Cubs Living, Dying by Home Run as Postseason Exit Looms
Ball go far, team go fart. The Cubs have out-homered their opponents 7-5 across five postseason games so far, yet they’ve scored no more than three runs in any contest and have been outscored 11-21 overall. That’s because only one of those seven homers came with men on base, and their only multi-run shot came in the 1st inning and represented their only offense in Monday’s loss.
That it was followed almost immediately by a matching blow by unlikely Brewers hero Andrew Vaughn was merely academic due to the futility of both the offense and the pitching. Other than literally everyone, who could have imagined that Shōta Imanaga would continue a weeks-long stretch of serving up dingers? Even with a team as desperate for power as the Brewers, a steady diet of meatballs will eventually end poorly.
“I ruined the game,” Imanaga told reporters via his interpreter. “So there’s a lot of frustration within myself.”
He’s not the only frustrated party, especially after each of the losses in Milwaukee played out as poorly as they did. I mean, how do you hit go-ahead homers early in both games, only to have both overwhelmed by crooked numbers in the subsequent bottom halves of the 1st inning? It’s not just uncanny, it’s soul-rending. A big part of the emotional let-down is that the Brewers’ counterpunches were entirely predictable.
Neither Imanaga nor Matt Boyd has pitched well in the second half, and the latter went on short rest despite a much heavier regular-season workload than anticipated. Craig Counsell defended the decision following the game, saying the whole organization supported it while explaining that they felt the 34-year-old could bounce back quickly from his abbreviated outing in Game 1 of the Wild Card series.
At the risk of making like an anthropomorphic version of Imanaga’s pitches, it has felt for the most part like Counsell is asleep at the wheel with his Tesla’s self-driving feature doing the work. Maybe that’s why the Cubs are crashing and burning. It certainly doesn’t help that Cade Horton hasn’t been available, making otherwise questionable pitching options the best possible options. Unless you’re with me in saying Colin Rea should have started Game 1 in Milwaukee. Or Game 2. Alas, that ship has sailed.
So while the pitching decisions have been highly questionable, I can give Counsell a little grace based on the circumstances. What remains more concerning to me is how the Cubs seem to be letting the games come to them rather than pressing the action.
They’ve stolen exactly zero bases on only two attempts in the postseason so far, both in the Wild Card clincher over the Padres. Baserunners haven’t exactly been plentiful, which understandably decreases the possibility of swiping bags, but that makes the need to move runners along all the more important. Especially when we’re talking about a team that has experienced a disproportionate amount of success when utilizing the running game. And especially when offense is so clearly at a premium.
“I think it’s a pretty simple idea here,” Pete Crow-Armstrong, he of one of those stolen bases attempts, quipped after the latest loss. “We go put more balls in play, we’ll probably score more runs.”
Scoring more than three runs in a postseason game is something the Cubs haven’t done in 2,917 days, though it’s hard to score when you don’t play the games in the first place. Even if they manage to get all the way to four or, gasp, five runs, the Cubs have dug so deep a hole that it’ll be nearly impossible for them to crawl out. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but my optimism has left the building.
In the end, I’m not sure whether or how much of this was avoidable. Between Horton’s injury and the Brewers obviously usurping all the Cardinals’ devil magic and then some, it’s possible no amount of lever-pulling or button-pushing from Counsell would have helped. But, damn, this series has sure felt like a massive letdown that could and should have gone in at least a slightly different direction.
