I thought you might just want a little note to get your week started on the right foot.
With last night’s win, the Chicago Cubs are 8-1 since the All-Star break, surpassing most reasonable expectations for how aggressively the switch could have been flipped – do you even remember just how low things had sunk right before the break? Jon Lester gave up 10 runs in the first inning against the Pirates! Even if you chop out that inning, the Cubs still lost that game 4-3! The Cubs were 5.5 games out of first place in the NL Central, and, realistically, the hope was that they could chop that down to a couple games by the end of July, and maybe pull into first place before September rolled around.
Instead, it took a little more than a week.
The Brewers have won just three times since the break, and they now stand a percentage point behind the Cubs in the standings:
Increasingly, the Pirates seem like the team to be most concerned with if you’re a Cubs fan, but, in truth, this is just going to be one of those stretches where the focus will be on the Cubs winning as many very winnable games as they can.
Today, the team kicks off a four-game set against the selling, terrible White Sox. Win three of those four games, and perhaps the Cubs will see themselves alone in first place by the time the weekend series against the Brewers rolls around.