Matthew Trueblood

Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-Imagn Images Because the Dodgers finished off the Reds late Wednesday night, the Cubs and Padres will square off at 4:08 PM Central time Thursday. They're the middle course in the final Wild Card feast of the round, starting near the time when the Guardians and Tigers will wrap up and ending (probably) just before the Yankees and Red Sox get underway in the Bronx. Sunset in Chicago is at 6:30 on Thursday. On an unseasonably warm October afternoon, the game will begin under the last of burning-off clouds and end right as twilight enfolds the city, turning it all those rich hues of purple, orange and blue that make the four-season city such a jewel. The drama of this game will be reflected by nature itself, even though the crowd will all be in shorts instead of sweatshirts. By the end of the game, those fireworks from Mother Nature will either set the party off like the light rig being run just right at the club, or taunt Cubs fans as they spill angrily out of Wrigley Field, wanting the chill and the crackle of leaves and even the damn rain October usually brings but getting only a defiantly summerish day—one that demands baseball, just when baseball is snatched away from the city for the year. These feelings—both possible feelings—are extremely familiar to Cubs fans. They're old friends, in all the evocative ways that that phrase falls over us when we hear it. What is an "old friend," after all? It's the warmest and most wonderful thing we have; one of the things that makes life worth living. On the other hand, many of our old friends are now aliens to us, or even enemies. Some of them are still friendly enough, but they've softened into far-off acquaintances, and their memory reminds us of pieces of our past selves that we've lost and want back—or that we regret ever being. On The West Wing, the turn-of-century political drama, "an old friend from home" was a code used by the staff when they needed to pull one another out of a meeting for something urgent and private, without the other people they're with knowing anything is amiss. The old friend they're talking about, then, is trouble. It's worry. In some ways, surely, trouble and worry are our oldest and most intimate friends. They're the ones we never get too far from, but we sure wish we could. In "The Sound of Silence," famously, Paul Simon begins by singing, "Hello Darkness, my old friend / I've come to talk with you again." In a song about that onrushing alienation and loneliness we just mentioned above, the first line identifies the one sure pal who never feels far off. Sunset will come right near the last pitch Thursday, and it might well be that 40,000 Cubs fans will feel Darkness at their shoulder by then—but equally, it's possible that Darkness will be splintered and pushed off by the light and sound and heat of a team clinching something that really counts and making their next step toward their ultimate goal. Other teams' fan bases know this duality a bit better, in that they've spent more time with it. Cubs fans have, in the grand scheme of things, relatively little experience waiting out a workday with an eye on the clock and a gathering tightness in their chest, both exhilarated and terrified. A win-or-go-home game awaits, and until it comes, fans' assignment is to get a bit more familiar with this feeling. If the Cubs can (at long last) shake off their century-old identity as irrelevant losers and become the perennial contender they ought to be, it's a feeling their fans will need to understand and manage better over time. The festive atmosphere of Wrigley Field when the team is good is a delightful old friend—a warm hug of a thing, even with the threat of a crushing loss looming in the background. It's fun to live through days like these. It's fun to immerse oneself and open the pores to the full vibrancy of it. It's also a tingly feeling, and that tingle is the danger—the threat of real pain, if things go wrong. No matter. It's worth the risk. Not all old friends are euphemisms. Of course, there will be two especially important old friends Thursday, in ways far more tangible and immediate than anything I've invited you to consider so far. One is Yu Darvish, the player who (perhaps) best emblemizes the collapse of the last great Cubs core. That's not an indictment of Darvish, of course, but of the Cubs—and, perhaps, a bit of an admission that the team got unlucky along the way. They signed Darvish prior to 2018, on a six-year deal meant to help them sustain the high-energy greatness that they'd begun to establish over the previous three seasons. Instead, he got hurt and pitched miserably in 2018. In 2019, he was healthy, but inconsistent. He pitched very well down the stretch and helped the Cubs hang around in a weak NL Central race, but ultimately, he was on the Wrigley mound when the dream of a true Cubs dynasty finally died, in a late-September start against the Cardinals. He took a 2-1 lead all the way to the ninth inning, but Joe Maddon's mistrust of his bullpen had grown so deep that he tried to get a complete game out of a tiring Darvish, who let in two Cardinals runs and lost the game. That was the last gasp. The Cubs tumbled out of the playoff picture; Maddon was fired; COVID hit. Darvish could have won the Cy Young Award in the meaningless 2020 season, but he didn't, and the Cubs lost his meaningless start in the meaningless Wild Card Series they played that fall against the Marlins. Then, the Cubs traded him to the Padres, for what has turned out to be Owen Caissie and nothing else of use. That was five full years ago, now. Darvish is only still in San Diego because he signed a massive extension prior to 2023. He turned 39 in August, and he's nowhere near the pitcher he was at his very best. He doesn't miss as many bats, and he gives up lots of homers lately. He's been hurt (neck, groin, elbow) and missed half of each of the last two campaigns. Yet, he still has six different pitches he throws at least 10% of the time for each handedness of batter, and he still throws strikes. In that way, he's still more like a video game character than a real pitcher, and he's still not the guy you want to face with your season on the line, exactly. He had a 5.38 ERA this year, but after a nightmarish first four starts in July, that number was just 4.23 over his final 11 starts. In those appearances, the Padres went 8-3, and Darvish had a 26.4% strikeout rate against a 4.6% walk rate. He averaged five innings and 19.6 batters faced per game in those starts. The Padres would take that Thursday, though it's a high-variance way to live. That could be one run in five frames; it could be four. It does feel like Matt Shaw could hook a Darvish sweeper into the basket in left field Thursday, and if he does, it will matter a great deal whether there's a runner on base or not. If so, the Cubs will be well on their way to knocking off that old friend. Before the thing is over, though, they'll need to contend with another old friend: Jeremiah Estrada. The jettisoned ex-Cubs reliever became such a story last year for his extraordinary strikeout stuff that it's easy to be let down by his performance this season; he ran into homer trouble of his own and posted a pedestrian relief ERA. He'll have to bear a significant load, with Mason Miller and Adrián Morejón unlikely to be available and Robert Suarez likely limited to one inning. Estrada, too, could give up a big hit to a Cubs slugger, but if he comes in and blows them away instead, it'll deepen the pain of the gut punch that would be losing the game and series. All that familiarity, all that atmosphere, and all that intensity will swirl into a perfect storm for some high drama Thursday. There's a great deal on the line, for both sides. The Padres are stretched thinner and have a dimmer medium-term future than the Cubs, even at a moment when the Cubs' medium-term future is somewhat murky. The emotions will be high. The air will feel electrified, and that electricity will spread and shift faster than usual because of the heat. This is what baseball fans spend April through September craving. Not having won the division, the Cubs need this win to prove their season a legitimate success. Even if they don't come away with it, this series has given us moments. There's no catchy banner to fly for getting the first Wild Card berth in a six-team playoff format, but these games themselves become flags that fly forever in the breezes of memory. Seiya Suzuki's home run and Carson Kelly's follow-up shot. Dansby Swanson's relentlessly smart, nimble defense. Nico Hoerner finding hits everywhere. These things don't fit into a sentence on a t-shirt, but they're the real reward for having won the Wild Card this year. Now, the Cubs need one more good day full of those warm and vivid moments—the kind that live on in your mind long after they happen. Another old friend—the Brewers—awaits after this, and they offer plenty of trouble to worry about. For today, though, the only thing that matters is today. Not long after sunset, tomorrow will take its weight, but for the long hours before first pitch, Cubs fans have to get comfortable with their prickly set of old friends and get ready to revel with a huge collection of them if the home team delivers. View full article

Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-Imagn Images The Cubs fell behind 1-0 early in Game 2 of the National League Wild Card Series Wednesday, but that's not a major problem. It was still a placid 1-0 in the bottom of the fourth, when with two outs, Seiya Suzuki again awakened the Cubs offense a bit. He slashed a double into the left-field corner, applying real pressure to Padres starter Dylan Cease for the first time. Carson Kelly was due to bat next, and he's not a great matchup for Cease—but he wasn't a great matchup for Nick Pivetta, either, and that didn't stop him from coming up with the game-winning homer in the fifth inning Tuesday. Mike Shildt was not going to get burned that way again. He ordered an intentional walk of Kelly by Cease, and then replaced Cease with left-handed reliever Adrián Morejón. It was a bold move—and an extremely risky one. Shildt set himself up to ask for 16 outs from his relief corps, knowing he would also need to win a game Thursday if they could hold the lead. He also exposed himself, theoretically, to a real risk of being matchup-baited. Morejón was coming in to face Pete Crow-Armstrong, who has batted .188/.217/.376 against southpaws this season. In 188 plate appearances, Crow-Armstrong struck out 55 times. In theory, though, Craig Counsell could have countered that move with one of his own. Justin Turner is on the team to do just two things: keep the vibes strong, and hit lefties. Despite an ugly overall line, he did the latter quite well this year. Turner got 109 plate appearances against southpaws, and batted .276/.330/.429 in them. He's no longer much of a power threat, but even a single would have tied the game in that moment. Then, Counsell could have pinch-run with Kevin Alcántara, who would have taken over in center field the rest of the way. That choice was right there to be made. Counsell didn't make it, though, and the truth is, that's because he'd already missed his chance. Because Counsell values Crow-Armstrong's defense so highly, the Cubs went almost three months without playing so much as an inning without him. Crow-Armstrong's offensive breakout made him indispensable to their humming offense, too, but it was the glove that made the difference. Even before the sophomore center fielder unlocked his offense beginning a few weeks into the season, he