Nothing doing for the bats again tonight against a good pitcher with high velo and upper-tier offspeed stuff. Yeah, guys like Ian Anderson will make a lot of hitters look bad this year, but the extent to which the Cubs struggle so disproportionately badly against quality pitching. Man. I know you know this already.
Trevor Williams had some of his nastiest stuff working tonight – a lot of ugly swings – and it was a start you’d gladly take. Ronald Acuña Jr. got his, as he pretty much always will, and then an Ozzie Albies double with a runner on base was the other run. Those two runs would’ve been enough for the Braves.
Ryan Tepera and Rex Brothers looked REALLY good tonight, too, for whatever that’s worth. Lower-leverage spots, and all that, so I won’t go crazy. But it’s just a reminder that, yeah, the Cubs do have guys in the bullpen who are dominant when they are at their best (it’s just that they are not consistently at their best, and their worst is, well, see the next paragraph).
Unfortunately, Brandon Workman’s appearance had big “Jason Adam this weekend” energy, where he just could not stop the bleeding, and then when things got really tight, he just couldn’t throw strikes. It was one of those slow-moving train wreck innings, that you just hoped a batter would hit a rocket right at someone, and although Nico Hoerner’s error (on a rocket, incidentally) rendered two of the runs unearned, the performance was just really bad.
Just about as bad as the offensive performance on the night. Two hits. Two. Hits.