Sports
Good news, the Chicago Cubs won 2 of 3 games against the LA Dodgers over the weekend. Bad news, they lost their best pitcher Justin Steele to injury for the rest of the season.
Early Results
A MLB team cannot win their division in April, but they can lose it. Going in to the middle of April we are seeing positive results from the Chicago Cubs, although they suffered the first set back of the season when Justin Steele was put on the 15 day IL. Right now they are at the top of the NL Central with a half game lead but that doesn’t matter as much as the +28 run differential that is the best in the league. The runs they scored during this last home stand in cold April weather is a very positive sign.
On Friday the Cubs start a 6 game road trip in Los Angeles and then San Diego, and I think these games are a good early test for the Cubs. I want to see them win at least two games in LA and win one in San Diego. The Dodgers have actually fallen back to earth going 6-4 over the last ten while the Padres has jumped up to the top of the NL West over the Dodgers and Giants. I will feel good about a split on this road trip.
The sun has come down on my last night here in Phoenix. We saw two Cubs spring training games, and they won one and lost the other.
Cubs win! Cubs win! Cubs win!
PSA. Chicago Cubs pitchers and catchers report to spring training in 8 days on February 9. The first spring training game is on February 20, 2025.
Good Teams Have Painful Loses
There is no consolation today for lifelong Detroit Lions fans. A loss in the first playoff game after having the best regular season record is particularly painful. Detroit fans can look back to the Detroit Red Wings, who had similar heartbreaking losses to the Devils in the 94-95 Stanley Cup finals and to the Oilers in 2005-06. The loss to the Devils was particularly hard because the Wings had not been in the finals for so long, had the best regular season record, and got swept. The next year the Wings again had the best regular season record and then lost to the Avalanche in the conference finals. Finally, the Wings won the Stanley Cup in 96-97.
Being a lifelong Cubs fan, I know the feeling of rooting for a team that were perennial losers to finally become a good team. I learned I would much rather feel the pain of a playoff loss than the feel the frustration of the Cubs being out of contention after the first month of the regular season. Painful loses are part of the consequences of being a good team, otherwise you are never in position to have such loses.
The Lions have built a firm foundation and there is no reason to not believe that Holmes and Campbell will learn from this and continue building upon that foundation. There are no guarantees next year will be just as good as this year, but there is every reason to look forward to next.
Major League Hypocrisy
I don’t understand how any professional sports owner can tolerate the same performance year over year, but that is the case for the Chicago Cubs as long as Jed Hoyer is in charge. I wonder whether Craig Counsell has started to think he made the wrong decision last year?
Today I was reading an article about the Cubs signing Matthew Boyd and found it to be the first to include a link to a post on Bluesky. It’s the first time I’ve seen a link to a post on Bluesky from something that looks like mainstream media.
Looking at the Cubs end of season summary by BleedCubbieBlue.com, I think the last list that compares the top ten players from the 2023 season to the 2024 season shows the best explanation for why the Cubs did not the playoffs. All of the Cubs best 2023 players regressed in 2024, and in the case of Cody Bellinger, the regression was dramatic. Last off season we did want Bellinger to leave, but I think this off season if Bellinger does leave the impact will not be as big.
The 2024 Detroit Tigers are exhibit A of evidence for how pitching in Major League Baseball is changing from a emphasis on starters to a team pitching staff. The Tigers basically got in to the playoffs with only one legit starter in Tarik Skubal, who dominated the Astros in his first playoff outing yesterday. Today and tomorrow, if necessary, the Tigers will deploy their entire pitching staff with a combination of openers, middle relievers, and closers and they can do so because they have one of the lowest team ERAs. I am sure the Tigers would love to have more than one starter on their staff, and they had that up to the trade deadline, but the quality of the bullpen was good enough to get them a wild card spot, and that would have been the case for the Cubs if the pen were better in 2024.
I am surprised the BleedCubbieBlue.com’s playoff summary of the Mets/Brewers series doesn’t ask the obvious question. Will the Brewers find their problem of not advancing in the playoffs was Craig Counsell? The first year of Counsell’s management of the Cubs produced the literal same result as the prior year, suggesting he is not the difference maker and that David Ross was not the problem. What might it mean about Counsell if the Brewers make it the World Series in the first year after his departure?
On this day in 1984 I watched the Chicago Cubs make the playoffs for the first time in my lifetime thanks to the pitching of Rick Sutcliffe. At the time it felt as though the best NL team, the Cubs, would meet the best AL team, the Detroit Tigers, but then the debacle in San Diego and Steve “bleeping” Garvey.
Just yesterday I wrote about how major league baseball has changed making the bullpen more important, at least as important, as starting pitchers and today BleedCubbieBlue.com reinforces that with stats about how trend of fewer stating pitching pitching 162 innings per year.
Looking To Next Season
The Cubs did not meet their expectation to win the NL Central division this year and they will not be in the playoffs this year. Last year I wrote that during the off-season the Cubs needed to sign two reliable starting pitchers and retain Merryweather in the bullpen; they only signed one reliable pitcher and Merryweather was injured all season.
Assad has earned the right to be in the starting rotation next year along with Imanaga, Steele and Taillon, but Hendricks should be gone so they will need one more starter and it is uncertain whether that starter is currently in the Cubs system.