had the run of center field. The club traded Cody Bellinger over the winter, thinking (after acquiring Kyle Tucker) that they would have better ways to spend the money owed to him and insufficient playing time to offer him. However, minor pickup Vidal Bruján failed to acquit himself as a backup center fielder, and the team chose not to carry Alcántara in what would have been a fairly small role as a platoon partner to Crow-Armstrong. They didn't have a backup at the position at which Crow-Armstrong excelled, so his offensive output became irrelevant—at least to the question of whether he'd play on a given day. He would. The team needed him. If he got a hit, great. If not, he'd help them merely by running down everything hit to the gaps. It was an easier bar to clear, of course, because there was no qualified alternative within the state of Illinois. Crow-Armstrong left games that he had started just five times all season: June 23 in St. Louis, in a blowout July 11 in New York, in a blowout August 10 in St. Louis, pinch-hit for by Turner in the Cubs' last at-bat with a lefty on the mound and the team trailing August 23 in Anaheim, in a blowout September 6 against the Nationals, due to injury Again, for much of the year, that was because he didn't have anyone behind him. If the Cubs had to play any more defense in a given game, they would do anything in their power to avoid taking Crow-Armstrong and his premium leather out of action. Late in the campaign, though, that changed. Alcántara came up and spent most of the final month with the club. He was available. Still, Counsell ignored him. He (or the organization, or both) simply doesn't trust the rookie outfielder. Alcántara did fine in the limited chances he did receive, batting .364 and drawing a walk in 12 plate appearances spangled across 10 games. It made no difference. His bosses didn't see him as a viable center field option. Ditto, as it turned out, for utility man Willi Castro, whose stint with the team has turned out to be fairly abortive. Injuries forced Castro into the lineup for stretches after he was acquired at the trade deadline, but he never found his rhythm at the plate, and the team barely bothered glancing at him as a center fielder. Thus, they got to this point—to that fourth inning at the onset of October—having squandered any chance to lay the groundwork and prepare themselves for a pivotal substitution. There was no way Counsell was going to thrust Alcántara or Castro into center field for five innings, so Crow-Armstrong was effectively stuck in. He grounded out to end the inning, and the Cubs' best threat of the day dissolved into nothing. They lost 3-0, after a tornado of fire emerged from the San Diego bullpen and blazed across the field. Morejón, Mason Miller and Robert Suarez each got more than three outs, and the Cubs did gently pressure each, enough that they'll be tired if called upon Thursday. Nonetheless, Thursday will come, for Shildt. His gambit worked. He knew Counsell was in no position to remove his lefty batter, despite the utter hopelessness of the matchup thrust upon him, and he took advantage of that. The Cubs blew the game, not by giving up a homer to Manny Machado or by not converting several three-ball counts into more baserunners (though those failures didn't help), but by not using their time wisely in August and September. Lifting Crow-Armstrong in that situation should have been doable, and rehearsed. Instead, it felt impossible. The game turned on a weeks-long anti-decision, made before the Cubs even clinched their place in this series. View full article

Image courtesy of © David Banks-Imagn Images Shota Imanaga will still get the ball for the Chicago Cubs in Game 2 of the Wild Card Series Wednesday at Wrigley Field. He just won't be the first one to do so. After they secured a Game 1 win Tuesday afternoon, the Cubs announced that Andrew Kittredge will start Game 2. Kittredge, who has only gotten more than three outs in a game twice this season, certainly isn't standing in for Imanaga. Nor is he the tip of a bullpen game spear. He's just an opener—a job he's done more than a dozen times before, in a long big-league career spent mostly with the Tampa Bay Rays. Kittredge is the high-leverage righty who matches up best with the Padres' key righty bats, Fernando Tatis Jr. and Manny Machado. He pitched the eighth inning in Game 1, and dispatched San Diego in order on 14 pitches. He saw Freddy Fermin, Tatis and Luis Arráez, but not Machado. Unless Mike Shildt is brave enough to significantly shake up his lineup in response to Craig Counsell's tactic, Kittredge will open Wednesday by facing Tatis, Arráez and Machado—and perhaps Jackson Merrill and Xander Bogaerts. In a series like this one, with up to three games but no days off, every reliever is essentially available twice. A manager might turn to a reliever for all three games of a series that goes the distance, but only in an emergency. By asking Daniel Palencia for five outs in Game 1, Counsell all but announced that the second game in which he would be available is Game 3. Brad Keller, currently holding the anchor role in the relay team that is the Chicago pitching staff, will be called upon to sew up a second win on whichever day the team can position themselves for one, so he needs to remain flexibly available Wednesday. However, with Palencia locked into an appearance Thursday (or not until the weekend, if the Cubs win today), Counsell is using Kittredge up front because he knows he'll need him, and against whom he wants to use him. The change dares Shildt to slide Tatis and/or Machado down in the lineup to punish Kittredge with lefty batters, but if the San Diego skipper takes that bait, he risks seeing his season end with one of those star sluggers in the on-deck circle—while Ryan O'Hearn or Gavis Sheets takes their fifth plate appearance of the afternoon. Using Kittredge right away also slips Imanaga past the meat of the Padres order, the first time through. If he sails through the first with ease or if he's in an early jam, Counsell might well let Kittredge stay in even to face Bogaerts. Thus, when Imanaga does enter, the first batters he faces will be drawn mostly from the Padres' pool of good-not-great left-handed batters. He won't have to bear the times-through-the-order penalty against Tatis or Machado any time before the fourth or fifth inning, and he can face up to 24 batters without facing Tatis or Machado a third time. It's unlikely that Imanaga will pitch to that many batters in this game, anyway. The only scenario in which he does so is one in which the Cubs trail, but narrowly, and he's pitching very well. We can, broadly, sketch the plans Counsell has in mind for the various forms the game might take, understanding that everything is subject to change in playoff baseball. PLAN A: Kittredge (1), Imanaga (5), Michael Soroka (1), Caleb Thielbar (1), Keller (1) - If no individual pitcher runs into major trouble, and if the Cubs can carve out even a small lead, this is the idea. Kittredge takes care of business in the first, then yields to Imanaga, who slices through the lineup twice (plus a batter or two). With someone like Jose Iglesias or Freddy Fermin due to see him a third time, instead, Imanaga will give way to Michael Soroka, who will pitch them through the briar patch of Tatis and Machado. Caleb Thielbar will be tasked with shutting down the very lefty-heavy band of the Padres lineup one last time, before Keller comes into finish the job. PLAN B: Kittredge (1), Imanaga (2), Rea (3), Thielbar (1), Soroka (1), Keller (1) - This is what happens if Imanaga doesn't have it Wednesday, and is getting hit hard or giving up home runs one turn through the batting order—but the Cubs are keeping the game in winnable territory with their bats. Colin Rea is the long man Counsell trusts most, even though Soroka is a key cog for this playoff bullpen. The latter is better-suited to a short-relief role than is Rea, and this is where Rea could shine. Of course, the usage of each of the last three hinges on whether the team does successfully keep the game winnable. PLAN C: Kittredge (1), Imanaga (3), Soroka (1), Thielbar (1), Civale (3), Rogers (1) - This is the outright "uh-oh" plan. If Kittredge gets ambushed or Imanaga gets shelled, and if the team is down by two or three runs by the top of the sixth, we're likely to see Aaron Civale and Taylor Rogers eat innings to close out the game. Given the strength of San Diego's bullpen, a deficit of any more than a run after the game's midpoint has to be treated like an expected loss today; the Cubs have that luxury and need to remember it. In this case, Counsell would keep the powder dry, not only reserving Keller's second appearance for Game 3 but choosing Civale over Rea. That would leave Rea, along with Drew Pomeranz, Keller, Thielbar and Palencia free to provide support to Jameson Taillon if needed on Thursday. This isn't a sign of mistrust in Imanaga; it's just a response to the unique structure of the Padres' roster and lineup. Imanaga should be the second arm into the fray, and he should stick around a while. How long will depend on how the game goes, but the Cubs don't have to sweat the details overly profusely in advance. The Padres are the ones with the narrow path to advancing, now. The Cubs have lots of ways to achieve that, and using their second Kittredge outing right at the front end of this contest is just a way of gaining more information while leveraging that greater flexibility. View full article

Image courtesy of © David Banks-Imagn Images The nervousness that creeps into Wrigley Field when the playoffs start to go wrong in the playoffs is familiar, and it makes a seasoned Cubs fan's skin crawl. Everything feels slightly wrong; you become aware of your socks. There have been too many near-misses and deflating setbacks crowded into the Friendly Confines over the decades. Those moments shoulder in and take standing-room places amid the present; the quiet of a loss settles over the crowd before the loss even has to be real. It was starting to get that way in the fifth inning Tuesday. The Cubs allowed just one quick, cheap run, in the second inning, when Matthew Boyd yielded a bloop double to Jackson Merrill and then a scalded line-drive two-bagger to Xander Bogaerts. By the bottom of the fifth, though, it began to feel like that might stand up. Nick Pivetta was cruising, with a fastball that was beating the Cubs' barrels so consistently he hardly went away from it. Chicago batters tried to sit on his breaking ball, at times, and when they didn't get it, they were lost. Then, like lightning striking twice—like a boxing combo, so sudden and forceful and carefully earned by all involved—the Cubs flipped the game. I mean, they totally flipped it. First, Pivetta made an error. In his first at-bat against Seiya Suzuki, he'd stayed away. He teased him with fastballs, then got him reaching, dipping, for a low curveball. We know that that doesn't work for Suzuki; he hit a lazy flyout. The devilish thing about baseball, though, is you have to get a guy out more than once. The second time he saw the Cubs' No. 5 hitter, Pivetta wanted to show him something different, so he started pounding him inside. It was a case of trying to be too brilliant, with a twist of not having updated the scouting report recently enough. Suzuki did seem to be looking away to start the at-bat, but he quickly cottoned on and shifted his sights to the inner half. That was a major problem for Pivetta, because although Suzuki had a bit of a hole inside for much of the second half, he'd closed it up during the final week of the campaign. If the ball had been