Successful Road Trip, Russell’s Deep Struggles, a Special Pitch Coming, and Other Bullets

I’m chaperoning The Little Boy’s field trip to an ecological center this morning, which will be interesting and fun, especially because The Little Boy’s favorite thing to do is fall down on purpose. Gonna be a dirty kinda day.

  • Speaking of which, the Cubs haven’t found consistent footing yet this year, but the bright side isn’t hard to see. They’re still a game over .500, and took three of five on a road trip that sent them to Colorado and Cleveland, and where they played without Kris Bryant for three of those games. They also saw TWO starting pitchers reach the 7th inning for the first time this year, with Jon Lester last night actually recording outs in the 7th inning. It’s a minor miracle!
  • I feel pretty good, though I’ll feel a lot better when Bryant is back in there taking confident, comfortable, normal swings. The Cubs now get four at home against the first place Brewers, who are hot as all get-out, but who have primarily been beating lesser teams (not that there’s anything wrong with that – good teams are supposed to do that). Four-game series are tough to win, but if the Cubs can take three, I’m not sure there will be any looking back.
  • The Cubs come on home:
  • Addison Russell’s results at the plate have been quite awful so far this year, but he’s putting on a positive face:
  • Russell is correct that he’s making a good amount of hard contact this year (he’s also not striking out a ton and is walking at a decent clip), but his soft contact is waaaaaay up, and I expect that is a lot of the reason for his depressed BABIP (.250) and microscopic ISO (.068). He’s also correct that his numbers are especially bad with runners in scoring position (.174/.296/.217), but they’re bad in all situations. It just looks like a case of not making enough quality contact so far. Why exactly is that happening? Well, that’s harder to say, since he looks fairly well-disciplined at the plate, and I’m not immediately seeing anything wrong with his swing. Instead, I can’t tell you how many times already this season I’ve been deceived by what I thought was a good barrel that actually proved to be nothing more than a routine, medium-depth fly ball.
  • (Photo by Jason Miller/Getty Images)

  • Maybe it’s a thing, maybe it’s not a thing, but here are the numbers:
  • A great read from Patrick Mooney:
  • Very special moment coming on Saturday:
  • (If you’re unfamiliar with Hailey’s story.)
  • Oh, and about good teams beating bad teams:
  • This is truly incredible, and I hope he does very well:
  • That’s October of 2012 when he last pitched in the big leagues. Six years of having surgery, trying to come back, having surgery, trying again, having surgery, trying again, having surgery, and finally making it back. It just didn’t seem possible that this day would come.
  • It exists, and is a Deal of the Day: a universal remote that is a Harry Potter wand.
  • The NFL Draft begins today, which means Bears fans should be on The Ten-Yard Line, following on Twitter, and also give us a like on Facebook, please and thanks:
  • written by

    Brett Taylor is the Lead Cubs Writer at Bleacher Nation, and you can find him on Twitter at @BleacherNation and on LinkedIn here. Brett is also the founder of Bleacher Nation, which opened up shop in 2008 as an independent blog about the Chicago Cubs. Later growing to incorporate coverage of other Chicago sports, Bleacher Nation is now one of the largest regional sports blogs on the web.

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