Cubs Suffer Yet Another Shutout Loss as Erratic Performance Continues
Baseball is replete with all manner of metrics, but you don’t need to comb through FanGraphs or Statcast to know that it’s impossilbe to win when scoring zero runs. That’s been an issue all year for the Cubs and the “best” offense in baseball, and it cost them the opening game of their Wild Card series against the Padres. Not that it’s all on the bats, as their opponents built a snowman against a pitching staff that performed up to its worst expectations.
Simply put, the Cubs looked like a team worn down by the grind of a long season and weird final week, while the Padres looked fresh and excited. The game was effectively over after just four pitches in the bottom of the 1st inning, with the home team taking a 2-0 lead on a pair of solo homers. That’s not revisionist, either. It truly felt as though the Cubs had lost before they even came up to bat for a second time.
Hitting 220 home runs in the regular season was pretty cool, but giving up 231 was not. When it comes to the playoffs and the truism that “ball go far, team go far,” you can’t afford to be outhomered by your opponents. I took a look about a month ago at how the Cubs’ general inability to keep teams off the scoreboard has damned them all season. At the time, the Cubs had been held scoreless in 12 games while pitching only five shutouts of their own.
They pitched one more shutout and were blanked twice — not counting Tuesday — over their final 32 games, giving them a very lopsided 14-6 margin. No other NL playoff team was held scoreless that many times and none pitched so few shutouts of their own. In fact, none of the other Senior Circuit contenders pitched fewer than 10 in the regular season. What’s more, none of them were shut out more than 12 times.
The Cubs may have scored the most runs (850) and had the best slugging (.428), highest wRC+ (114), and most fWAR (37.8) in baseball, but none of that matters if it’s not consistent. Being a little erratic is fine during the regular season because you’ve got 162 games for things to even out. But when you have to win two of three in order to stay alive, you don’t have the luxury of failing to show up every now and then.
I guess you could say they were unfashionably late rather than being complete no-shows, as they did manage to collect three hits over the final few innings. Heck, they even staged a fake rally by loading the bases with one out in the top of the 9th. At no point did it feel like they were threatening to come back, however, as the Padres dictated the action from the jump behind starter Michael King and a group of energetic hitters who came ready to play.
Sure, the Cubs could still bounce back and win the next two in San Diego to make all this hand-wringing seem silly. They’ve certainly done that more than a few times over the past several months. The difference is that they’re already down a game and don’t have the kind of pitching staff that anyone trusts to win playoff games. It sure would be nice for Kevin Gausman and a collection of relievers to prove me wrong, but I’ll be awfully surprised if they can pull off a series win at this point.