above his hands, Pivetta might have been ok. It wasn't, and Suzuki sent a missile deep into the left-field bleachers. The quietude exploded and evaporated, and your socks receded into your subconscious. That brought up Carson Kelly, which should have been good news for Pivetta. Kelly was one of his six strikeout victims through the first four innings, which the hurler accomplished by sticking to a simple plan: fastballs up and away. Kelly really struggles against heaters in that location, especially from righties, and the Padres clearly knew that. If you read our advance scouting guide to the series this morning, even you knew it: Kelly was not a good matchup with Pivetta, from the Cubs' perspective. Chastened by the failed Suzuki experiment, perhaps, Pivetta and catcher Freddy Fermin (working together for the first time, with Pivetta's personal catcher Elias Díaz hurt; it seems a heinous oversight by the Padres not to have gotten the two some game action in tandem during the regular season run-in) decided to go after Kelly the same way they had the first time. And honestly, that should have worked. Kelly is one of those hitters whose swing really loses its juice when the ball gets into the upper third of the zone, and especially above it. He can't hurt you there, most of the time. In fact, until Tuesday's fifth inning, Kelly hadn't hit a high four-seamer from a righty with any real authority all year. To find instances of him doing it, you have to go back to last July. Here's the thing, though: the previous examples should have been warnings. Here's Kelly swatting a very high, backspin fly ball just over the wall for a grand slam against the Twins last summer. MVlENGdfWGw0TUFRPT1fVlFKWVYxTUZWZ0FBWEFRTEJBQUFVbFFIQUZnRld3SUFDbElDVVFJRVZRTUhVd1lE.mp4 That, by the way, came against a pitcher (then-rookie David Festa) not at all unlike Pivetta in terms of pitch mix and approach. Here's a ball from a few weeks later, on which Kelly came up just shy of a scoreboard-flipping late bomb in Toronto. S3d4dnZfWGw0TUFRPT1fRGdaWEFWd05BMVFBV2xFS0FBQUFVd2RSQUFCUUJsWUFBVnhUQVF0WFUxWURWUXBX.mp4 Kelly is in a better position to generate power this season, with alterations to his stance and stride. That's why he had a better year at the plate this year. However, he also has something in him—a little bit of the timid hero. He doesn't swing for the fences at the top of the zone, almost ever. When the moment is biggest, though, he makes little exceptions. And sometimes those become very, very big exceptions. To really understand what a twist that swing is, consider the chart on the left (of all his regular-season homers this year, by pitch location) and on the right (the chart for his at-bat in the fifth Tuesday). Pitch 6, up there on the bar of the top of the zone, is not in his power zone, except when the adrenaline is flowing. Then, he can make it so. That, as it turned out, was the game. The crowd stayed loud; the Cubs created some insurance; the bullpen was magnificent. We'll have more on this contest before the next one tomorrow afternoon, but for now, suffice it to say this: Suzuki and Kelly made excellent adjustments and met the moment in unexpected ways. That's the stuff of which memorable playoff appearances are made. That's what makes a baseball fan's socks roll up and down, without their even noticing. View full article

Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images For your average, everyday, regular-season series, it would be borderline psychotic to spend hours putting together a comprehensive scouting report on the opposing team. That's what teams do, of course, because it's the only way to be ready to play the increasingly complex modern game. Fans, however, have to be a bit more cavalier. Every game is just one of 162. Even a three-game weekday series is just under 2% of a full season. All that's out the window now. This three-game weekday series might not even go as long as three games, if one team shows up materially more prepared than the other—and for the loser, it will be 100% of the rest of their season. Thus, it's time to spend your morning commute (or coffee break, or suspiciously long on-the-clock dump) tackling some questions you'd barely graze, if this were the regular season. The Padres and the Cubs play two afternoon games this week, at Wrigley Field. What Game 3 of that set might look like, we can't afford to worry about yet. Right now, all that matters is how the first two will go. They're each scheduled for a 2:08 PM CT first pitch, and will be nationally televised. The pitching matchups for each are set, and they're intriguingly similar. It'll be almost (but very definitely not exactly) like playing the same game twice. If one team wins that game both times, the other's season will crash to an end. These are two very good teams, only lightly diminished by injuries and the grind of the long season. How do they match up? Essential Details Game 1: Padres Starter: RHP Nick PIvetta - 31 starts, 181 2/3 innings, 2.92 ERA, 26.4% strikeout rate, 6.9% walk rate, 3.1% home-run rate, 33% ground-ball rate, 93 DRA- Cubs Starter: LHP Matthew Boyd - 31 starts, 179 2/3 innings, 3.21 ERA, 21.4% strikeout rate, 5.8% walk rate, 2.6% home-run rate, 37% ground-ball rate, 96 DRA- Key Personnel Consideration: Elias Díaz is Pivetta's personal catcher, and is likely to play Game 1. Current weather forecast: Sunny, 77°, winds expected to blow in at 8-15 MPH Game 2: Padres Starter: RHP Dylan Cease - 32 GS, 168 IP, 4.55 ERA, 29.8% K, 9.8% BB, 2.9% HR, 36.6% GB, 86 DRA- Cubs Starter: LHP Shota Imanaga - 25 GS, 144 2/3 IP, 3.73 ERA, 20.6% K, 4.6% BB, 5.5% HR, 29.1% GB. 114 DRA- Key Personnel Consideration: In a series full of fly-ball pitchers, Imanaga achieves an extreme even in that crowd. The Cubs need to field their best defensive outfield in this game. Current weather forecast: Overcast, 74°, winds expected to blow in at 8-15 MPH Projected Lineups Because of the similarities in profile (handedness for each pair, pitch mix for Boyd and Imanaga, arm slot for Pivetta and Cease), the optimal lineups for these teams will be nearly identical for the two games. Interestingly, neither lineup will feel especially familiar, because each team has just had injuries shake up their daily corps—and each is facing a set of pitchers that changes what they do a little bit, relative to their default setting. Padres Fernando Tatis Jr. - RF Luis Arraez - DH Manny Machado - 3B Gavin Sheets - LF Xander Bogaerts - SS Jackson Merrill - CF José Iglesias - 2B Ryan O'Hearn - 1B Elias Díaz (G1) / Freddy Fermin (G2) - C Cubs Michael Busch - 1B Ian Happ - LF Kyle Tucker - DH (G1) / RF (G2) Seiya Suzuki - RF (G1) / DH (G2) Pete Crow-Armstrong - CF Dansby Swanson - SS Nico Hoerner - 2B Carson Kelly - C Matt Shaw - 3B The Skinny To topline this thing, you need to know the following: The Cubs brought Kyle Tucker back from the injured list this weekend, but only as a designated hitter. It's not clear whether he'll be able to play right field, and while Seiya Suzuki has been better at avoiding the bad read or the clank-and-drop this year, he's much more prone to the disastrous play than is Tucker. That goes extra on a sunny day, forced to play right field. Whether Tucker can play right field might turn out to matter much more than you would guess, even though he himself has been merely passable with the glove. Nick Pivetta had a career year, after signing a disappointingly team-friendly contract with San Diego over the winter. He'd never had an ERA under 4.00 before, and this season, he got under 3.00. He fills up the strike zone, and can miss bats with his breaking stuff against hitters of both handednesses. Dylan Cease, set to become a free agent this fall, went the opposite way, at least in terms of surface-level numbers. He's better than his ERA reflects, though he's always been somewhat susceptible to this type of season. San Diego lost key contributor and right-handed bat Ramón Laureano to a hand injury during the final week, and he'll miss this series. That's a huge blow for the Padres. At the same time, they got Xander Bogaerts back from a prolonged absence just before the season wrapped, which balances things out somewhat. The Cubs can understand that, of course, with Tucker returning to the lineup at the last minute just as they lost would-be playoff starter Cade Horton. These teams split the season series, but that doesn't tell the full story. In each of the last two years, the Cubs' most painful loss (arguably) was to San Diego, in April. Last year, they lost 9-8 in a game they led 8-0 into the middle innings. This year, they squandered a 7-3 lead in similar, excruciating slow-motion fashion—this time, at home, where they'll play these very games with everything on the line. That's a part of the Padres' identity. Only Atlanta and the Blue Jays won more game than did San Diego (9) when trailing by multiple runs after four innings this year, so if you get ahead of them, you have to keep your foot on their throat. (The Cubs, because you're wondering, won just four such games this season.) San Diego's offense can be dynamic, but they've underachieved. The biggest reason for their comeback ability, arguably, is their remarkable bullpen. With Robert Suarez, Mason Miller and ex-Cub Jeremiah Estrada anchoring a ferocious group, they can shut you down if they get ahead—but they also make it harder to extend a lead, especially in a game that matters enough to justify using their best relievers even while behind. Beyond the batter-pitcher matchups we're about to break down at length, the Cubs have two enormous advantages in this series. One is their defense, which has been worth 83 Defensive Runs Saved (DRS) this year, second-best in MLB. The Padres come in 14th, at 28 DRS, and even that comes mostly from right field and behind the plate. The Cubs are much better at turning balls in play into outs, and the Padres don't specialize in hitting the long ball, the way they used to. The other major advantage lies in the running game. Fermin can be a deterrent and a runner-killing machine behind the plate, but with Díaz and the sometimes-inattentive Pivetta starting Game 1, the Cubs have a chance to run and create runs via small ball—assuming they can get on base. The Padres will have no such opportunities. Boyd and Imanaga are two of the six pitchers (of 500 qualifiers) who hold runners closest, and each has a good pickoff move to make overeager guessers pay. The Advance Scout's Handbook This is the section of this piece to keep open during the games for these two days. We're going to talk about the specific ways individual batters match up with the starters on each team, and talk about how the Cubs need to execute to get the better of matchups that (taken as a whole) do seem to lean in their favor. The Padres Against Lefties With Horton off the board, the Cubs will hand the ball to Boyd in Game 1 and to Imanaga in Game 2. That means two straight days with a southpaw on the mound, who brings with them some funk and whose arsenal has as its key components a four-seam fastball, a fading offspeed pitch, a slider and a curve. Each pitcher adds other wrinkles, and their pitch shapes and velocity bands aren't identical, but Boyd and Imanaga are similar enough that we can study the best way for each to attack the Padres' batters, without significantly differentiating them. Fernando Tatis Jr.: Lefties can get Tatis out with four-seamers up and away. However, if they miss laterally while trying to hit that corner of the zone, they pay a hefty price. Tatis likes the ball up, and wants to turn on it with his fearsome swing. When building a gameplan against a hitter, you have to create