Matthew Trueblood

Cade HortonPete Crow-ArmstrongMatt ShawOwen CaissieJordan WicksKevin AlcantaraMoises BallesterosBen BrownJefferson RojasJames TriantosJackson FerrisAlexander CanarioMichael AriasDaniel PalenciaLuke LittleBJ Murray JrJaxon WigginsJosh RiveraCristian HernandezHaydn McGeary

Cade HortonPete Crow-ArmstrongMatt ShawOwen CaissieJordan WicksKevin AlcantaraMoises BallesterosBen BrownJefferson RojasJames TriantosJackson FerrisAlexander CanarioMichael AriasDaniel PalenciaLuke LittleBJ Murray JrJaxon WigginsJosh RiveraCristian HernandezHaydn McGeary

One of the 2023 Cubs’ most unassuming heroes was the man who spent the majority of the season behind the catcher’s mask. Looking ahead to 2024, though, we have some big questions to consider about where that position is going and how the Cubs ought to handle it. Image courtesy of © Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports Without doubt, Yan Gomes was one of the most valuable members of the 2023 Cubs. Entering the season, it seemed vaguely unlikely that the Cubs would exercise their $6-million option for his services in 2024, given his age and what he’d done as (in large part) Willson Contreras’s backup in 2022. Here at the end of the season, that seems laughable. Gomes not only delivered several big hits over the course of the season and outhit the average catcher by some 30 points of OPS, but became the anchor of the run prevention unit–a trusted receiver and beloved leader behind the dish. Here’s the problem: Gomes, like brief backup Tucker Barnhart, is a below-average thrower. He’s also a below-average pitch framer. Barnhart was actually slightly above-average in that regard, in 2023, but his bat was so bootless that he couldn’t stick, anyway. Until this season, framing was considered the much more important skill, but with the explosion of the running game after the implementation of new rules, that’s far less true. (It will be still less so if, as seems increasingly likely, the league goes to some form of automated strike zone within the next few years, but the shift is already underway.) Gomes is so good at the softer sciences of catching that it’s hard to envision the Cubs moving on from him at any point in 2024, unless his health forces them to do so. That’s a real possibility, though. Gomes hadn’t taken as many plate appearances or caught as many innings as he did this year since 2018. He’s 36 years old, which is something like 72 in catcher years. Let’s say Gomes does stay healthy next year, though. Can the Cubs afford to keep giving him the bulk of the starts? Even if he calls a great game and uses that extraordinary square-jawed handsomeness to bring calm and confidence to the hearts of his pitchers, can that make up for his deficiencies in the more quantifiable areas of catching? Happily, Miguel Amaya will make that a tough decision, in a good way. He had good framing numbers in his rookie campaign. Alas, he wasn’t good in the throwing department. That was part of why he didn’t seem to earn David Ross’s confidence, at any point. Of course, another part might be that Ross simply sees more of himself in Gomes than in Amaya, or that he seems to instinctively mistrust young players, but in any case, it’s true. It’s not even clear whether they can bring back Amaya (presumably, in a larger role) as the second catcher next year, or whether Ross will prefer that they bring in another external option and keep Amaya in Iowa to open the season. In Amaya, Moises Ballesteros, and Pablo Aliendo, the team does have three young backstops in the upper levels of their system. Only Aliendo has a plus arm, though, and only Amaya seems likely to be a serviceable framer. It’s going to be fascinating to see how the team responds to the winds of change in terms of what catchers do and what catching is. That question hangs heavy over teams other than the Cubs, to be sure, but it feels urgent in their case. For however long framing continues to be a skill that matters, it matters a lot to the Cubs, because their pitching staff relies more on called strikes than most teams’ do. They don’t have overpowering, swing-and-miss stuff. If they get a small zone on a given day, they get into trouble in a hurry. That’s one thing Jed Hoyer and Carter Hawkins will try to change this winter, but it figures to take some time. While the transformation is ongoing, the Cubs really need good framing, and they need to slow down the running game better than they did in 2023. Neither Gomes nor Amaya seems capable of doing both for them, so it will be a challenge to mix and match well enough to get the offense and defense needed from that spot to get over the hump and into the 2024 postseason. View full article

Sunday marks the end of an exciting and enjoyable season of Cubs baseball. With one of the players who did the most to make it so heading for free agency, let's take a moment to savor his campaign. Image courtesy of © Brett Davis-USA TODAY Sports For most Cubs fans, it will be a massive disappointment if Cody Bellinger's Cubs career comes to a close Sunday. He's been too good, and too perfect a fit for their needs, for the team not to make every effort to retain him. Non-tendered by the Dodgers last winter, he signed with Chicago for $17 million, and he's been worth half again that much. Re-signing him won't be easy, and might not even be possible. Still, at this moment, it looks likely to be Jed Hoyer's first priority when the offseason comes. Before then, though, let's pause and consider just how good and fun Bellinger was in 2023. If he doesn't play Sunday, he'll finish the season with a .307/.356/.525 batting line. He's hit 26 home runs, driven in 97, and stolen 20 bases. That's an impressive collection of numbers. In Cubs history, the only other players to have 20/20 seasons in which they also hit at least .300 are Leon Durham, Ryne Sandberg, and Sammy Sosa. Obviously, of those three, Bellinger most resembles Durham. He hasn't blown past 30 in either power-speed category, as Sosa and Sandberg each did at least once during their years of filling up box scores. He's also been aided in reaching 20 steals by the rules changes that led to an explosion of steals throughout the league this year. Still, it's an impressive fun fact. Yet, it doesn't even fully capture the aesthetic pleasure of watching Bellinger play this year. With that lithe build, upright stance, and leaning, stretching swing, Bellinger is simply fun to watch, even in the batter's box--where some great hitters can also be a bit boring. He's unorthodox in delightful ways. He doesn't put up especially impressive batted-ball data, which certainly has to be accounted for when the team considers how much they'll be willing to pay to keep him around, but the way he moves in the box is oddly reassuring on that score. He seems so adaptable that you can shrug off the absence of 115-mile-per-hour screamers, to some extent. He hits it hard enough to find gaps and clear fences when he gets a little count leverage, and the rest of the time, he's just trying to hit it. That's the other dazzling thing about Bellinger: he's shown a remarkable ability to cut down his strikeout rate, and not just in favor of more groundouts. Durham isn't really the erstwhile Cubs first baseman to whom I would compare him most readily. Very often this year, when he's locked out his legs and leaned forward at the waist to sweep a pitch on the outside corner into left field, I've been powerfully reminded of Mark Grace. He's not nearly as extreme a contact hitter as Grace was at his peak, but Bellinger's 15.8-percent strikeout rate is good for a 71 K%+, according to FanGraphs. In other words (since 100 is average), when adjusting for league and other contexts, Bellinger's strikeout rate has been almost 30 percent lower than the average hitter's. Doing that while hitting for power and average, even if it comes as the cost of some walks, is impressive. In terms of K%+, BB%+, ISO+, and BABIP+, his season most resembles a couple of Aramis Ramirez's peak years. Sammy Sosa. Ryne Sandberg. Mark Grace. Aramis Ramirez. If Bellinger has put himself so neatly into the companu of those four players, it's hard to imagine how the Cubs can feel anything but thrilled with his season, or how they can let him walk this winter without putting up a fierce fight to keep him. In addition to that offensive production, he was a fine, capable center fielder (especially before his knee injury in May), and he's graceful and sure-handed at first base. That versatility makes him even more valuable, and while it will also make him harder to re-sign, the Cubs seem especially well-positioned to benefit from it. If Bellinger is willing to be an everyday first baseman, but to continue to make occasional appearances in the outfield, he'll fit perfectly into the team's long-term plans. Failing all that, though, he's been a joy to watch in 2023. If this was his only season in a Cubs uniform, it will go down as one of the best one-and-done years in the team's history. View full article