Before deciding whether the Cubs need to sign a starter, there needs to be consideration that the bullpen in today’s game may be more important than starting pitching. Working with a slate of new bullpen pitchers is not a good strategy for how pitchers are now used, so I would focus more on keeping the bullpen pitchers you can count on and replacing those you cannot with people who you expect to be on the team for several years. I don’t think enough consideration has been made on the consequence of the three hitter minimum on relief pitchers.
Finally, it should be clear by now that the Cubs batting line up is too easy to shut down. It looks to me like every hitter has the same profile such that if a pitcher has success against one person they likely will succeed against all. Because nobody gets one or more hits in every game, there needs to be diversity such that when one player gets 0 hits another gets 2 or more hits.
The Cubs line up is a result of a system of evaluating hitters and that system, for which the Cubs front office is responsible, is clearly flawed. Exhibit A of this is the mid-season signing of Paredes this year and Candelario last year, both were no different than the other Cubs hitters and did not much help once inserted in to the lineup. The 2024 Cubs had the same results of the prior team and every team since 2017. If we want a different result then the system needs to change.
It’s time for a turnover in the front office, a new approach is needed in evaluating hitters. I am convinced that despite the new, cool metrics, team batting average still matters. A high team average exists with a good ratio of good, consistent hitters who have a high individual average, to unreliable low average hitters. Home runs might win games, but it doesn’t look like an entire line up of 20 home run hitters will win championships. The 2024 Cubs hitters excelled against poor pitching, but was not competitive against good pitching.
BTW, the Cubs did it again, putting up another football score (12-0) on the Pirates. The pitching staff and catcher posted a combined no-hitter. The Cubs are 4.5 games behind the Braves for the final wild card and continue to play with our emotions. An aside, how much worse would the Cubs be without Shota Imanaga?
The last two weeks sum up the Chicago Cubs 2024 season. Last week the Cubs put up football scores against the Pittsburgh Pirates (18-8, 9-5, 14-10) and gave me hope that they could make a real run for the last MLB playoff wildcard. A week later the Cubs are playing that same Pirates team and have lost 3-5 and 0-5, and that pretty much has me throwing in the towel on their chances. Yes, they are only 4.5 games back and thus mathematically in it, but after the Pirates leave the Yankees come in to Chicago for three games and then the Cubs travel to LA to play the Dodgers, and they are very likely going to be out of the running by the end of that series against the Dodgers. If the Cubs were to make the playoffs, it will be because they are lucky; their inconsistency makes it more probable they will be watching the playoffs
In Hindsight
The Cubs have been playing better since the All Star break and have got themselves to 1 game below .500, making the series against Cleveland that starts tonight important. The Cubs have a favorable schedule for August so they have a chance to put their record well above that .500 mark and make the Wild Card race interesting for their fans. Right now the Cubs are 3 games out of a final Wild Card spot but their are four other teams ahead of them. All the Cubs have to do is keep winning.
After The 2024 Trade Deadline
Officially the All-Star game is considered to be the half-way mark of a MLB season, but the real mid-season milestone that matters is the trade deadline. The actions taken by a team by the trade deadline indicate whether the team management thinks it can make the playoffs, if they do then they will try to make trades that help the team win in the current season, otherwise they start work on the next season. Jed Hoyer’s comments that he was focusing on 2025 was indication that Cub’s management doesn’t expect to make the playoffs this year.
Last season the Chicago Cubs were surprising buyers at the deadline, having gone on a winning streak that convinced Jed Hoyer the team had the shot at a wildcard spot, but that didn’t happen and David Ross the scapegoat. Now this season, after signing Craig Counsell to the highest salary of any MLB manager the Cubs are last in the NL Central with a 51-58 record and they are seven games out of the last wild card spot. In short, the Cubs are likely not making the playoffs this year. Are they going to fire Counsell?
Even though the playoff positioning is different between last year and this year, a fair assessment is that the team is really no better than the year before, nor the year before that or any other year up to 2016. What we have is the same problems of unreliable hitting and pitching from the bullpen. The fact that the 2024 team’s starting pitching has been so good is as much an indicator of how much MLB has changed since 2016 than anything. It used to be that teams with strong starting pitching were winners, but the game now does not rely so much on starting pitching to win games.
The sole purpose of starting pitching in the game today is to not lose the game in the first five innings by not giving up more than three runs, the bullpen is expected to now win every game by not giving up any runs. If that weren’t bad enough, hitting is a completely lost art in baseball, with hitters needing only a .244 batting average to be considered good. The game has come down to this, pitching keeping the opponents from hitting home runs until your own batters hit two or more home runs.
The Chicago Cubs line up has been made up of the similar type of unreliable hitters for nearly a decade now, which is a clear indicator to me that the front office’s idea of what is a major league hitter is out of sync with reality. As long as Hoyer is running the Cubs they will not be any different, and so it’s on ownership to recognize the insanity of continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result.
If I were the owner of the Chicago Cubs, now that the trade deadline has past, I would fire Hoyer immediately to signal that it’s time for a change. Take the time to review and interview people over the remainder of the season to find the right replacement to have your new front office in place before the off season begins in earnest.