some margin for error, so the right way to attack Tatis is to line the bottom of the zone with the fastball, then dip below the zone with the changeup (or, in Imanaga's case, the splitter). Tatis has been worse as a power hitter this year, and lefties have been especially good at stumping him, but he's made up for the loss of punch with much-improved patience. As a result, Imanaga might have to be willing to walk him at times, rather than risk throwing a fastball that catches the wrong pocket of the zone. Boyd, whose changeup stays in the zone much more often and can play off the fastball even when it's landing in close to the same vertical location, has the better answer for what Tatis is doing well in 2025. The key really, truly is to keep the ball down and away; he can't lift the ball when lefties hit their spots right now. Make him beat you with a single and a steal, especially because he's been caught seven times attempting steals this year and the Cubs have pickoff artists on the hill. Luis Arráez: Much more than most hitters, Arráez adapts his swing plane based on pitch type and location. That's the sign of a hitter who's able to recognize pitches earlier than almost anyone, which is why he's such a contact freak. Stunningly, in over 20 swings, he didn't whiff on a curveball from a lefty even once this year. However, he trades bat speed for all that adaptability, so you really just have to pound him low with the fastball. His swing works neatly out away from him and above the belt, but crowd him or hit the bottom rail of the zone with four-seamers and Arráez often gets himself out. Caleb Thielbar is actually a slightly better matchup for Arráez than are Imanaga or Boyd, because whereas they (and Drew Pomeranz) each lean toward elevating the fastball, Thielbar has the ability to dot the bottom line with his; he throws 17.8% of his fastballs in the lower reaches of the zone. You just have to resist the temptation to try to punch Arráez out. Throwing him a changeup or a curve is creating a threat where none exists. Don't do it. Manny Machado: It sounds reductive, but so much of getting Machado out as a left-handed hurler comes down to execution. He's the one Padres hitter who has mashed lefties this year, and we might see Mike Shildt put two lefties behind him in the order to punish any attempt by Counsell to bring on a righty reliever to deal with him. Thus, a game could easily come down to whether Boyd or Imanaga (or Thielbar or Pomeranz) can get Machado out in a key spot. That, in turn, comes down to sequencing and location. Machado uses good anticipation and his plus bat speed to get the barrel to inside fastballs against lefties very well. He slows his bat slightly and tends to clip the ball, leading to line drives to center field rather than long flies to left, but it's a reliable way that he produces hits. To get him out with the heater, you have to elevate. He will whiff up there, especially up and away. Once he reaches a two-strike count, though, Machado makes a major swing adjustment and can line that high heater the other way. The best plan is to start him with high, teasing heaters, then throw your best breaking ball or changeup to get him out with two strikes. That's the standard formula, but it's comforting to know that it works; not every right-handed batter can be gotten out so simply. Running changeups work better against him than the ones with more of a vertical shape, so Imanaga could do well with a strike-to-ball sweeper. Boyd's change suits Machado's weakness better. Each has the tools to avoid letting him hurt them, though. It's just going to hurt a lot if you miss in the middle of the zone to him. Gavin Sheets: Lefties can safely start Sheets with a fastball for a strike. He's passive early in counts, with just 10 swings (and two hits, both ground-ball singles) on first-pitch fastballs from lefties this year. He's seen 39 such pitches, so he's willing to take a strike, and even if he swings, you're not in a ton of danger. Thereafter, crowd him with that heater. Sheets has a very flat swing and wants the ball on the outer half; inside heaters from lefties eat him up. Xander Bogaerts: It's extremely important to pitch Bogaerts backward. He's very dangerous on fastballs from lefties in early and hitter-friendly counts. He's also heavily prone to whiffs on offspeed pitches, though, so as long as you don't leave that pitch on the inner half, it's not terribly hard to get him out. Start Bogaerts with a changeup or splitter away, then finish him with fastballs and be ok with that finish being a lazy fly ball, rather than a strikeout. Jackson Merrill: The follow-up to Merrill's run at the Rookie of the Year Award last year has been underwhelming. He's a more smooth-edged but less toolsy rendition of Crow-Armstrong. The key, especially as a lefty, is to attack Merrill with high fastballs. Miss low, and you'll pay. Even though his numbers are down and his swing speed looks initially unimpressive, he has a uniquely steep swing that makes him lethal when he draws a bead on a low heater. In that way, he's very much like Crow-Armstrong. Don't try to sneak a first-pitch cookie past him, like you can against Sheets. Be willing to nibble, see if he'll chase, and then let him get himself out on a mishit fly ball when you get the fastball up near the letters. José Iglesias: This is, perhaps, Shildt's most interesting lineup decision. He almost has to sit Jake Cronenworth; you can't run five lefty hitters out against a pair of lefty starters. Iglesias isn't as dangerous as Cronenworth can be at his best, but he's a tougher out for a lefty than Cronenworth usually is. He's not going to tap the ball on the first pitch. He has zero balls in play on 18 first-pitch offspeed pitches from lefties this year. He also won't swing at the change if the count goes to 3-2; he didn't offer at any of the four he saw. In between, he'll go for a changeup, but the best plan is to start him with a breaking ball, get strike two on the change, and then go up and away with a fastball for the strikeout. That's a common hole in the swings of righty batters facing lefty pitchers, and given Iglesias's swing plane, his lackluster bat speed exacerbates the problem. Ryan O'Hearn: If Laureano hadn't gotten hurt, O'Hearn might have been the odd man out in the lineup shuffle. All things considered, he'll probably start at least one of the games; he's a terrific defensive first baseman. Against a good lefty, though, he's an easy out. If you can hit your spot on the outer third to him, and you can put any other pitch at all in his head, you can get him out with the fastball. He looks inside for fastballs and lets his bat catch up to anything slow or spinning away from him; he doesn't have the bat speed to cover the outer-half heat with that approach. It's all about making him respect something softer, without actually throwing anything in the zone except the fastball away. Freddy Fermin: Never, ever play with your food—especially in the playoffs. Fermin has an even worse version of the hole in Iglesias's swing. Aim for the upper and outer quadrant, and take care of business. Hitters will adjust if you go to the well too many times that way, of course, but even a modicum of mixing in other stuff to set it up will make a simple fastball an out pitch to Fermin. Elias Díaz: Just don't leave the changeup up, and you'll be fine. Días, who was only very briefly anything else, is purely a mistake hitter at this point in his career. He doesn't have much plate discipline or an adaptable swing. Jake Cronenworth: Unlike almost all his teammates, Cronenworth won't whiff on your lefty fastball. Start him with soft or spin. He tries to get opportunistic early in at-bats, and occasionally, he gets himself out by taking a fastball hack and dribbling a ball somewhere on a slider. Crucially, though, don't double up with the heater deep in a count, when trying to put him away. He's going to hit that hard somewhere. The Cubs Against High-Slot Righties Who Fill Up the Zone Nick Pivetta throws a good-not-great fastball, and a host of other stuff—but really, he's two different two-pitch pitchers, with a few decorations attached to each. Against lefty batters, he leans almost exclusively on the fastball and the curve, with just a few cutters and other baubles mixed in. Against righties, he's a four-seamer/sweeper guy, with a few cutters to keep people honest. It's not hard to identify Pivetta's pitches out of his hand. His curve has that dreaded hump, for lefties. His release angle is different enough to separate the fastball and the sweeper relatively early. You could get yourself a long way down the wrong road, therefore, by assuming that it's easy to lock in on either pitch and tee off. It ain't so. Pivetta's main offerings diverge so much in terms of velocity and movement that, even though hitters will often spot it fairly soon, they struggle to adjust enough to get the good part (or any part, sometimes) of the bat on the ball. Guys often freeze, even, and take a called strike on a fastball right down the middle, having known it was that pitch in that spot but not having pulled the trigger. He gets you moving and thinking, and then you realize you're so far off your visual target that it's not even worth trying. Thus, the key to hitting him is anticipation. You have to mentally eliminate one of his two main offerings to hitters in your batter's box, at least once or twice an at-bat, and just commit to attacking the pitch you think you're getting. It's a bit different with Cease, but because his pitch profile (and the over-the-top look he offers from a similarly tall frame) is so akin to Pivetta's, hitters end up solving the same sets of problems. This is another small advantage for the Cubs in the series. More so than Imanaga and Boyd, Pivetta and Cease almost train hitters to hit the other. The Cubs' batters should feel like they're getting a third and fourth look at Pivetta when they face Cease in Game 2. In fact, that Pivetta essentially ended up in front of Cease in the rotation for a big chunk of the season might be why Cease's numbers don't look good this year. The lineup I sketched for these games reflects the unique challenge of hitting pitchers like these two, and the way that bends things relative to a standard-issue opponent. By a healthy margin, the best hitter on the team against pitchers who share key traits with Pivetta and Cease this year is Busch, so there was no need to shake up the top spot in the order. However, this type of hurler neutralizes Nico Hoerner in a way almost no other pitcher type in the league can. Thus, I have him slid far down the batting order. Benefiting therefrom is, among others, Dansby Swanson, who took Pivetta himself deep earlier this year and has good overall numbers against pitchers like him. TkFkVkJfWGw0TUFRPT1fQUFkVVhGeFJVZ0lBRHdjREFBQUhBdzlVQUFBQ1dnTUFBQUJYVmd0VUExRUhWQVJR.mp4 Ian Happ slots in second, for me, because although he's struggled against pitchers with this general profile, he seems to have really figured out the specific task of hitting Pivetta. He's not good at covering both pitch types he sees from Pivetta; it's not in the nature of his swing. But he's locked in and timed himself for one of the two, and come up with very well-struck hits against Pivetta as recently as April. TkFkVkJfWGw0TUFRPT1fQVFOU0FnSUhBZ0lBRDFZR1h3QUhBRmNDQUFCVFV3VUFVMVZSQmdSUVZRVlhCUXRW.mp4 Because that appears to be a special case of Happ figuring out a pitcher with a tricky pattern, though, if you want to see him slide down the card for Game 2, you'll get no argument from me. Tucker, for what it's worth, is not especially well-suited to hit