When the Milwaukee Brewers came to Wrigley Field at the end of August, the Chicago Cubs had earned the privilege of counting it as a playoff series. They've been playing games with the stakes ratcheted that high ever since. Alas, they've lost most of those games. Image courtesy of © Benny Sieu-USA TODAY Sports In a fitting capstone to a three-week edifice of misery, the Cubs lost a game even their opponents seemed to want them to win Friday. They were pushed to the brink of playoff elimination (and really, past it) by a collective and evenly distributed ineptitude, neither softened nor sharpened by the fact that it wasn't a failure of effort or desire. This team simply has nothing left--not enough talent, not enough mental energy, and not enough physical strength. That fact can evoke plenty of emotions from plenty of people, but in itself, it's a cold and objective reality. It couldn't have been laid more bare than it was Friday night. Making what might be his final start in a Chicago Cubs uniform, Kyle Hendricks was superb through four scoreless innings. Even in those, though, he did show a lack of the fine command to his arm side that can still make him a dominant starter, but which seems to be there for him less often with each passing week. In the fifth inning, he finally ran into real trouble, and that trouble was exacerbated by a non-error miscue on a should-have-been double play. Hendricks didn't even escape that frame, and the Brewers took a 3-0 lead that felt commanding, given the Cubs' inability to do anything with Milwaukee starter Colin Rea. If that was the end for Hendricks and the Cubs, it was an excruciating reminder of one of nature's surest axioms: Nothing ends well, because it wouldn't end if it were still working. Hendricks's very sound surface-level numbers have been one of this season's treasured surprises, and he's pitched beautifully--but the signs of his decline and imminent inutility are everywhere. That inability to find the outside corner to lefties (and inside to righties) with his sinker is murderous for him. His strikeout rate sagged all the way to 16.1 percent for the year, almost 33 percent lower than the league's average clip. Watching him manipulate his changeup and call his own games this year was a pure source of joy for baseball purists, but projecting him to be successful in 2024 is tough. He might have been better able to survive that inning, and ultimately to win the game, but for the sputter and spasm of the offense at the end of this inconsistent season. They just haven't been able to find the clutch hit for much of this month. After a spring of uncertainty and a summer of explosive triumph, the fall has been saturated with frustration. The Brewers skipped both Brandon Woodruff and Freddy Peralta in their rotation for this weekend, opting for the spare arm of Rea. When he departed, none of the Brewers' four best relievers marched in in his stead. Milwaukee wanted the Cubs to win this game, so that they could force whichever team they end up playing next week (be it the Marlins, the Diamondbacks, the Reds, or the Cubs) to use up their pitching and exhaust themselves throughout this weekend. They had a rest regimen in place, and Craig Counsell didn't compromise it. That's why the Cubs were able to claw back and force extra innings, with the score 3-3. It's why they ended up with a wide-open look at breaking the game open in the 10th, with runners on the corners and only one out. The top of their order was due. Of course, by then, Nico Hoerner had been forced out of the game by a bruised knee. That meant that the team's hopes rested on Patrick Wisdom. Those hopes were frustrated, as they were likely to be, even accounting for the low-wattage arm to whom Counsell entrusted the entirety of the ninth and 10th, after he'd come on to get the final out of the eighth. Wisdom just isn't the hitter you want up when a single would mean two runs, but an out would mean a near-certain loss. It's Hoerner you want in that spot, but he wasn't there. The whole thing was a maddening microcosm of the Cubs' season. They had a window, but they couldn't p-ush through it. They didn't have the manpower to finish the job. We should regard this stretch, in some ways, as a gift. After all, while they've come up desperately short of their goals, this team has been playing what is effectively playoff baseball for the last month. The meaning we seek in sports lies in the clearly defined stakes. So many of us are stuck in existences wherein the stakes never seem to rise very high, and wherein even high stakes come with so many convolutions and contradictions that we can't be sure where our loyalties lie, much less take any action to advance our interests. Sports give us the chance to see, based on the simple arithmetic of the scoreboard and the standings, how important any given moment is, and our loyalties (since they're completely arbitrary) are never in doubt. What we crave is the moment of adrenaline, when the string is out and there can be no excuses or escape if failure befalls us. That's when successes are most sweet. The Cubs reached that point long ago, and they held fans there with them for a long time. That suspended state of peril made Nico Hoerner's grand slam against the Nationals and the frantic comeback against the White Sox on the South Side meaningful. It made Mike Tauchman's catch in St. Louis and Adbert Alzolay's string of magnificent fist pumps more vivid. It made Michael Fulmer's daring escape, Christopher Morel's walkoff striptease, and Justin Steele's Labor Day masterwork much more exhilarating than the same moments would have been, stretched out over one of those happy but languid summers in which a team wins 93 games and claims a playoff spot without a real sweat. Once a season reaches its climax and conclusion, of course, a lot of that clarity evaporates. On the other side of the dust cloud we're currently in, it might be hard to say whether this season was a resounding success. The Cubs did better than most fans and analysts expected, and got some very encouraging performances on the way. On the other hand, they didn't survive their quasi-playoff test, and they didn't have a moment of pure catharsis and relieved exultation--not even a junior version, like the one the Marlins will savor sometime this weekend. The future is not at all clear. Did the Cubs make progress toward lasting contention in 2023? I think good arguments could be made in favor of that thesis, or against it. They clearly need a bit more star power at the front of their rotation and in the heart of their lineup, and that's a tough spot to be in, because they have a lot of money tied up in guys who fit more in the middle of the rotation and the non-premium parts of the batting order. The great revelation of this campaign was Steele, but he's 28 years old, faded down the stretch, and has some injury markers that will require careful watching. The next-best performance might have been that of Cody Bellinger, but he now embarks on free agency again, and even if he comes back, it will be at a considerably higher cost and with a long commitment attached. While it's easy to feel good about some aspects of the Cubs' organization, it's clear that they will need to stay aggressive in both the free-agent and the trade markets to try to regain supremacy even in the NL Central. The league as a whole, as the Braves painfully reminded them just this week, is another beast altogether. There's a tall mountain to climb, and while the just-completed attempt might have taught the team some valuable lessons, they still get rolled back to the bottom and have to climb all the way back up next year. They're not guaranteed to have better equipment on hand. "[Baseball] begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops, and leaves you to face the fall alone," wrote A. Bartlett Giamatti, some years before he became the Commissioner. "You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight--when you need it most--it stops." Giamatti was a philosopher-poet. His Stoicism can only be envied, from our point 40 years in his future. He could meditate on the close loss of a pennant race, and understand its broader lesson, even if it was a hard one. He knew it was his own mortality, the whisper slosh of his blood and the onrush of time that meant he had one fewer summer of baseball left, that made those losses hurt. We can know that, but not take the same solace he did from it. We're stuck on the internet. We can log off, but we still know it's there. We've been turned into slightly feral creatures, defensive and full of fake bravado, trying not to let anyone put in the virtual papers that we were mad. We are. The Cubs' thud of a finish embitters the whole experience of this season a bit, the way a bad sunflower seed will leave its taste in your mouth for an hour when a good one's is gone in a minute. Still, the Cubs played a good season. It was good, because it wasn't without meaning, and because there were enough good moments when the meaning and moment were well-established to leave streaks of sunlight across the tableau of the year left in our minds, now that the chill rains have fallen and Mutability has "turned the seasons and translated hope to memory, once again." Giamatti called baseball "our greatest invention to stay change," but observed that it often ends up bringing change on--or at least bringing our attention to the time and the need for change. The Cubs will change, between now and next spring. Some of the changes will be needed and welcome. Some will be painful. Some will balance those flavors. One way or another, though, all those changes will come. The Cubs have run out of ways to forestall them, and fans have run out of meaningful games for another year. View full article

