Well that was just a good old fashioned drubbing. Virtually nothing of value to take away from it, except for the fact that Alfonso Rivas keeps hitting. And Mark Leiter Jr. pitched a straight up traditional relief inning (and was great).
Non-competitive loss. Thanks for the Friday night fun.
Random thought: Some three-run sequences are worse than others. In the second inning, Kyle Hendricks gave up a monster double to Rowdy Tellez, which is certainly not good. But he got a dribbler from Lorenzo Cain with two outs and Nico Hoerner couldn’t quite complete the play (ruled a hit, but could’ve been an error). The next batter, Jace Peterson, hit a bare-minimum home run that bounced off the top of the wall in right (at the exit velo/launch angle combo, it’s a lazy fly out 75% of the time). It all still counts as three runs against Hendricks, but was that inning really that bad? He was a good Hoerner play away from that three being a zero, with no difference in his performance.
None of which to say Hendricks pitched well tonight. The fastball location was once again all over the place, he was getting hit hard, and he wasn’t getting whiffs at the rate he was in his more effective starts. I mean, he gave up a homer to 2022 Christian Yelich for crying out loud. More on Hendricks in the future.
He wasn’t the only Cubs pitcher that gave up a dinger tonight, though, not by a long shot …