this kind of pitcher, and didn't have much success against Pivetta this spring. He did hit the ball hard a few times, but always right at someone or with a bit too much loft. That's the risk for his swing path in the area of the zone where Pivetta lives to lefties. He'll make his Cubs legacy, if at all in the series, when he gets a shot at Mason Miller later in games; that's a better fit for his unique brand of brilliance. Otherwise, he might need to settle for a wrong-way single at a key juncture. The other player pushed far down the order—further than he's been since mid-August, in fact—is Kelly. That's because he's even worse than Hoerner against pitchers like Pivetta and Cease. Their stuff is just a nightmare fit for his swing path and his patient approach. The Cubs should, in fact, consider pinch-hitting for Kelly with Moisés Ballesteros and then swapping in Reese McGuire if Kelly's spot comes up in a pivotal situation during the series, with Pivetta or Cease on the mound. A Few Bullpen Thoughts In a series this short, it's not as important to sweat the possible overexposure of particular pitchers that comes from bringing them into multiple games and giving the same hitters multiple looks at them in a short span. On the other hand, there are no off days in this set, either. Fatigue could come into play for the relievers, as well as for starters. Look for both Counsell and Shildt to shield their high-leverage arms from working back-to-back in Games 1 and 2 if at all possible, because they certainly won't want to have to turn to anyone for a third straight day in Game 3. Taylor Rogers will probably only appear if the series goes to a Game 3. Unlike Thielbar, he's not a materially better matchup for any of the Padres than Boyd or Imanaga are, so unless one of those two departs very early, Rogers probably won't be called upon., He could, however, easily be a better matchup for someone than Jameson Taillon is, by the fourth inning of a decisive Game 3. It's in that contest that all hands will truly be on deck. Estrada, though an elite strikeout arm, is too similar to Pivetta and Cease to be a great backup to them. He might be unexpectedly vulnerable to a huge hit late in a game, so don't despair if he comes in to try and protect a thin lead for the visitors. Machado and Tatis are, obviously, the most important bats to target with the Cubs' late-game trio of right-handed relievers. They're neighbors in the lineup, but it's not necessarily the case that the same righty should face them in any given spot. Andrew Kittredge is the best matchup for both players, so mentally, slide him up the reliever hierarchy in your mind. Brad Keller is a bit better an option against the two than is Daniel Palencia, whose stuff should play well against Arráez and Sheets. Benediction This series is going to be a blast. The Cubs are well-positioned to win it, despite the absence of Horton and the uncertain readiness of Tucker. Hopefully, this exhaustive study will make you feel a bit more aware and a bit less anxious during the action. If both sides play a facsimile of their best game, it's the Cubs' that should win out, and we can have another long conversation like this one this weekend as the team travels to Milwaukee. View full article

Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images Earlier this morning, we talked through the options the Cubs face when constructing a 26-man roster for their upcoming Wild Card Series against the San Diego Padres. In the process, I proposed that the team is likely to carry 15 position players, allowing for the possibilities of injury, ejection and mid-game substitutions, be they tactical or based on the nagging injuries a few key hitters are carrying. Now, it's time to look at the other side of the roster list. If the Cubs do take 15 hitters, they'll have 11 pitchers to work with as Craig Counsell prepares for 81 outs (or a few more, or many fewer) over three days. Let's talk about who they'll be, and who's on the outside looking in. Starters (3) Matthew Boyd Shota Imanaga Jameson Taillon It would be a substantial upset, for me, if the Cubs gave the ball to anyone but the three hurlers named above, or in any other order—should the series go three games. Matthew Boyd pitched Wednesday night against the Mets, and is on full rest, set up nicely for Game 1 of the Wild Card set. That, of course, was the place the team might initially have hoped to reserve for Cade Horton, but Horton cracked a rib somewhere between his final two regular-season starts and is likely out for the year. The news could be worse. Boyd has been wonderful for the Cubs this year, though of course, he's struggled more in the second half after earning an All-Star nod with a brilliant beginning of the campaign. He and Shota Imanaga each give the Padres some tough matchups, because San Diego doesn't hit lefties well. Each also figures to make a relatively short start, but that's ok. If the Cubs can get to the sixth inning with a lead, they'll feel very confident. That will be the task before both Boyd and Imanaga. If the series goes to a decisive third contest, the story might be different with Jameson Taillon, a righty who doesn't match up as nicely with the Padres and who hasn't been as impressive this season as his two southpaw teammates. Relievers (8) Brad Keller Andrew Kittredge Daniel Palencia Caleb Thielbar Drew Pomeranz Michael Soroka Taylor Rogers Colin Rea The closest thing to a controversial call here is that Colin Rea is penciled in as a reliever, rather than as the third starter. Taillon and Rea have been similarly effective this year, all told, and admittedly, this is at least partially a nod to Taillon's greater seniority and heftier contract. Still, Rea is also more compelling as a potential multi-inning reliever, because he has an arsenal that can be pared down and tweaked for maximum effect in the bullpen—and experience doing so, to boot. Rea pitched Friday; Taillon went Saturday. That means that Rea should be available for medium-length relief as soon as Game 1, whereas Taillon won't be ready to go (except in some truncated relief role) until Thursday, when Game 3 would be played. Rea is also the better complement to the pitch profiles of Boyd and Imanaga, so if Counsell ends up needing a bridge from one of his lefty starters to his higher-leverage relievers, Rea is a plausible one; Taillon is less so. Look for Counsell to seek out the left-leaning pockets of the Padres lineup and make aggressive use of both Caleb Thielbar and Drew Pomeranz, but perhaps just one of them in each of the first two games. That should keep any San Diego hitter from getting unduly good looks at them. Once you reach October, the risk of overexposing a reliever to a specific batter from the opposing team becomes real and worrisome. That's why having multiple trusted relievers for each role is so valuable. Brad Keller, Andrew Kittredge and Daniel Palencia have pitched in the same game nine times this year, and (in varying orders) that seems to be the trio Counsell most trusts to close out games. If he can get his starters through five and get some help from one of his lefties, though, he should be able to hold back one of the three (plus Michael Soroka) even if he's protecting a lead in one game. That's valuable. The names who don't appear here are, in a few cases, as compelling as the ones who do. This roster leaves off Aaron Civale, who last pitched for the team on Sept. 24 and could give them a lot of length—but whose stuff hasn't leapt forward since he moved to the bullpen for the first time, and who probably isn't fit for any kind of dangerous work. It excludes Ben Brown and Porter Hodge, as they wind down disappointing seasons. It excludes offseason additions-turned-injury cases Ryan Brasier and Eli Morgan, although if either of them has shown the team something compelling recently in rehab work or a Triple-A Iowa, they could always be tacked on as a 12th arm, squeezing out one of the hitters I project to make the team almost by default. Javier Assad also isn't listed. He made (more or less) a full start Sunday, and appears to be tracking toward making a start or providing bulk innings in a tandem effort should the team reach the NLDS. He's the second-most interesting name not projected to make the cut here whom the team might include, after all. The most interesting: Jaxon Wiggins. It's toweringly unlikely that the Cubs are planning to sneak Wiggins into the back end of their bullpen, with an eye toward him making his big-league debut in the postseason, If they feel they need an infusion of raw stuff, though, Wiggins is the most intriguing way they could do it. Those are all the names worth saying, in this context. Whether the team ultimately goes with 11 or 12 arms, most of these will be there. Counsell will remain cagey and creative, but however he prefers to get from Out No. 1 to Out No. 81, the Cubs have decent pitching depth for this time of year. They're in a good position. Whether that will matter is likely to come down to execution, now. View full article

Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images Building a roster for a win-or-go-home best-of-three series is an entirely different challenge than building one to win 92 games across 162 in a six-month marathon. The Cubs were patient and methodical all year, using their hot start to the 2025 season to accommodate a steady approach the rest of the way. Now, that all comes to an abrupt end. Beginning Tuesday afternoon, the Cubs and the San Diego Padres will play a best-of-three series for the right to advance to the National League Division Series. Every inning, every out, and every pitch will matter; every decision they make between now and Thursday night will matter. The nature of this short a series both raises and lowers the stakes of certain roster choices. Craig Counsell will, of course, only need three starters (at most) this week, and he'll have a fresh set of relievers to turn to behind them. There's no reason for the team to carry more than 12 pitchers, and even that might turn out to be too many. On the other hand, when every pitch matters and there are only three games to play, 14 or 15 position players feels like a bit of an extravagance, too. For a club that tried to stick to a very regular starting nine for most of this season, the bench won't feel especially vital. In a moment, though, those players can become extremely important. There are tactical gambles you take in playoff games that you would eschew in regular-season ones. There are also some injury issues to consider, with this particular team, that make having a deeper corps of position players than would be typical fairly appealing. All that has to be part of the conversation, but broad strokes won't do. Let's get into the specifics of a Cubs playoff roster projection, one roster segment at a time. We'll break this up into two parts, starting with the hitters. Catchers (2) Carson Kelly Reese McGuire It would be lovely to find Miguel Amaya able to contribute to this team after all, but it feels like this round is too soon to even dream of it. If his efforts to demonstrate his readiness go well, he could be sent to the Arizona Fall League to maintain his timing and stay in shape, but he shouldn't take Reese McGuire's job (or even be added as a third backstop) in either the Wild Card round or (should the Cubs get that far) the Division Series. An NLCS return is a more reasonable hope, but even that might be a remote one. Carson Kelly is likely to start every game through at least a round or two, anyway. McGuire has done yeoman's work as an emergency fill-in, but his OBP this season is .239. It's nice