Almost by accident, the Cubs spent the offseason building a team whose fortunes would depend on the strength of their defense. They got to the final month of the season with that as a winning formula, but the gloves have gone cold. Image courtesy of © Brett Davis-USA TODAY Sports The old baseball truism that defense and speed don't slump is wrong. It's just wrong. Players go on defensive hot and cold streaks, the same way they do at bat or on the mound. The chances are just so much more sparse, and most measurements of each individual play in the field so much more crude, that it's harder to spot them. For the Cubs, though, several key defenders have had bad Septembers, and it's added up to their downfall. Dansby Swanson has, infamously, made a handful of errors since late August, roughly doubling his total for the whole season over the final six weeks. He's also been a step slow on a couple of ground balls to his left recently, and while those don't get counted against his fielding percentage, they're potential chances he missed. Nico Hoerner, who paired with Swanson to make such an impenetrable and dynamic middle infield for most of this season, has been a bit slow, too, and specifically, there have been three plays over the last two weeks on which it was clear he was trying to do too much. On one ground ball up the middle during Justin Steele's disappointing start against the Pirates, Hoerner was thinking double play on a ball on which he only had a chance to get one out. As a result, he didn't even keep the ball on the infield, let alone get any outs, and two runners got an unearned 90 feet. Ian Happ's struggles in left field have been well-documented. In Thursday night's backbreaking loss, it was another ball that Happ got to but could not catch that opened the door for Atlanta to widen their lead and knock Marcus Stroman out of the game early. Seiya Suzuki has been great for much of the season, but at the moment, his error in right field Tuesday night is the defining moment of his Cubs tenure and the most vivid symbol of this Cubs season. He's had a couple other catchable balls that eluded him recently, too, often costing the team extra bases and forcing the pitchers to get extra outs. We could keep going. Mike Tauchman, never a defensive whiz in center field, looks heavy-legged out there, and isn't getting to anything. He failed to charge a line drive early on Thursday night and (while he had no chance to catch the single in the air) cost himself any chance of throwing out a runner at the plate. These little things add up. Let's widen the lens, though, and talk about the team's results. Here are the Cubs' opponents' average exit velocity, launch angle, and batting average on balls in play by month: Month EV LA BABIP April 87.4 12.9 0.282 May 88.4 13 0.313 June 88.7 14.7 0.264 July 88.4 10 0.291 August 88.7 12.8 0.288 September 88.5 10 0.307 There might be teams who can win while allowing a BABIP north of .305 over a long stretch. Those teams would need to have a very high team strikeout rate for their pitchers, or be an especially thunderous club offensively. The Cubs aren't that style of team, and when their defense cracks, their whole team gives way, as if a dam burst. As you can see, it's not as though the pitchers suddenly began giving up rockets. The defense just hasn't caught the ball and made the crucial play often enough. It's no coincidence that the Cubs' two losing months this year (so far) are May and September. This does not excuse all other areas and aspects of the team. The club's situational hitting has also abandoned them, and the pitching staff's weariness is showing up in the form of some extra walks at bad times. A narratively satisfying team collapse usually involves one part of a club letting down the others; this is more of a soft decline by the whole team at once. The defense stands out, but only because it was so good for so much of the season, and because the organization's hopes for a playoff berth leaned so heavily on that unit. View full article

