CHICAGO — The Cubs have played their final homestand before next week's MLB trade deadline, and the six-game stretch was basically a perfect microcosm of what's gone wrong for the team in 2024.
Now it remains to be seen if some players on the roster have played their final game at Wrigley Field in a Cubs uniform.
The Cubs are off Thursday before playing a three-game weekend series in Kansas City against the Royals and a three-game series in Cincinnati against the Reds next week Monday through Wednesday. The trade deadline is Tuesday at 5 p.m.
On Monday, before his team opened a three-game series against the Milwaukee Brewers at Wrigley Field, Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer confirmed the team likely would not be buyers at the trade deadline.
Hoyer didn't say the Cubs would be sellers, either, and it's always good to remember that anything a team executive says leading up to the trade deadline must be taken with a grain of salt.
However, the results on the field during the six-game homestand coming out of the All-Star break didn't do anything to push Hoyer and the front office toward being a buyer. Rather, the Cubs only fell further down the National League playoff picture.
The Cubs went into the break four games under .500, but they had seemingly gained some momentum by going 5-2 on a difficult seven-game road trip to Baltimore and St. Louis right before the break.
Even more encouraging, they scored 41 runs on that trip, an average of nearly six per game, lending some hope that the dormant offense would wake up and lead the Cubs on a second-half run like last season, when they nearly made the playoffs.
Instead, that seems to have been an aberration.
The Cubs went right back to their non-hitting ways after the break, scoring a meager nine total runs in losing four of six to the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Brewers.
Frustration mounts
The nadir of frustration really came this week against first-place Milwaukee.
The Cubs were probably out of realistic contention for the NL Central title, anyway, considering they entered the series 10 games behind the Brewers, with St. Louis and Pittsburgh ahead of Chicago, too. But sometimes a "last-stand" series can wake a team from its slumber, so perhaps there would be one final push had the Cubs swept the Brewers, or at least won two of three.
Instead, it was just the same old story.
The pitching was great once again, especially the starters. Javier Assad struggled with control in the opener Monday night and didn't make it past the fourth inning, but he held the Brewers scoreless, the bullpen was stellar, and the Cubs got a 3-1 win.
Then, Jameson Taillon tossed 7 1/3 innings of one-run ball on Tuesday night and Justin Steele worked through 5 1/3 innings on Wednesday afternoon, holding the Brewers to two runs despite not having his usual command.
But the Cubs couldn't win either of Taillon or Steele's starts.
They scored no runs on Tuesday in a 1-0 defeat and just two on Wednesday in a 3-2 loss. The bullpen, working with no margin for error too often this season, couldn't completely keep the Brewers off the board, which is what they would've had to do. The result was the Cubs losing two of three, despite holding the Brewers to five runs the entire series.
In Wednesday's game, the offense had a solid start, managing two runs on five hits over the first three innings. But then it did next to nothing, putting just three runners on base and going down in order four times. The Cubs had just one runner reach scoring position over the final six innings, and that came with two outs.
“We pitched well. We didn’t score enough runs,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said to reporters after the game.
Perhaps frustrated fans are tired of Counsell seemingly giving that same answer after every game, but what else can he say?
The Cubs are tied for 24th in MLB in batting average (.233), 24th in slugging percentage (.375) and 23rd in OPS (.685). Their 424 runs rank 10th in the 15-team NL.
In the most important category — the standings — the Cubs are in last place in the NL Central, one game behind fourth-place Cincinnati and 11 behind first-place Milwaukee. Their chances to win the division are all but mathematically finished.
Their NL Wild Card prospects are certainly better, but not by much.
The Cubs are now five games out of the third and final wild card spot. While making up that deficit is not impossible, the more depressing reality is that they're in 12th place out of 15 NL teams.
Commensurately, the Cubs' FanGraphs playoff odds sunk to around 5% on Thursday, better than only woeful Miami and Colorado and rebuilding Washington in the NL.
Optimists can say that's not 0%, but it's been clear for a while now that 2024 just isn't the Cubs' year, and the front office seems to be in agreement, too.
So it could be quite a different roster the next time the Cubs step foot inside the Friendly Confines.