that this series will be played in the afternoons; Kelly hit .235/.322/.375 at night but .266/.346/.491 in day games this year. Infielders (6) Michael Busch Nico Hoerner Dansby Swanson Matt Shaw Willi Castro Justin Turner No surprises here, and no controversy. The starting infield will be the same every day during at least this series. There are some circumstances under which Counsell might choose to pinch-hit for Michael Busch with Justin Turner, and if and when that time comes, I implore you to react reasonably. As ugly as his overall numbers are, Turner has been fine since his ice-cold start, and downright solid if you isolate his numbers against lefties. The key development recently is the emergence of Moisés Ballesteros as a secondary lefty bat who can play first base, where the team plugged him in twice over the weekend. After Turner comes in for Busch, in later stages of the game, Ballesteros might come on for Turner against a righty reliever. Castro has struggled mightily in a Cubs uniform, and had struggled in the last few weeks of his tenure with the Minnesota Twins. He rushed back from an oblique strain earlier this year and hasn't been the same; the smart money says he'll appear only as a replacement in cases of injury or ejection. Outfielders (5) Ian Happ Pete Crow-Armstrong Seiya Suzuki Kyle Tucker Kevin Alcántara Which of Kyle Tucker and Seiya Suzuki starts in right field will be worth watching, especially for Shota Imanaga's start in Game 2. Suzuki struggles with the sky during day games and the sun will slant cruelly into the right fielder's eyes during the middle and later innings of each of the first two contests. If Tucker is healthy enough, he's probably better out there. However, should he start games there, it won't be a surprise if he can't end them there. Keeping Kevin Alcántara on the roster is important; he can be a late-game defensive substitution. It probably won't be as simple as swapping Tucker for Alcántara, though. It's more likely that the Cubs would pinch-run for Tucker after he reaches base, then slide Alcántara into his place defensively in the following half-inning. The pinch-runner might be more of a specialist. Tactical Pieces (2) Moisés Ballesteros Billy Hamilton There's no way the Cubs can allow Billy Hamilton to take an at-bat for them. And they won't. However, he can still run. He has baserunning instincts and veteran wile. If he showed them enough in a brief audition with Triple-A Iowa, he could well be the 15th man on the positional side of the roster. Ballesteros will be the 14th, and can serve as a counterpunching pinch-hit option behind Turner. He's also a candidate to take an at-bat from Kelly or Matt Shaw against certain righty hurlers, and in an extreme, do-or-die last at-bat scenario, they might want to have him to take over for Alcántara in a given spot. There are few other candidates for the playoff roster, on the position-player side. Carlos Santana is still with the team, but he didn't show anything to suggest that he can help them on the field in this round. Owen Caissie isn't game-ready. Amaya is the one question mark, but again, he's probably another round or two from truly entering the equation. The dilemma is between having 14 or 15 hitters available. This is a prediction that they'll go with 15. Later today, we'll break down the pitchers who might make up the other side of the sheet. View full article

Image courtesy of © Charles LeClaire-Imagn Images Depending on whom you asked, Cade Horton was in line to start either Game 1 or Game 2 of the upcoming Wild Card Series for the Chicago Cubs, who hope to be hosting that best-of-three set against the San Diego Padres. Horton has been the team's best starter over the last two months, as he's adjusted to major-league hitters and tapped into the full value of his ever-deepening arsenal and plus command. Unfortunately, now, he's out of those plans entirely—and his season is likely over. The Cubs placed Horton on the 15-day injured list Saturday, with a fractured rib. The righty was lifted after three innings of his start against the Mets early this week, dealing with soreness in his side; subsequent imaging revealed the crack and attempts to work through the pain proved fruitless. The team recalled lefty Jordan Wicks to take Horton's place on the active roster for the weekend, although Wicks is not likely to make the playoff roster. That pretty well locks Matthew Boyd and Shota Imanaga into the first two spots in the team's rotation for the series against San Diego. They make good matchups for the Padres lineup, anyway, especially after San Diego lost right-hitting outfielder Ramón Laureano at least through the Wild Card Series. However, Horton feels like a major loss, because his starts had become such spectacles of efficiency and sheer attitude on the mound. Making do without him will mean stretching the team's pitching depth in some new and creative ways. Craig Counsell will still have options. The starters who look best-positioned to pick up the slack where Horton leaves room are Jameson Taillon and Colin Rea, but the team can (and will) also turn to both Javier Assad and Michael Soroka to make multi-inning appearances, if their run into October goes long enough. That quartet will try to buttress Boyd and Imanaga and form a bridge to the back end of the bullpen, where lefties Caleb Thielbar, Drew Pomeranz and Taylor Rogers will counterbalance righties Brad Keller, Daniel Palencia and Andrew Kittredge. All 12 pitchers are now likely to make the Wild Card roster. It's a relatively deep corps, though a few of them will only be trusted to pitch in perfect matchups or when the situation affords some margin for error. Horton could return if the team advances, especially if they make it as far as the NLCS. However, there are a lot of hard wins to earn between here and there, and Horton has run into this wall (figurative or literal) after throwing 147 innings between Triple-A Iowa and the majors. That's more than twice as many as he threw in 2024. If he can get right, the team will try to bring him back in some role, but it's no longer reasonable even to dream of a full-fledged starting Horton at any point in October. He'll be a minor contributor, if he's a contributor at all. The team also has Aaron Civale, Ben Brown, Porter Hodge, Eli Morgan and Wicks on hand as potential backfillers for the spot being vacated by Horton, but for various reasons, it's unlikely any of them will pitch much in the playoffs. It says a lot that it was Wicks, and not Brown or Hodge, whom the team called up when Horton officially went down. The wild card (so to speak) is righty pitching prospect Jaxon Wiggins, one of the hurlers to whom the team cleaved tightly during negotiations for potential rotation upgrades in July. There's a seasonal workload issue to consider with Wiggins, too, and it's overwhelmingly unlikely that he'll make the playoff roster, but he's the one hurler with an arm of similar promise to Horton's, whom the team might call up in the stead of their star rookie. For now, the club's focus will remain on winning Saturday to sew up home-field advantage over San Diego. If they can do that, they'll worry about how to get the requisite outs to advance. Then, they'll worry about how to overcome the Brewers. At this time of year, it's all about short-term planning. Unfortunately, that means leaving the summer of Cade Horton behind, and facing a fall without him. Fortunately, though, the team has the privilege of worrying about this, as opposed to turning its gaze toward the winter, as most teams have already begun to do. View full article

Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images The Cubs' dominant first half was fueled, more than anything else, by the shockingly potent offensive quartet of Kyle Tucker, Pete Crow-Armstrong, Seiya Suzuki and Michael Busch. Those four players hit the All-Star break with a combined 79 doubles, 14 triples, 86 home runs, 233 runs scored, 263 RBIs, and 55 stolen bases in 62 attempts. They were having a season for the ages—the kind of combined offensive onslaught teams only dream of. The second half has been like waking up from that dream. Busch has hit into wretched luck, but he's the one who's managed to stay afloat the best. Suzuki went over six weeks between home runs, as his approach went haywire and he lost touch with his power. Tucker played through a nagging finger injury and slumped badly. then lost most of September to a calf strain just as he began to rediscover his productivity. Crow-Armstrong's overly aggressive approach caught up to him in hideous fashion, and he's been one of the worst hitters in the entire league since the break. The team has had to cobble together rallies and win with improved pitching of late, when they've won at all. Offensively, they've been carried by Ian Happ and Nico Hoerner, rather than the guys who looked to have them on track toward a 900-run season at one early juncture. Just in time for the postseason, though, there's some evidence that the first-half boppers are back. Suzuki's two homers Thursday night were followed, Friday, by a huge grand slam, turning a likely win into a laugher in the seventh inning. That wasn't even one of the two best bits of news of the day, though. First on that list was Tucker returning to the lineup, and having a single and a walk in his first game. Only time will tell how well he's held onto his shored-up swing mechanics or his timing, and he didn't run well at all when he put the ball in play; he might have to serve as the designated hitter even when the playoffs start. However, he looked enough like himself to inspire some real hope. Second on the leaderboard for best news of the day was Crow-Armstrong hitting his 30th home run of the season, a few innings before Suzuki did the same. It looks as though Crow-Armstrong owns Cardinals righty Miles Mikolas, who started Friday and looked as cooked as he has for most of the last two seasons. He won't get to face anyone who offers him such easy succor during the playoffs, no matter whom the Cubs play or when, but that swing looked more like the first-half version of Crow-Armstrong than anything else he's done in the last two months. The ball was gone the moment it left his bat, and you could see the surge of confidence in his bearing and the relief in his face when he got back to the dugout. He's been slowly—very slowly—coming around for the last fortnight, after a month and a half of failure so profound that it was very hard to justify his place in the lineup, even with his elite defense taken into account. He has four extra-base hits in his last 11 games. If he can be even that kind of occasional threat in the playoffs, the Cubs will gladly take it. There were three cherries on the sundae of the game, too. Busch cracked a double, hit a home run and drew a walk. The most games with multiple extra-base hits and a walk by any player this season is six, a leadership shared by Freddie Freeman, Aaron Judge and James Wood. Busch only has four of them, but if it feels like more than that, it's because three have come in the last 11 days. Again, October won't offer pitching as hittable as the Cardinals' hurlers from Friday, but Busch has gotten very hot, very quickly. Take over a game with multiple extra-base hits and draw a walk in any game in the postseason, and you never buy a drink in town again. That's looking more and more possible for Busch. The bullpen trio of Andrew Kittredge, Daniel Palencia and Brad Keller (in that order) got what might well be their last tune-up appearances of the regular season, and they were stellar. The group combined for six strikeouts and zero walks, and allowed just two hits in three innings of work. Palencia's return from a concerning shoulder injury is a huge deal; the bullpen feels miles deeper with him in it. Colin Rea was spectacular, for the second outing in a row. The Cardinals lineup doesn't pose an especially stern test right now, with Willson Contreras and Masyn Winn out for the year with injuries, but Rea sliced through them for 5 2/3 innings of two-hit ball, walking one and fanning seven. Late in August, as he began what has been an annual late-season swoon, I wrote that it was hard to feel good about Rea and his prospects of helping the team in the playoffs. To the immense credit of both Rea and Cubs coaches, he's back on track, having addressed a mechanical issue that emanated from fatigue and was eroding his ability to command his stuff. This version of Rea looks likely to slot into the playoff roster, although he might have to wait and see if they make it past the Padres to get his shot. The Padres came back from an early deficit to beat the Diamondbacks, so the Cubs still need either a win or a San Diego loss this weekend to claim home-field advantage for the Wild Card Series. Winning their own game was huge, though, especially because of the way it unfolded. They also got Moisés Ballesteros into the game as a pinch-hitter, once the rout was on, and had him finish the game at first base—a possible preview of how he could fit into the postseason roster picture, should the team need the DH spot to revert to Suzuki and/or Tucker. Chicago just needs one more good day at Wrigley this weekend to ensure some fun ones this week, and in the particulars of their romp Friday, they gave fans ample reasons to expect just that. View full article