It's hard to believe it, but the last two nights' worth of painfully close losses against the best team in MLB haven't eliminated the Cubs from playoff contention. On the contrary, they have an open path, yet, to that goal. Let's peek at it. Image courtesy of © Dale Zanine-USA TODAY Sports The Chicago Cubs still have, according to FanGraphs, a 29.6-percent chance to claim a place in the Wild Card Series. That's just me being pessimistic, too. Baseball Prospectus has them at 42.2 percent, because they're a bit more bearish on the Marlins than is FanGraphs. As weary as the Cubs look, and as tough as their remaining opponents are, and as devastating as the pile of winnable games that have gone as losses feels, they only need to outplay Miami by one game over the next four days to crawl across the finish line and earn the right to play in the postseason. I think we have clarity, in several ways, about where things stand now. This team is not going to make some miraculous charge to the World Series, from here. That's off the table. Given that, though, they have the freedom to consider the next four days their World Series. They've been playing playoff games since as far back as late July, and non-stop since the Brewers came to Wrigley Field in late August. Though they're out of steam and have failed to do what they had a chance to do, they still have a chance to meet a new, lower standard for success. If they win the third Wild Card berth, from here, I expect and hope that the champagne clubhouse celebration will be as exuberant as if they had won the division. We also have clarity in terms of scoreboard watching. The Diamondbacks are out of reach, but in any scenario in which the Cubs could make the playoffs anyway, the Reds are also out of the running. The Cubs need to try to scratch out two or three wins over these final four games, because they stand tied with the Marlins, who possess the tiebreaker between the teams. They have to outplay the Fish by a game, which means they need a slight falter from that team, too. Like the Reds and the Cubs, and even somewhat like Arizona, Miami seems exhausted. Like every team but Arizona, they're trying to survive despite some significant injuries that have them playing at less than full strength. There's still a good chance of the Fish finishing 2-2, or even 1-3. The strength of schedule difference between these groups seems huge, but over a small handful of games and with the Brewers having nothing for which to play, it doesn't matter as much as whether and to what extent both the Cubs and the Marlins can play with energy and find enough pitching to get 108 more outs without imploding. That's what this season has come down to. At the beginning of the season, this would have seemed a perfectly acceptable outcome. In early July, it was an impossible dream, far out of reach. Compared to where they were on Sept. 1, this seems a disaster. All of those realities can coexist, because they're all perceptions. They're all distorted by our emotions and our reference points. They're all subjective. There's only one objective reality to this, and it's that number: 108. Pick up a baseball, and count the stitches. There are 108 of them, of course, but those are double-sided stitches. That's where things stand. The Cubs have 108 outs left to rack up some runs with their hitters (108, for sure, because the games are all on the road), and 108 outs left to earn with their beleaguered pitchers. Each moment of the rest of this season is one fingernail scrape down the red thread ladder of the ball. It's easy to imagine how things might have been better than this, and easier still to imagine how they could be worse. It doesn't matter. All that does, for four more days, is that ball, and that vivid red countdown clock. View full article

