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“Two games in a row and the other team celebrated on our field,” third baseman Kris Bryant said. “That makes it a lot tougher, watching them.”
Bryant, the league’s most valuable player in that dreamy 2016 season, played just 102 games this year because of shoulder injuries. He struck out three times on Tuesday, going 1 for 6. The Cubs had six hits overall and fanned 16 times, going 1 for 6 with runners in scoring position.
That was a chronic problem for these Cubs. They ranked third in the majors in plate appearances with runners in scoring position this season, yet hit just .247 in those spots, ranking 20th. The trend continued in their one-night postseason.
“Yeah, we played that game a lot,” Manager Joe Maddon said. “Believe me, it was on my mind for a large part of it. We had some opportunities, we just could not cash in. They pitched really well, too, but we need to figure that out in the off-season, next spring training.”
The Cubs have 387 wins in four seasons under Maddon, who is entering the last year of his contract. His job would seem to be safe, but you never can tell anymore; three playoff teams dismissed their managers after last season, and on Tuesday the Minnesota Twins dumped Paul Molitor, a year after he led them to a surprise wild-card berth.
Maddon got little help this season from the Cubs’ splashy off-season moves. The team signed pitchers Yu Darvish, Tyler Chatwood and Brandon Morrow for a combined $185 million, enticed by their hard, sharply moving repertories. Yet all were inactive on Tuesday, felled by injuries, underperformance or both.
Other moves worked, like the signing of reliever Steve Cishek last winter and the summer trades for Cole Hamels, Daniel Murphy, Jesse Chavez and Jorge De La Rosa. But besides a brief uptick after Murphy’s arrival in August, the Cubs simply could not generate consistent offense from a lineup of stars.
The Cubs were supposed to run away with the Central for the third straight year. Instead, they’ve had to settle for a measly Wild Card spot. They could have avoided this had they been able to muster any offense against the Brewers in Monday’s tiebreaker, but that’s been the story of the season. Ask Cubs Twitter, and they’ll tell you that this team has severe offensive issues. I mean, just look at the lineup they trotted out against the Brewers with the division in jeopardy.
Daniel Murphy: 117 wRC+
Ben Zobrist: 124 wRC+
Javier Báez: 131 wRC+
Anthony Rizzo: 125 wRC+
Kris Bryant: 126 wRC+
Kyle Schwarber: 116 wRC+
Jason Heyward: 100 wRC+
Willson Contreras: 101 wRC+
What a bunch of scrubs, huh?
Non-pitching Cubs have hit .268/.345/.427 for a 107 wRC+. That’s sixth in the majors and second in the National League. Now, they’ve been without Bryant for much of the year, Rizzo started the year in a severe slump, Murphy hasn’t hit as well in a Cubs uniform, and Contreras isn’t the same but this offense is in better shape than the Rockies. The Rockies only have three above average hitters by wRC+ on their entire roster. The Cubs don’t have to play a below-average bat.
Still, Cubs Twitter isn’t wrong. This team does have some serious offensive problems. Though their 4.69 runs per game is ninth in the majors, the Cubs have been held to one run or fewer in 39 games. How can that be? How can a team be simultaneously potent and impotent?
The Cubs have run into the same problems as the Dodgers. The Dodgers nearly missed the playoffs because they haven’t been good in high leverage situations. As a team, the Cubs are hitting .226/.305/.340 in high leverage situations. That’s just a 68 wRC+ and the worst mark in the league. The Cubs are one point behind the Nationals and we saw how their season wound up.
Ian Happ, Anthony Rizzo, and Jason Heyward are the only hitters who haven’t gotten worse when the game is on the line. Báez, who has been the Cubs’ single best hitter this year, has an OPS of just .598 in high leverage situations. Contreras, who has had a down year all around, has been even worse at .467. But the biggest culprit of them all is Kyle Schwarber.
In 56 high leverage plate appearances, Schwarber has hit .044/.214/.044. That’s an OPS of .259. That’s a wRC+ of -62. In the biggest moments, Schwarber has hit like José Quintana. His -62 wRC+ isn’t just the worst on the team, it’s the worst in the majors. And he didn’t just eek out Devon Travis and Steven Duggar. His wRC+ is 16 points worse than the next closest player.
The Cubs’ lack of clutch manifested itself in Monday’s game. Looking at the FanGraphs play log, the Cubs were 1-for-19 with two walks in medium-to-high leverage situations (leverage index of 0.85 or higher). The one hit was Rizzo’s dinger. One walk set up Contreras grounding into a double play. The other walk (which came immediately after that double play) came ahead of Báez’s strikeout with runners on first and second to end the sixth. If you remember, Báez worked the count to 3-1 and eventually swung through a belt-high fastball.
The good news for the Cubs is that this isn’t indicative of any sort of flaw. This is just what has happened, not what will happen. This isn’t predictive. Chili Davis hasn’t turned the team into a ground attack team. Their ground ball rate is about where it was last year, and only slightly higher than the year before. They’re still a good offensive team just as the Dodgers are still a good offensive team. The Cubs lack of clutch hitting doesn’t prove to me that the Cubs won’t hit any more than the A’s incredible clutch hitting proves they’ll continue to hit.
Still, the Cubs find themselves on the brink of elimination because they haven’t been able to come up with the big hit. Now, they’ll need those hits to come if they want to stay alive.
Kenny Kelly is a writer for Beyond the Box Score, McCovey Chronicles, and BP Wrigleyville.