Image courtesy of © David Banks-Imagn Images Earlier this week, we talked at length about the specific problems that have led to a massive power outage by Seiya Suzuki in the second half of this season. Suzuki entered Thursday night's game against the Mets having homered just twice since the All-Star break, on July 18 and August 6. As hopeless as the numbers have looked, though, I closed that piece on a relatively hopeful note: Suzuki made that look prescient Thursday night, just in time. In the preantepenultimate game of the regular season, he took the date to which you needed to go back to get two of his home runs in frame from July 18 to September 25, slamming two different pitches from rookie hurler Nolan McLean into the left-field bleachers. Suzuki has been on time all along, but he locked in on two offerings that McLean left in locations he didn't intend, and finally found the elusive match between his best range of swing planes and the pitch shape and location he was getting. The Mets still won the game, 8-5. Other than Suzuki's two bombs (responsible, together, for four runs), the only Cubs offense came courtesy of Dansby Swanson, who hit a homer of his own as he quietly surges through the tape to finish the season. (Quietly, Swanson has gotten to 50 extra-base hits for the second time in his three-year Cubs tenure, and is slugging a robust .442 since August 1.) Shota Imanaga gave up all eight runs, as Craig Counsell tried to get him through a ragged start and ensure that he had the appropriate number of pitches to carry into his down time before pitching in the Wild Card Series. That's bad news, and Imanaga doesn't seem to be at the top of his game. On balance, though, Suzuki's power outburst is more important than anything else that happened. If he can get hot—and particularly if he can be a reliable source of power in the middle of the batting order—the Cubs are suddenly fine, after all. There's been considerable anxiety lately, and it's not unfounded, but the team just needed one or two players to turn around their negative trends in order to take some real optimism into the postseason. This week, they've gotten: Daniel Palencia back onto a big-league mound, with his shoulder and his stuff looking intact; Matthew Boyd pitching more like his first-half self; and Suzuki breaking out of his long power slump with a thunderclap of a game. Friday, they hope to reactivate Kyle Tucker and slot him in as the designated hitter, giving the lineup its greatest sense of completeness in several weeks. One luxury the team afforded itself with their hot start was to meander a bit through September, and although this would have been a costly period of healing and consolidation if the Brewers hadn't run away and hid with the division weeks ago, the real damage done by even four months of uneven play has been relatively limited. The team is walking a highwire into the weekend, needing to keep people healthy, get good news on Cade Horton's prognosis, and see (more) good things from Suzuki and/or Tucker. Already, though, they've had a better week than their record would indicate. View full article

Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-Imagn Images The Cubs' magic number dwindled to 2 Wednesday, as the Brewers beat the Padres in San Diego and Chicago took care of business against the visiting Mets. Arguably, though, there were even more important numbers to be found in the box score, where Matthew Boyd turned in an encouraging start: 5 1/3 innings, two hits, two runs, one walk and three strikeouts. It wasn't the kind of gem to which Cubs fans became accustomed from Boyd early in the year, but it was just the second time in his last seven outings that he pitched well. Boyd's raw stuff was solid, but not exceptional. He induced 12 whiffs, though he only got those three punchouts, and that roughly matches his recent trends: a limited ability to overpower anyone, and a need to locate well if he hoped to succeed. The difference was that, by and large, he did locate well. Here's his pitch chart from a recent rough outing, against the Rays on Sept. 6. The problems there were a lot of sliders left up and a lot of big, arm-side misses with the changeup. When Boyd struggles to execute those pitches, his fastball becomes much more hittable, too. On Wednesday night, he was much better at keeping the ball down, and he filled up the zone with the change. To get swings and misses in two-strike counts, he'd need to be better at leaving the zone, especially with the changeup. That strike-to-ball change that made him devastating in many starts early in the season still isn't there for him. By being able to throw the change in the zone, though, he forced Mets hitters to swing a bit less aggressively against his fastball, and he worked ahead in the count more often. This version of Boyd won't be the frontman for the team's playoff rotation, but he's perfectly viable as a Game 2 or Game 3 starter. Ideally, of course, he'd get back to executing both that changeup and the slider a bit more consistently, and regain the ability to miss bats at a high level. Until late July, he did so. He threw his slider for strikes, letting his sidearm slot on the pitch make hitters balk and freeze. He kept them off the fastball with that slider, then left the zone to get strikeouts with the changeup. Recently, he's had a harder time elevating the heater, but he's especially struggled to land the secondary offerings in the zone. If he can get back just a portion of his command on those pitches in the postseason, he figures to be quite good. That was the case Wednesday night, giving fans renewed hope that it might be true next week, as well. View full article

Image courtesy of © David Banks-Imagn Images It's been one week since a sweep in Pittsburgh gave the Cubs their 88th win and the certainty that their season would not end after Game 162. That was a very good day. There were smiles, hugs, encomiums and hopeful proclamations about the things that still laid ahead of the team. They partied. The team felt that it had achieved something important, and they expected to do more. Six full days have passed since, and the Cubs are 0-for-6 in their quest for a good one. They've gotten only mixed signals on their key injured players. It sounds like Daniel Palencia and Kyle Tucker will be activated some time this week, giving them each a chance to show that they're healthy before the playoffs begin Tuesday, but it's hard to sustain much confidence in either. Matthew Boyd and Shota Imanaga are healthy, but for fans (and club personnel) hoping to see them each stabilize and have strong starts after some recent struggles, there's been no succor. Nico Hoerner continues to rake, and Ian Happ is doing fine, but Michael Busch can't get untracked. Pete Crow-Armstrong and Seiya Suzuki remain, largely, lost at the plate. Dansby Swanson's defensive decline is a minor but real point of concern. Rookie third baseman Matt Shaw is distracted and unproductive. On Tuesday, even Cade Horton—the most relentless source of positive feeling for this club since mid-July and the team's presumptive Game 1 starting pitcher next week—left his final start of the season after just three innings, dealing with tightness in his back. He hadn't pitched since the previous Tuesday, and has dealt with illness between appearances. It's possible the balky back was purely the result of the cough and shortness of breath he's dealt with for days, but that's only reassuring in a medium-term sort of way. If a week between starts didn't have him fresh and fired up for this one, who's to say whether another week will be enough to make him ready for that playoff appearance? All of these things are real sources of concern, if your focus has swung toward the postseason, but in a funny way, you could compartmentalize them and worry less about them, if only the team would win a game or two. A successful regular season, for this team, was never going to be 162 games long. It was going to be 90 wins long. The difference matters. The grind gets rougher when the time between wins stretches out and a team has to endure the difficulty of playing the game without the reward of coming out on top. Even amid huge questions about how the team will score enough runs or find enough quality starting pitching to play deep into next month, if they'd won one or two of the last five games, it would be easy to shrug and fix one's vision on the horizon. Instead, after being within four positive results of securing home-field advantage for the Wild Card Series at the end of Friday's games, the Cubs have lived four long days without seeing that magic number come down at all. They have five games left; the Padres have four. If six of those nine games break against Chicago, it will be San Diego who hosts the nearly inevitable series between the two next week. That would be a bleak outcome. It'd be hard to imagine the stumbling Cubs coming out of it with two wins in the best-of-three. This isn't supposed to happen to this team. Their identity has been tied up in this not happening. Jed Hoyer built one of the oldest rosters in baseball and paid Craig Counsell the (then-)highest salary among big-league managers to prevent lapses of focus and streaks of poor play at just the wrong times. Until Sunday, the team hadn't lost four games in a row all year. Now, they've lost five in a row. They have Justin Turner and Carlos Santana so that this doesn't happen. They have Drew Pomeranz and Caleb Thielbar and Boyd so that it doesn't happen. They paid Swanson $177 million and Jameson Taillon $68 million so that it doesn't happen. Now, they're dealing with a multi-system failure on the eve of the test on which their whole season will be judged. Some of that is bad luck. Even more of it is just fluff. They could, after all, lose out and still make the postseason, and sneak past the Padres and heat up against the Brewers and make everyone forget that they finished the