Let's save the eulogies for the actual funeral, and the encomiums for the actual celebrations. While we're still here in this fraught week of baseball, let's marinate on a decision together. Image courtesy of © Brett Davis-USA TODAY Sports The magnificently spunky 2023 Chicago Cubs will get one last, scintillating, unwelcome opportunity to prove how special they are when it comes to bouncing back. With five games left in their season, they're on the canvas again, having taken a gut punch that leaves them searingly vulnerable and with almost no time to recover. They got no help from out of town Tuesday night, but that should have been fine. That should, even, have been another bracing moment of grim determination-building. Fine, snarls our hero, I'll do it myself. That was the mien of this team along about the middle of Tuesday night's game, when they led 6-0 over the mighty Braves and seemed poised for their fourth straight win. They'd gotten less help than that for which they might have hoped over the weekend, too, but no matter. They'd taken care of business against the lowly Rockies, and ho! There they were, doing so with an even fiercer force in the house of the team who will be the National League's top seed when the playoffs start next week. It was a good moment. Several things went wrong between there and the fly ball that eluded the glove of Seiya Suzuki in the bottom of the eighth inning, giving us all flashbacks to Brant Brown and Ron Santo. No individual one did them in--not even the Suzuki error. Still, one other error made earlier on did contribute to that moment, and it's what I want to talk about today. We can save myriad bigger, deeper thoughts for later, after we see where this game fits into the grand scheme of the incredible story of this Cubs team. In the top of the eighth inning, with the Cubs leading 6-5, Yan Gomes led off with a single. Due next were Miles Mastrobuoni and Pete Crow-Armstrong, and since both of them bat left-handed, Atlanta manager Brian Snitker chose that moment to go to left-handed reliever Brad Hand. David Ross did not immediately counterpunch, though. He let Mastrobuoni go up and lay down an unsuccessful sacrifice bunt. Then, rather than let Crow-Armstrong bat for himself against a lefty, he used pinch-hitter Patrick Wisdom to try to get Mastrobuoni (who had replaced Gomes at first on a fielder's choice, then quickly stole second himself) home. Mike Tauchman had started the game in center field. Crow-Armstrong came in to run for him in the middle innings, when the Cubs had a seemingly comfortable lead and Ross felt the defensive upside of his rookie center fielder outweighed any offensive downgrade in the move to Tauchman. In hindsight, that was obviously premature, because the Braves engineered most of a six-run comeback without testing the center field defense at all. At the time, though, one could make a strong case for the move--especially before Crow-Armstrong got himself thrown out on the bases like a nincompoop, a short time later. By contrast, though, Ross's eighth-inning sequence is indefensible. First of all, even given the special circumstances of this game (a contest the Cubs absolutely had to win, a thin bullpen, a uniquely lethal opposing offense), it is never correct to put down a sacrifice bunt with nobody out in the late innings of a game you already lead. The insurance run just isn't valuable enough, in terms of changing the likelihood of your holding that lead, to justify giving up an out. You play for the bigger inning in that situation. That goes double when you're on the road, and trebles when you consider that the Cubs were about to roll things back over to the top of their batting order, too. The right sequence of moves there was to pinch-hit Wisdom for Mastrobuoni, not Crow-Armstrong. Then, if Wisdom couldn't hit a dinger or split a gap or something, Ross could have had his young center fielder lay down the bunt, instead. Nico Hoerner still would have batted with a runner in scoring position, but the Cubs would still have had the elite defense of Crow-Armstrong in center field if the rally didn't become a run. Wisdom's limited playing time has unsteadied his already spotty defense at third base lately. It might be that he has none of the coaching staff's trust as a third baseman, and that they were only willing to have him replace someone if they could move Cody Bellinger out to center field and put Wisdom at first. It doesn't matter. If they were that unsure of him defensively, he shouldn't have gotten the pinch-hit at-bat all. Using Wisdom in Mastrobuoni's place might have made the inning more likely to result in a run, because even if a bunt did happen, it would at least come with one out, not zero. More importantly, though, if that's the substitution they make, then Crow-Armstrong is still in center field when Sean Murphy lifts a low fly ball to right-center in the bottom of the frame. If Crow-Armstrong is out there, he calls off Suzuki, and that fly ball is caught. The Cubs would still have had a tough job in holding the lead for one last inning, but it would have been a perfectly manageable one. Crow-Armstrong claims that ball. Bellinger couldn't, and Suzuki made the decisive mistake. A few players had brutal games, and have made bad mistakes at just the wrong moment during this team's accursed September struggles. Ross made at least two other dubious choices, and the front office could plausibly come in for its own scolding. After all, this roster has gotten miserably thin and beatable down the stretch, and it's the executive suite's job to precent that from happening. Still, this one felt like the truly awful mistake. Ross has been far too adamant about preserving the status of veterans this year. One of a manager's jobs--and especially, in the modern game, one of the most important ones--is to empower and profitably use rookies. Even teams much better than the Cubs need help from young players who haven't yet proved themselves, or who make some bad gaffes as they adjust to the big leagues. All season, Ross has largely failed in that regard. He's botched the development of Miguel Amaya, and not from some abstract, long-term perspective, but in that Amaya came up as a productive backup catcher and has become an afterthought who looks overmatched and confused at the plate. Ross waited too long to move Drew Smyly to the bullpen and call up Jordan Wicks. He has gotten nothing of any real value out of Crow-Armstrong and Alexander Canario, two players with sufficient talent to make a positive difference even in MLB over these final few weeks. He was similarly unwilling to give Matt Mervis sufficient runway to lift off. Not all of that falls on Ross, of course. Those types of moves and even some daily usage choices are collaborative efforts between the field staff and the front office. Still, this has been blown. Balls like the one that might have thwarted the Cubs' playoff hopes are why Crow-Armstrong is on the team. In a ham-fisted pursuit of a run that didn't need to matter, Ross only succeeded in planting the seeds of his own undoing. There are five games left in the season. Ross can't afford to screw up even one more of them. View full article

When the Cubs announced their probable starters for the penultimate series of their regular season on Sunday, there was a mild surprise in the sequence. It lends us clarity on their thinking over the next week, but raises as many questions as it answers. Image courtesy of © Isaiah J. Downing-USA TODAY Sports As everyone expected, Justin Steele will start Tuesday night in Atlanta, to open the Cubs' series against the top team in the National League. Once we saw him make a moderately surprising return to the starting rotation Saturday, it also seemed clear that we would get a Marcus Stroman start on Thursday or Friday, so it's no shock that he'll pitch in the finale of the series. Sandwiched between those two, though, was Kyle Hendricks's typical place in the rotation. Instead of him, Jameson Taillon will take the ball on Wednesday. Hendricks is pushed back to the season-ending series in Milwaukee, after the club's southern sojourn. That was an unexpected move. Yet, it makes plenty of sense, in a couple of ways. Firstly, Taillon might be a somewhat better matchup for the Braves than Hendricks is, and a somewhat worse matchup for the Brewers. Hendricks has faced Atlanta four times since the start of 2021. In those games, he's pitched 16 innings, allowed 27 runs, and watched 11 balls sail over the fence. Fans who remember any of these encounters know that few of those homers were wall-scrapers. By the numbers, the Braves actually aren't exceptional against changeups or low-velocity fastballs from right-handed pitchers. They are, by contrast, the very best team in baseball against right-handed fastballs at 93 miles per hour or harder, whereas the Brewers are dead last against such pitches. The Cubs know these numbers, too, but have chosen to make Taillon unavailable for the Milwaukee series in order to bring him forward for this series and avoid another matchup of Hendricks against that lineup. It's hard to blame David Ross for getting queasy at the thought of watching one of those implosive starts happen again with the Cubs' season on the line. Besides, Taillon probably won't be throwing Atlanta many fastballs. Increasingly, over his last several starts, he's become a cutter-slider guy against right-handed batters. It's the formula he felt for in vain for much of the season, but he's locked it in of late and had better starts than the team got from him throughout the first half. In his last seven outings, Taillon has pitched over 40 innings, with a strikeout rate north of 25 percent, a walk rate south of 5 percent, and a 3.35 ERA. This is the pitcher for whom the front office paid $68 million over the winter. Belatedly, he has earned this chance to pitch with the stakes as high as they can go. Still, Ross will need to be ready to pull the plug quickly on Taillon if things just aren't working. Against lefty batters, he's highly dependent on feel for his curveball, and if he doesn't have it, he and (hopefully) Yan Gomes will need to recognize that and pitch around the likes of Ozzie Albies and Matt Olson. In that event, though, Taillon should be on a short leash. That brings us to the central truth that underlies all these decisions, and the interest they provoke: the Cubs' pitching staff is thinning and tired. That goes double in the bullpen, relative to the rotation, so Ross will face a real challenge in trying to get to the end of one or two of these games if the Cubs grab a lead. One part of the logic in starting Taillon instead of Hendricks is the fact that Taillon is much more likely to give the team five or six innings. If things don't turn out that way, however, Ross will have to figure out who can give him length out of the bullpen, without leaving him shorthanded for what could be another truncated start by Stroman (still stretching back out, and not yet at full effectiveness again himself) the following day. Facing Atlanta and Milwaukee on the road to end this hard grind of a season, still needing at least two or three wins to give themselves any hope of making the playoffs, is a harsh demand. Ross and the front office are thinking more along the lines of triage than of triumph. Yet, with a one-game cushion on the also-depleted Marlins and Reds, the Cubs are in reasonably good position. They have done most of a very difficult job. They just have to finish it. View full article

