

The emotion of that moment–the stop of the heart when Tellez put it in play in such a critical situation, the elastic stretch and swivel of one’s attention as the play unfolded right to left to right, the eruption from Stroman and from the crowd when the play was made–is the kind of magic good defense can deliver. It’s the payoff for all the anxiety of being built around that attribute, instead of having the lineup to blow people out. It might not work 90 times this year, and the Cubs will have to do more on offense than they did Thursday in order to make a surprise run to the playoffs, but the opener was a proof of concept.