regular campaign in a two-week fugue state. One benefit of having so many superannuated veterans around is that they can counsel everyone not to worry much about the natural letdown after a team achieves something they fought so long and fiercely to win. The playoffs are not fully random, as some would have you believe, but they're highly susceptible to randomness, and one form of that randomness is the sudden turn from slump to streak for an entire team. It happens. On the other hand, this doesn't feel like a normal set of hiccups. They don't have a hot power hitter for the middle of their lineup right now. They've been batting Carson Kelly cleanup again lately; Kelly has a .669 OPS since Miguel Amaya got hurt in late May. The vaunted bullpen is hitting some very normal and generally non-worrisome speed bumps, but their offense, their starting rotation and even their fielding are faltering, exposing the degree to which they've been overly reliant on that pen as they've treaded water over two-thirds of the season. After a June 3 win in Washington, the Cubs were 38-22, and had outscored their opponents by a whopping 102 runs. Since then, they're 50-47, and have outscored opponents by just 21 runs. They heated up impressively from mid-August through that clinching win in Pittsburgh, but a week's worth of lousy play since only underscores that this once mightily consistent team has gotten streaky lately—and not always in a good way. When you visit their Baseball Reference page, it's hard not to be awed by the collection of full-season numbers listed, especially in the WAR column—but that hides some ugly truths about this team. Tucker, Crow-Armstrong, Kelly, Busch, Suzuki, and Boyd all were so good in the first half that their stat lines disguise how poorly they've played of late. Shaw, Imanaga, Swanson, Happ and Palencia took over to carry the team for various segments as the first group sagged, but three of those five now look to be slumping or hurt. Only Hoerner and Horton seem to be fully in stride at just the right time, and now, even that is in doubt. There's an imbalance here that you can see in the full-season data (for instance, Cubs position players are far and away the best in baseball in Runs Above Average, according to Baseball Reference, but Cubs pitchers are fourth-worst in the league), but which gets distorted along the way. Really, the imbalance isn't between any two units or based on any kind of matchup, but between the first- and second-half Cubs, or the Cubs before and after Tucker began to be diminished by nagging injuries. At some point, this was a great baseball team—or it had the chance to be, anyway. At this moment, this is barely even a good baseball team. That's unfortunate, because this is the moment that matters. As much as they might have felt they had while the champagne was spraying, the 2025 Cubs haven't yet achieved anything important. Winning one's division validates a season, on its own, but crawling across the finish line as a Wild Card entrant—a distant second to the Brewers, again, in the Central—doesn't do so. The Cubs failed to deliver a regular season that makes their season a success, so they have to prove themselves by winning at least one series in the playoffs. Their veterans need to communicate that. Their young players need to internalize that, and work hard to make themselves ready for the task ahead. The coaching and medical staffs need to make clear choices about the viability of their injured would-be contributors and plunge forward, with or without them. To shake off the fug of a post-celebration losing streak and a lousy off-field storyline and a star going outside the organization for treatment of what seems like a routine injury, the team needs to get back to winning. They need to go out and win a few of their final five games, get that home-field advantage, and remind themselves what it feels like to be the best version of themselves. Unfortunately, that won't guarantee anything. They're still an old team, and it still feels like the best version of them might be unreachable—lost in the magic of that first-half power binge from Crow-Armstrong or the impossible efficiency of first-half Boyd. Still, it feels important. Five games from the regular season's conclusion, this team needs something to vault them forward and give them a running start on the postseason—or they might be beaten before they get up to speed. View full article

Image courtesy of © Katie Stratman-Imagn Images The Chicago Cubs need something more than an offensive spark. Here and there, over the last month and change, they have found a spark, with Dansby Swanson, Ian Happ and Nico Hoerner passing in and out of hot streaks that have helped the team push across just enough runs to win some games and lock up a playoff spot. However, the heart-of-the-order hammer they need to consistently outslug teams has remained stubbornly absent. Kyle Tucker hasn't been able to fill that role (on any more than a brief, fleeting basis) since he suffered a finger injury at the start of June. Pete Crow-Armstrong is reaping what his approach has been sowing all along. Michael Busch has hit into bad luck for weeks. And Seiya Suzuki is, simply, seeing the wrong side of the ball. In the first half, Suzuki was the beneficiary and the benefactor of the team's offense. With Tucker and Crow-Armstrong often sandwiching him in the batting order, teams rarely had the chance to pitch to Suzuki with the bases clear, and he became adept at punishing hurlers who tried to attack him within the strike zone. Suzuki made some swing adjustments this year, especially focusing on going and getting the ball farther in front of his body. That helped him cover more of the strike zone with an authoritative stroke and generate more hard contact. Even with those tweaks on board, though, he's a high-ball hitter. That's always been true of him. His swing is fast, and it's fairly flat. He finds the ball with the barrel best when he's able to get his arms extended, rotate with his front shoulder, and sweep the bat fairly level through the hitting zone. Thus, he does best when he can see the ball up and maintain his bat speed through contact. When he has to make a late adjustment, it's usually a dip of the bat to reach a ball that's lower than he expected. The result is rarely impressive. In the first half, even as he sought to cover the bottom half of the zone a bit better than he had in the past, he was doing all of the above well. His earlier swing decisions led to more balls pulled in the air, and although he was giving up a bit of the ability to make contact and draw walks that he'd shown in the past, he more than made up for it with superb power output. In fact, that continued straight through into the early stages of the second half. Trouble began in the first week of August, or so. Suzuki hit his last home run on August 6. Through that game, he was batting .251/.318/.513, with 127 strikeouts, 45 walks and 55 extra-base hits in 478 plate appearances. Since then, he's hitting a paltry .213/.342/.254. In 149 trips to the plate, he's drawn an admirable 24 walks and only punched out 32 times, but he's also only mustered five extra-base hits—all of them doubles. It's an extraordinary (and, obviously, unacceptable) power outage from the team's best first-half power threat. Given that, you'd expect to see some significant differences in his key swing metrics. Those expectations, though, would be confounded. Segment Bat Speed (mph) Swing Length (ft) Swing Tilt Attack Angle Attack Direction Contact Pt. (in) Through 8/6 74 7.2 31° 7° 2° Pull 34.2 Since 74 7.2 32° 7° 2° Pull 33.9 You couldn't ask for much more consistency. Most hitters are pretty consistent in most of these regards, but it's not uncommon to see someone's swing speed vary widely within a season. In the cases of players who go through big changes in outcomes, you'll often see a concomitant shift in their attack angle or direction, which tell us a lot about timing. Suzuki is practically a clone from one sample to the other, but his production has gone from terrific to non-existent. His average exit velocity through August 6 was 92.6 miles per hour; it's plunged to 89.1 mph since then. As you might guess, his approach has changed a bit. In the first sample, he swung competitively at 59.7% of pitches within the zone, which is very patient, already. In the second, that rate is down to 57.0%, which walks over to the line between patience and passivity and does a lethal little tapdance on it. Even more tellingly, though, we can focus in on pitches low in the zone and near the top of it. Segment Swing Rate - Pitches Up Swing Rate - Pitches Down Through 8/6 63 43.3 Since 60.7 48.8 Aha. Now, we're onto something. See, when he's seeing the ball right, Suzuki swings more when the ball is elevated, and he's more willing to lay off the ball at the bottom of the zone—even if it's in the zone. He's made some adjustments to that approach over the years, to better handle the way big-league pitchers attack him and the way umpires call the zone when he takes his natural tack, but in broad strokes, it's still true. Crucially. this year, he got especially good at telling when the ball was going to stay up a bit. Here's an example of that very thing. As it happens, this is that last home run he hit, off the Reds' Andrew Abbott. QndvOVZfWGw0TUFRPT1fQUFnRVYxTUZBZ0FBQzFjR1V3QUhCd05UQUFOVEJRUUFWRlpXQUFkV0JnUlNWZ0Jm.mp4 If this is a bit sharper of a downer, Abbott probably gets Suzuki out, but note the way he's able to whip the bat through the zone. His hands get away from his body early, and as he recognizes the pitch, they're already in position to facilitate a flat flick through the ball. Compare that swing to this one, on a very similar breaking ball from the Pirates' Evan Sisk, last week. dnZiVldfWGw0TUFRPT1fVlZJSFhRWUdWd29BQ2dFSFVnQUhCZzVSQUFBRVZsRUFBRndNQmxCVEJnQlhDQXND.mp4 This is a great illustration of how hard hitting is, isn't it? You can't get two pitches that are much more alike, and you can't put much more similar swings on them. Yet, one ball streaked out of the park with a vapor trail, and the other (while well-struck) became a lazy fly ball. To understand why, let's look at one more swing, featuring a bit more of an exaggerated example of what's changed. ZU44TjZfWGw0TUFRPT1fQVZOUlVRSUNVUUVBQ1ZSV0J3QUhDQUZUQUZoVFVsUUFBVlpXVWdBRkJ3QlhBd29E.mp4 Suzuki is having a harder time anticipating the movement of pitches down in the zone lately. He's also, relatedly, having a harder time laying off them. He has great hand-eye coordination, so the well-honed, altered swing he's still putting on the ball is making late adjustments and generating contact, but he's not hitting it nearly as squarely. Maybe that has to do with a change in how pitchers are attacking him; maybe it's a matter of the grind doing its annual work and making it harder to maintain excellent discipline or plate vision. Either way, Suzuki is getting much less exit velocity out of the same swing speed, a product of more slightly misread pitches on which he's dipping late and catching the ball wrong. The good news, here, is that Suzuki is still generally on time in the box, and that his swing is physically intact. He needs to change something in his in-the-moment preparation, to see or anticipate the pitch better and catch it flush more consistently. That's no easy tweak, as the nearness of the first miss above shows. Hitting requires a high-speed precision that can sometimes feel superhuman. However, the change needed here is minute, and Suzuki might well be on the cusp of breaking out of this funk at just the right time, in a very big way. View full article