The numbers aren't unanimous, but by and large, they say that the Cubs' reigning Gold Glove left fielder is still above-average out there. Reading that, didn't you feel just a little bit of third-party impostor syndrome? Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-USA TODAY Sports Remarkably, I do think the numbers (Defensive Runs Saved, from Sports Info Solutions, says Ian Happ is 3 runs better than an average left fielder; Defensive Runs Prevented, from Baseball Prospectus, has him 6.5 runs to the good) are telling us the truth. Somehow, someway, Ian Happ is getting more outs than he's costing the Cubs. His arm has been in fine form this year. Despite not throwing unusually hard, he's been efficient, because he's gotten rid of the ball exceptionally quickly on a few plays and has been deadly accurate. He's not letting everything fall in, either. Happ has been an average left fielder this year, with a bit of added value because teams keep testing his arm. That's a fact. This next bit is not quite a fact, but I defy anyone to tell me they honestly feel differently: Watching Happ in left field this year has been painful. If you're a Harry Potter fan, Happ's reaction to fly balls (and even a fair number of grounders and line drives that reach him on a hop or two) probably looks familiar. If not, consult the above, but you can still get the rough idea without watching. Happ isn't slower this year, and he isn't battling some highly technical mechanical flaw in his jumps or anything. The man is in a wrestling match with the baseball almost every time, even while it's still in the air. His legs don't look right. He lurches at the last second. About twice a week, I briefly think he's about to pull a Gregory Polanco. About once a week, he actually does. Happ has had to slide for balls he shouldn't have had to slide for, including when cutting off hits in the gap. On the Cubs' final home stand of the year this past week, he developed an extremely weird habit of not only deferring to the center fielder on balls hit to left-center field, but turning away from the ball entirely, as if suddenly very interested in the ivy or the goings-on in the Cubs bullpen. He and Pete Crow-Armstrong nearly collided on a ball toward the gap in the ninth inning Sunday, and while it was perfectly catchable for either party and there was ultimately no trouble, it looked wrong. None of this is a criticism of Happ. On the contrary, he's done incredibly well to remain at least average at his position, given the severe, mysterious affliction with which he's battling. At the end of a long season in which he's played all but three games and has already come to the plate 668 times, it's possible he's just dead tired. It's possible that the visual training he's so famous for doing to make himself a better hitter has created some unforeseen issue with the different ballistic tracking required to chase fly balls. It's possible Happ is playing through an injury of some kind. Whatever the case, that he's out there every day and hasn't cost the Cubs more dearly in left field is to be lauded, not derided. Still, the team should consider some alternatives. As hard as Happ is playing, he has hurt the team in multiple recent losses with bad defensive play. If they trust Christopher Morel in left field at all, letting him patrol that area might make sense, with Happ switching to the DH spot Morel often occupies in the lineup. Happ has been terrific at the plate this year, in ways that are being too much overlooked. In 27 more plate appearances than he had last year, Happ has the same number of strikeouts (149), 40 more walks (98 vs. 58), and only four fewer extra-base hits, with two more home runs. He's posted an .864 OPS over the last four weeks, with the team's playoff hopes in the balance every day. He deserves to be in the lineup every day. He just might need a little time off from left field. It's either that, or they're going to have to give him a second glove to wrestle more of these midair bad hops into submission. View full article