The Chicago Cubs were eliminated in the 2018 National League Wild Card Game by the Colorado Rockies. The game took approximately 28 innings and seven hours, which means there’s plenty to discuss. Do you want to talk about the Denver kid, Kyle Freeland? Yeah, that seems like a great idea. What about the spunky pluck of Tony Wolters? Sure. If you want to get dark, we can talk about the Cubs and the opportunities they squandered all game, if not all year. Why were they even in the Wild Card Game in the first place?
It’s all compelling. It was a tremendous baseball game and another argument in favor of the single-game elimination format of the wild card.
For my money, though, nothing beats the story of the pinch-runner who came into the game in the eighth inning.
Terrance Gore was the hero until he was a goat until he was a footnote. The Cubs had the bright idea of adding a mega-pinch-runner to their postseason roster, and it looked like it would be the smartest move anyone would make this October. Entire Yes albums have been made out of subjects less exotic and thrilling as Gore’s dash around the bases. He immediately stole second with two outs in the eighth inning, and then he scored the tying run on a single. It was so damned pure.
And then he had to swing a bat.
This was in the 13th inning. Because he had replaced Anthony Rizzo, who can actually hit.
Do not make fun of the Cubs for trying this, though. It was beautiful until it wasn’t. The biggest problem was that the Cubs scored one (1) run in an elimination game, and there aren’t enough narratives in the world to gloss over that. Picking apart individual performances and decisions seems silly when the collective performance looked like something the 2013 Cubs would barf up on the back end of a doubleheader.
But it was Gore who was the most compelling story for a few seconds, an asteroid burning up on reentry. He had appeared in eight career postseason games before tonight, and his team had won all eight. When a team put him in, it was like they were playing a Magic: The Gathering card that allowed them to take the other player’s wallet. With a pinch-running appearance and a stolen base, Gore was the reason the Cubs tied the game. For a moment, he felt like the reason they were going to win it all.
Then Gore had to swing a bat.
And he did! With great gusto! On what would have been ball four? On what would have been a leadoff walk. On a ball that would have put the tying run on base.
Oh, no.
If Gore got on base to lead off the 13th inning, then the Rockies would have clenched their everything just a little bit tighter, and it would have become a nauseous cat-and-mouse game that would have favored the Cubs. Gore is a runner who was seemingly created, Serpentor-style, from DNA extracted from Vince Coleman, Maury Wills, and Herb Washington, and the Cubs were an ill-advised swing from getting him on base and looking like the smartest team in the land. Every postseason team should have a Terrance Gore on the roster, just for this reason, and they would look like geniuses.
Until he has to swing a bat.
Gore had to swing a bat, he didn’t reach base, and it’s not a secret why. Baseball is hard. Really, really hard. It’s freaking hard to hit a Scott Oberg slider. It’s hard to take the 52nd major league plate appearance of your life with a season on the line and parse the difference between a slider just under the zone and a slider in the zone. It was an unfair ask of Gore, and it ended about how you would have expected.
Twitter screamed at Gore for swinging, but that’s too reductive. Fellow speedster Dee Gordon walked nine times in 588 plate appearances this year, not because he was impatient, but because major league pitchers have enough skill to say, “I’m not dumb enough to walk this guy.” It’s what pitchers did with Juan Pierre before him. Gore was thinking strike, and he should have been. Honestly, it was Oberg who screwed up more by throwing anything outside of the strike zone, even if it was a good pitch.
Gore didn’t reach base because baseball is hard, and that’s a perfect reminder of what the postseason really is. It’s about angles and imperceptible advantages and moments in time. It’s about having that guy at the plate exactly at the right time, when it took about 47 different roster moves to get that guy on the roster in the first place. For just a few minutes, it looked like the Cubs had figured it out. They had the speedster, and they had tied the game because of his speedsing.
It almost worked.
And then he had to swing a bat.
Ned Yost deployed a nuclear Terrance Gore for the Royals and won two pennants with his help. The Cubs weren’t drunk when they figured they would try the same thing; it was an inspired decision. Now they look like dinguses with the benefit of hindsight, even though replacing Rizzo for Gore was the reason the game was tied in the first place. The right player at the right time became the wrong player at the wrong time.
Which means it looks like it’s time to dust this off again:
It’s taken me about four decades to realize that’s the entire postseason, summed up into a sentence: It’s a fine line between stupid and clever. The lefty-masher who doesn’t really have another skill, that third lefty in the bullpen, the September call-up who was blowing 100 mph ... these are all postseason tropes that get added to the roster at the last second because of someone’s wild hunch. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t. It’s entertaining as all hell either way, and sometimes the three-inning reliever eats the bear, and sometimes the bear eats the three-inning reliever.
If we’re into baseball as entertainment, we should root for hunches like Gore to work. It’s fun as hell to watch Gore run around the bases. It was clever until it was stupid, but it nearly worked.
The Rockies are moving on because of boring things like “strong starting pitching” and “a lineup featuring talented hitters,” and the Cubs were eliminated because they scored one (1) run in 13 innings. For a brief moment, though, we all saw a peek of an alternate universe in which Terrance Gore took charge.
I would like the ability to live in that alternate universe from time to time, if that’s okay.
I would also like the ability to flip back to the regular universe, where teams employ talented, well-rounded players to play the cleanest and best baseball possible. Both realities are desirable, even if one seems more likely than the other.
Welcome to the postseason. It’s dumb as hell, unless it’s completely brilliant. Nothing makes sense, and everyone goes home too early, except for that one team.
I can’t believe we still have a whole month of this stuff.
