What's wrong with the Cubs? A backslide to mediocrity on Chicago’s North Side | Sport
The Cubs are back. After flipping 107 years of history a season ago by winning the organization’s first World Series title since 1908, disappointment and losing have returned to the North Side of Chicago.
Entering this season, the reigning champs had 4-to-1 odds to repeat as champs according to Las Vegas sports books and were consensus favorites to take the National League’s Central Division. They were the reigning champs, young and had their entire core returning. While anything can happen in the postseason â€" just ask the Nationals â€" and it may be harder to repeat in baseball than any other sport, it was even more difficult to foresee a scenario in which the Cubs didn’t at least make the postseason. Then the season started and the Cubs went 13-11. Solid, if not quite on the pace of the spectacular 149-77 mark the team posted over the previous season and a half.
Then the Cubs went 12-16 in May. Okay. Just a small hiccup. A simple brief World Series hangover. The smiting would start at any moment.
But June only improved to 15-13 and now the Cubs are just 3-5 so far this month. While we all patiently waited for the Cubs to turn it on and easily vanquish the Milwaukee Brewers and the rest of their Central foes, it somehow became mid-July. There are now 88 games are in the books â€" 54% of the season complete -- and the Chicago Cubs are ... not all that good. It’s a fact that seems both completely familiar and hard to comprehend. But as baseball begins anew after the All-Star festivities, Joe Maddon’s squad sits at 43-45, five and a half games behind the Brewers in the division and seven and a half out of the wild card â€" the team’s first-half struggles punctuated in the final game before the break by a 14-3 drubbing at the hands of the Pittsburgh Pirates in which the Pirates scored 10 first-inning runs on Chicago ace Jon Lester. Instead of preparing to defend their title, the Cubs are in the process of digging a hole big enough that it could soon fit all five m illion who reportedly attended their championship parade.
So what exactly has happened? As with all losing teams, there are numerous problems â€" although thankfully this time none of them are goat or black cat-related. Two of the problems most definitely are not Kris Bryant or Anthony Rizzo. The team’s young sluggers have continued to show they are franchise cornerstones, combining for 38 home runs so far on the year. But Kyle Schwarber, the presumed third member of the team’s bomb squad, has struggled mightily. While Fox broadcaster Joe Buck made Schwarber out to be the next Ken Griffey Jr during the World Series, Schwarber’s success has been more in line with Donald Trump Jr this season, hitting .178 and getting demoted to Triple-A. Shortstop Addison Russell has also regressed at the plate, putting up an on-base percentage of just .297, which is at least slightly better than Javier Baez’s rate of .295.
If only the struggling Cubs batters had the luxury of hitting against the team’s starting rotation. To a man, Chicago’s starting pitching is well off their performances from 2016. Lester’s ERA is at 4.25 and was well above his 2016 mark of 2.44 even before Sunday’s drubbing. Kyle Hendricks, perhaps due for a regression after winning the ERA title last year, has seen his ERA balloon above 4.00, and 38-year-old John Lackey is having one of the worst seasons of his career (5.20 ERA) in what is increasingly looking like the last season of his career. But the biggest concern might be Jake Arrieta. Not so long ago described as baseball’s “unstoppable destroyer of worlds†â€" whoops! â€" Arrieta’s career now looks to be on a decline almost as steep as its ascent. Two years ago he was the National League Cy Young winner. Two years before that the Orioles gave up on him and stuck him in the minors. Today his ERA is up into the familiar mid-fours of his Baltimore years and he’s no longer getting swings and misses, primarily due to a drop in velocity. His earning potential has dropped even farther. A free agent after this season, Arrieta has undoubtedly shaved at least $100m off his next contract and that figure will grow with each bad start. Right or wrong, the pressure of all that money melting away has to weigh on him and impact his performances.
And that leads us to a third reason possible reason for Chicago’s decline: “intangiblesâ€. A team built by sabermetrics devotee Theo Epstein may shudder at the thought, but there’s ... something ... missing with these Cubs. David Ross and Dexter Fowler were both great “clubhouse guys†on last year’s team, but Ross retired and Fowler signed with the hated St Louis Cardinals. Whether their presence would have prevented incidents like catcher Miguel Montero blaming Arrieta for stolen bases, a decision which led to Montero getting cut, we can’t know. Surely neither could lead Schwarber’s bat to more pitches or motivate Lackey to reverse the aging process. But there just might be something to another intangible: the idea of a World Series hangover. If the Cubs continue on their current glide/crash path and finish out of the playoffs, they’ll be the fifth consecutive World Series champion to miss the postseason the year after they won it all. And like the Cub s are now, most of these teams weren’t even all that close to contending. The 2016 Royals won 14 fewer games, the 2013 Giants won 18 fewer and the 2014 Red Sox went from 97 wins and a parade to 71 and last place. The Cubs are currently closer in the standings to the last place Reds than the first place Brewers.
The good thing is, no one outside the clubhouse seems to care all that much about this team’s struggles thanks to last year’s championship. If you wipe 2016 out of the record books, sure, Chicago would be in full depression mode about another Cubs team falling far short of expectations. But 2016 happened. The drought ended. Cubs fans saw a championship in their lifetime. It’s looking increasingly like they may not see a repeat champion in their lifetime and that’s okay. They just wanted one championship. Cubs fans will take the ensuing hangover no matter how long it lasts.
0 Response to "What's wrong with the Cubs? A backslide to mediocrity on Chicago’s North Side | Sport"
Posting Komentar