Cubs ‘Gotta Play Better’ to Avoid Another Double-Digit Streak

If I had told you 18 days ago that the Cubs looked like the worst team in baseball, you’d have thought I was an idiot. Well, even more of an idiot. They had just completed their second 10-game winning streak in a span of 23 games and were 15 games over .500 with a 3.5-game lead in the division. Since then, however, they have won just two of their last 15 games to fall back to third.

They’re mired in an active streak of nine straight losses, so another defeat on Tuesday would give them three 10-game streaks in 39 games. That is unthinkable, but no more so than how poorly they’re playing. Dating back to May 9 in Arlington, the Cubs have been shut out four times and have averaged just 2.3 runs per game. They have scored only three runs in the first four innings of their last seven games, with all of them coming this past Sunday against the Astros.

In that same stretch, they have scored a total of seven runs against opposing starters. But you know what’s even wilder? The Cubs have scored in just six of their last 63 innings. Compare that to the Astros, who scored in nine different innings during their recent sweep at Wrigley. Since this skid started, the Cubs’ .178 team batting average is the worst in MLB by 19 points, their .273 slugging percentage is last by 26 points, and their 39 runs are tied for last.

The pitching has been only slightly better, with a 5.01 ERA that ranks 28th and a 20.3% strikeout rate that sits 22nd. Their 76 runs allowed are fewer than only five teams, but their starters are carrying a 6.51 ERA with 58 runs allowed. Both of those tallies rank 29th, in case you were wondering. All of which is to say that the Cubs have arguably been the worst team in baseball over the last two-plus weeks.

“We gotta play better, we gotta swing the bats better, we gotta pitch better, we need more guys contributing to good stuff,” a bewildered Craig Counsell said after his team’s latest loss. “And as a coaching staff we gotta figure out a way to get the players there. Offensively, we are equipped to be way more consistent than this and way better than this.”

They are indeed equipped to be better, as we saw when they were racking up wins left and right, but that matters little when middle-of-the-order hitters go ice cold. Ian Happ and Seiya Suzuki have been abysmal during this stretch, putting up numbers that don’t bear repeating. Michael Conforto, who was the hottest hitter on the planet for a few minutes, has fallen off a cliff. Though his overall line is still strong, he’s 0-for-16 with seven strikeouts and no walks during his last six games.

Michael Busch homered for the Cubs’ only run yesterday, and he’s been their best hitter by a wide margin lately. That’s a reversal from earlier in the season, when he seemed like the only one in the lineup who wasn’t contributing. The whole thing about this team from the beginning of the season is that its construction was meant to avoid these kinds of deep ruts. Yet, somehow, they’ve managed to get completely sideways with no signs of righting their course.

Everything about this group right now reeks of incompetence. That isn’t to say the players and coaching staff are incompetent, mind you, only that it looks for the time being as though almost no one knows what in the hell they’re doing. This recent stretch has been some of the worst Cubs baseball I can remember, and that’s really saying something. At least in some of those really lean years, we expected them to be bad.

What’s happening now is a whole new level of futility that seems to have completely befuddled all those involved. You can almost feel them pressing when you watch the games on Marquee, and it’s like everyone has seen a ghost. This mess has to turn around at some point because it’s inconceivable that they could continue this level of poor play much longer, but it might take an opponent to gift the Cubs a win just so they can remember what that’s like.

I’m not ready to climb to the ledge or anything, and I actually believe this group can still figure things out well enough to make us laugh about this stretch in September. That said, it’s incredibly frustrating and disappointing to keep following this mess day after day.