NEWSLETTER
The Cubs are losers of six of eight. Kris Bryant is on the disabled list for the first time in his career. Kyle Hendricks and Jose Quintana have been far from themselves. Yu Darvish may not return for a long time yet.
But I feel … OK? Borderline good even?
Maybe it’s just the veneer of seeing the Cubs come back and win in such convincing fashion on getaway day, because, let’s be honest, recency bias is very strong in fanatics. We are genetically wired to be that way.
Still, after getting swept in Cincinnati by a hot, but also not great, Reds team – and doing so in horrible, horrible, choking-away-games fashion – the Cubs dropped the opener in Los Angeles, and were staring down the very real possibility of two four-game sweeps in a row. The Dodgers, after all, are among the hottest teams in baseball, and they were about to throw out three starters with ridiculous peripherals, including a dude with a sub-2.00 ERA, and also Clayton Kershaw.
So for the Cubs to then take two of those three games, yielding a split in that series … well, it’s hard not to feel like a turnaround. Maybe brief – we’ll see what happens this weekend – but it was a very clear pivot from how things were looking and feeling.
Heck, even just imagining if the wins had come in a different order confirms this feels a lot better. Imagine if the Cubs had won the first two games in Cincinnati and then lost the next six coming into today. We’d be feeling low, man. Real low.
The road trip, overall, was horrible. There can be no argument there. I won’t make it, and I won’t hear it.
But if you’re going to have a horrible road trip (and even good teams do), that one may have played out in the best possible way.
Joe Maddon and the Cubs seemed to agree, with Maddon saying that things were good except for the dang series in Cincinnati, and Anthony Rizzo calling it a “good ending to a not-so-good road trip.”
Consider this: although the Cubs’ playoff odds at FanGraphs had topped out at a virtually-season-high 96.0% before the Reds series began, they now stand at a still-robust 88.6% – higher than the odds were for most of May. If that’s how things look at the end of June, coming off the biggest slump of the year, that ain’t too shabby.
Hopefully, despite the injuries and the cross-country travel in the tough chronological direction, the way the Dodgers series plays out gives the Cubs a little extra energy coming into this home series against the Twins. Although the Twins are probably already toast in the (bad, bad) AL Central, teams that don’t often travel to Wrigley Field always seem to come in with a little extra bounce and a little extra hunger. Their fans will be there in force, too.