For three years now, the Cubs have handed thankless, unlovable jobs to Patrick Wisdom. In return, he's given them gratitude, love, and a smile that seems to be powering the team into its final, most rigorous trial. Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-USA TODAY Sports There have been as many moments when the game seemed to tell Patrick Wisdom he wasn't wanted as there have been when the 2023 Cubs seemed dead and ready for burial. Wisdom wasn't drafted out of high school, though some part of that was because he was committed strongly to Saint Mary's. He was a compensatory first-round pick by the Cardinals in 2018, but five years later, he still hadn't reached the majors, and he was right on the cliff toward which the professional baseball world pushes you--the one from which you're forced to leap, either to catch the ledge above and climb into The Show or to fall down into the abyssal scrap heap. He made the leap, but it was a close thing. The Cardinals traded him after 2018 for another afterthought minor leaguer. The Rangers cut him loose after 2019 as a minor-league free agent. The Mariners signed him a few weeks later, but he never squeezed onto their active roster during the pandemic season. They released him in mid-August 2020, and the Cubs scooped him up, but his brief stint with that (technically) division-winning team--a couple at-bats, starting three years ago Monday, in front of empty stadiums that made the game so much less fun--had to be a bit unfulfilling. For its next trick, the game reinforced Wisdom's utter unwantedness by having the Cubs make him a free agent again that fall, only to have him find no takers and come back on a minor-league deal in January 2021. The man was coming up on 30 years old, and he was clearly slated to start his season in Iowa. When he did get the call, in late May, it was Nico Hoerner's place on the roster he took (Hoerner was hurt and placed on the injured list), but quickly, it became clear that his role would be come closer to being the replacement for Kris Bryant. While Bryant moved around the diamond (a week at first base because of Anthony Rizzo's balky back, stops in all three outfield spots as Ian Happ and Jason Heyward struggled), Wisdom slid into the third base slot vacated by him and the (also injured) David Bote. In July 2021, Bryant started five games at third base, six in left field, six in right, and one in center. Wisdom started 13 times at third that month, but not in the final three games. For those, he moved to first base, to fill in for the departed Rizzo. In a sense, although eventually in tandem with Frank Schwindel, Wisdom was asked to replace both Bryant and Rizzo in the Cubs lineup. He wasn't even a young, exciting alternative. Neither was Schwindel. The Cubs gave him a miserable job to do--and he did it gorgeously. Both Wisdom and Schwindel hammered away that summer, somehow winning the affections of some severely disaffected Cubs fans. He came back in 2022, and was asked to be an offensive anchor for the team, a role that so hilariously outstripped his ability that it seems cruel in hindsight. Of his 534 plate appearances, 198 came as either the third or the fourth hitter in the batting order. He kept his OPS+ north of 100, somehow, despite playing through a hand injury for a chunk of that time. He was holding on to his opportunity to play in the big leagues, but what was being asked of him was beyond his ken. This year might be the meanest trick yet. The Cubs needed Wisdom's astonishingly hot start to surge out to their 11-6 record in mid-April, and to stay afloat through the rest of that month. Once he went cold, though, he took the brunt of the fans' frustration, which was really over the fact that the team had done so little to accumulate the depth a contender should have at the corner infield positions. Then, exactly as the team got hot, David Ross finally did bench him. That's not entirely a coincidence, of course. Wisdom isn't a good defender, despite plenty of hard work at both infield corners and in the outfield. He batted .108/.175/.230 in 80 plate appearances from May 15 through the All-Star break, and although there's an injured list stint (and some time spent playing hurt) in there, that's a genuinely ghastly, costly batting line. It wasn't unfair to observe that Wisdom wasn't helping the team, or to call for reinforcement precisely at his spot, which is what the Cubs achieved when they first worked Nick Madrigal in as a defensive ace and then traded for Jeimer Candelario at the deadline. It wasn't unfair of Ross to start using Wisdom very sparsely, which is what he's done ever since then. It was an awfully thankless job, though. When Wisdom did get the call, he was hitting for a team that has been trying to climb out of a hole deeper than any Cubs team has dug out of before, and he was playing ground balls with everyone scrutinizing him very closely. The stakes were high, and Wisdom had to contend not only with the pressure and the difficulty of succeeding in MLB in the first place, but with the challenges of doing so without any kind of regular game action. Since July 20 (the last game in which he was written in as even a semi-regular in the lineup, before the team's recent injury crisis), Wisdom has gone three or more full games without getting in on five different occasions. Take the final three days of August and the first 10 of September, and you have almost a fortnight in which Wisdom had four plate appearances. Since July 21, the Cubs have played 60 games, and Wisdom has come to bat 53 times. Yet, he has five home runs and a slugging average of .571 in that span. He came up in the sixth inning of a crucial game Sunday afternoon, with the Cubs trailing by one and the wind blowing in, and he smashed the ball through that wind so fiercely that the ball was long gone right off the bat. It was the game-winning hit that secured a sweep of the Rockies and gave them greater control of their own destiny entering the final week of this campaign. Wisdom has been on the rail of the dugout at every moment of his long stretches of inactivity. He's been such an eager concelebrant in big moments and such an unbothered worker in the face of a quiet demotion that he seems to command the respect of his teammates in a way that refutes any fan's inclination to disdain him. He's 32 years old. He's a journeyman who barely caught the ledge when he was forced to leap to the big leagues, and he might never again be a regular in MLB. Yet, he just hit his 75th home run with the Chicago Cubs. That's as many as Henry Rodriguez hit during his time with the team. Wisdom's next Cubs homer (if there is one) could tie him with Moises Alou on the career leaderboard--or it could not count toward a pursuit of Alou, because it could come in the playoffs. Rodriguez signed for $11 million over three years when he joined the Cubs, 25 years ago. Alou came along a few years later, at $27 million over three years. Wisdom, who might well be non-tendered this winter, has made about $2 million in total, at a time when the average salary in MLB is more than twice that per year. It's not unfair. It's just thankless. That's baseball, sometimes. That's why Sunday was so wonderful, even beyond the concrete benefits to the Cubs' playoff chances. That moment brought wonderful catharsis for Wisdom, and for the guys in that dugout who seem to genuinely love him. That the team still seems to have that irreducible resiliency at its core is a credit to Ross, to be sure. So is the fact that his tactical deployment of Wisdom has yielded such good production. The fact that Wisdom has maintained a great attitude and been a positive clubhouse and dugout presence all along, though, is a credit to Wisdom himself. Without often being rewarded for it by a demanding and unforgiving game, he keeps bringing joy and dedication to his work. Whatever his numbers or his baseline skills, he's been an important part of the Cubs getting this far this year. As the team stares down a tough slate of opponents for the final week and a thin margin for error, Wisdom has delivered his signature moment, but he's probably not done helping them rebound from difficulty and continue battling for one another. View full article

I think Snell is closer to being the heavy favorite than is Strider. It could come down to the final couple starts for each. I do tend to agree, though, in that I imagine it would take something very special for Steele to put himself back in the center of the conversation. These last two starts have thwarted him.

He'll still have options next year, too. A guy with speed and defensive value and on-base skills, who can also be sent to the minors when needed? That's a terrific little role player.

The chess board is rearranged. The endgame is here, and the Cubs are in a losing position, It's time to take some chances, and force some change. Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports By no means were the bats the primary reason why the Cubs just dropped a series to the lowly Pirates. The Cubs' pitching staff is running out of steam, and their ace let a game get away from him at the worst possible time. Still, they have missed too many opportunities to score--to come from behind, or to build bigger leads. It's been a long period of struggle, at the end of a very volatile season for the offense. To give his team the best possible chance to escape their current doldrums, David Ross should give his lineup one final shake--one last zap from the defibrillator paddles. Here's the lineup that ought to start every game the rest of the way, regardless of the handedness of the opposing pitcher. Nico Hoerner - 2B Cody Bellinger - 1B Seiya Suzuki - RF Christopher Morel - DH Ian Happ - LF Dansby Swanson - SS Yan Gomes - C Miles Mastrobuoni - 3B Pete Crow-Armstrong - CF Let's break that all down a bit. Firstly, it's past time for Hoerner to reclaim the leadoff spot he (rightfully) lost a few months ago. Since the All-Star break, he's batting .307/.385/.410, in 287 plate appearances. He's drawn 25 walks, been hit by eight pitches, stolen 21 bases in 25 tries, and continued to play relentless, high-level baseball. In the fug of negativity that has thickened the air in Cubdom lately, Hoerner's brilliant and thrilling second half isn't getting nearly enough attention. I don't hold with those who think this season will be defined, if it ends the way it's trending, by a September collapse. If they do miss the playoffs, count on me to run a piece here listing a dozen games they should (not merely could) have won, but most of them came in the first half. This remains the only Cubs team ever to fall 10 games below .500 and then reach 10 games over .500 at any point. Their season will be defined by that resilience and that tenacity, and Hoerner is the exemplar of that. If there's an indelible image from Thursday night's game that should be regarded as a microcosm of this Cubs season, it came in the bottom of the first inning. Hoerner smashed a double off the wall in the left-field corner, but the way he steamed all the way into and even around second base, it was clear he was thinking about the possibility that Bryan Reynolds would misplay the ball as it hit the basket, the bricks, or the ivy in Wrigley's unusually deep corner. He was ready to take third if the slightest hiccup occurred down there. This Cubs team's identity is right there: Hoerner, in an ultimately doomed effort, running hard and taking absolutely nothing for granted. He's the tone-setter the team needs at the top of the lineup the rest of the way. Batting Bellinger second is what every other team in baseball would have done by now. The best aggregate slash line for MLB teams this season by batting order position doesn't belong to the third hitter or the cleanup man. It's the second place, where the league is hitting .264/.338/.449. The Cubs are 26th in the league slugging average from the two hole, at .388. In what little time is left to them, they need to get their best hitters the most plate appearances, and right now, Hoerner and Bellinger are two of their best three hitters. The other one is Suzuki, who should bat third instead of second only because of some handedness considerations we'll discuss shortly. For now, suffice it to say that he's batting .336/.390/.639 since being restored to the lineup after a brief sojourn on the bench, on Aug. 2. Even on an 0-5 Thursday night, he had batted balls at 92, 93, 101, and 101 miles per hour, and struck out looking on a tough call in the ninth inning. He should be guaranteed a first-inning plate appearance every day the rest of the way. Giving Morel the responsibility of hitting cleanup is a leap of faith. So be it. In anyone's list of the five biggest home runs of this season for the Cubs, Morel has two. He's cranked 35 total homers in 537 plate appearances this year, between Triple A and MLB. He's hit 40 of them, and 80 total extra-base hits, in 828 career plate appearances in MLB. His .308 OBP would look out of place in the heart of most batting orders, and there might be times when what the team really needs is the cleanup hitter to get on base to start an inning. In that case, they could easily pinch-hit Mike Tauchman for Morel. It's Morel for whom the odds favor some power production, though, and it's the right time to take that gamble. Batting the right-handed Suzuki and Morel back-to-back is important, too, because that's how the Cubs can cushion Ian Happ and protect him from left-handed relievers a bit. Happ needs that. Too many teams have brought on lefties this year specifically to get at Bellinger and Happ in a three-batter sequence, or Tauchman, Bellinger, and Happ in a four-batter one. By separating Happ from other lefty batters with two lefty-mashing righties on each side, Ross could foreclose that option for opposing skippers. At this stage of the season, you could make a case for batting Gomes ahead of Swanson, but we'll save that for an even wilder dream post. For now, it's enough to suggest that the team needs to slide Swanson further down, as he continues to skid toward the finish of his first season on the North Side. He continues to try to pull the ball too much, especially in key situations, and he's not adjusting the way he needs to adjust in order to escape the slump. Gomes will need some rest, of course, but Miguel Amaya can bat in the same place in the lineup with no huge change in expected production. It's just the shape of that production that would shift somewhat. At the bottom of the batting order, the emphasis should be on defense. Look at the best teams in baseball. The Braves put Michael Harris II and Orlando Arcia at the bottom of the order every day. Those guys can still hit, but they're the center fielder and shortstop, respectively. They play not because of their offensive prowess, but because they're excellent fielders. The Cubs' lineup isn't as strong at the top as Atlanta's, but this reconfiguration would nudge them back in that direction, and as such, they can still afford--indeed, they need--players who get to play because they help the team get outs in the field. Mastrobuoni's mistake in the ninth inning Thursday night was inexcusable, but overall, he's the best defender they have for that spot on the active roster. Ditto for Crow-Armstrong in center field. Whenever a lefty enters for the other team, or whenever the Cubs need a big hit from the eight hole, pinch-hitting Patrick Wisdom for Mastrobuoni would be a no-brainer. Ditto for Tauchman at the expense of Crow-Armstrong. To begin each game, though, those guys should be out there providing the best possible support to a weary pitching staff. This isn't a panacea. This is a small change when big ones would be preferable. There remain bigger conversations to be had, before the end of the season. If the Cubs remain as committed to salvaging this as Ross claimed they would be Thursday night, though, this lineup change would be a great place to begin demonstrating it. View full article

Tom, man, I dig the optimism, because of course there does remain some meaningful chance that they fix this and make the playoffs. But if you think people have just been overreacting endlessly in both directions all year, I think a couple of things must be true: 1. You can’t have been actually watching this team that closely. As we’ve established in the past, you and I are the same age. We’ve seen the same number of baseball seasons. This team has not been normal. Their variance, their inconsistency, is at a far right edge of the scale. 2. You’re treating a very, very divided and multifarious “fan base” as a monolith. You’ve made a lot of remarks about the mood of the fan base, or Cubs Twitter or whatever, and I don’t find that there’s anything like the hive mind you perceive. The above is one take, and I thought a pretty well-articulated one by Brandon, in a sea of differing ones. I really think you’re oversimplifying perceptions and smoothing over realities too much.