Cubs' morale is high in the midst of a strong August – will they be able to sustain it?
PITTSBURGH — Thanks to an August surge, the Cubs (68-66) are on pace to finish the season with 82 wins.
The beauty of baseball is that it isn’t that predictable. The Cubs could ride their recent momentum and favorable schedule to a significantly better record. Or they could stumble at the finish line.
So far, though, their route there took some surprising turns, in aggregate, this is about the season they were projected to have. The Cubs have their own projection models, but going into the season, Fangraphs had them at 82.3 wins, with a 41.3% chance to make the playoffs.
Now, it’s looking like 82 or 83 wins won’t secure a National League wild-card spot. Not even close. It seems the Cubs were always going to have to outperform projections to make it into the postseason. But morale is high after a sweep in Pittsburgh this week
“We’re playing really good baseball,” left fielder Ian Happ said. “We’ve really strung together some good offensive performances. . . . I’ve been saying this for a couple weeks now: it’s game by game and series by series.”
The Cubs have the Mets (70-64) in their sights. But the Braves (73-61), who occupy the last NL wild-card spot, haven’t faded despite injuries to key players. While the Cubs are 16-8 in August, the Braves put up a respectable 15-11 record this month going into Thursday, making them difficult to catch.
The Cubs are making up for a two-month rut — which lasted longer than anyone expected. But as the season has worn on, the good and bad months have evened out. The Cubs overperformed against a tough schedule in April, steadied the ship in July, and have won the series they were expected to in August.
If they keep this strong stretch going through September, especially if other teams falter, they have a chance to beat the odds and seize a playoff berth.
If they miss again, the question will be where it all went wrong. And at least part of the answer will be that in constructing this roster, president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer and his team didn’t build in enough wiggle room. Counting on overperformance is no sure bet.
To understand their approach, however, it’s necessary to look back a few years.
Coming out of the Cubs’ 2021 teardown, when the prospects the Cubs received in trade-deadline deals were still young and largely unproven, MLB Pipeline put the Cubs’ farm system at No. 18 in 2022 preseason rankings.
In that way — taking stock of a middling farm system and a lack of slug after parting with established players — the 2022 Cubs weren’t dissimilar to the 2013 Phillies. But Chicago is hell-bent on shortening the timeline from sell-off to perennial playoff contender. It took Philadelphia a decade.
Free-agent spending got the Phillies over the hump and has kept them on the other side. But teams look at the Mets as a cautionary tale. Owner Steve Cohen set spending records going into the 2023 season, making for a thrilling offseason. But a rash of injuries and exposed depth led to a 75-87 record, and they missed the playoffs by a large margin.
That balance between spending and development is one few large-market teams beyond the Dodgers have struck for any extended period in the past decade. But the Cubs’ primary goal is sustained success — a category that’s difficult to judge until after the fact.
As for this season, the Cubs are still fighting. Through Wednesday, Fangraphs gave them a 3.6% chance at making the playoffs. But at this point last year, the Cubs had 73.8% odds. The unpredictable can drastically swing a team’s fate, even with only a month left in the season.
“We’ve got to catch up,” manager Craig Counsell said this week. “We’ve got to keep winning games; that’s the part that we can control.
‘‘And just keep doing that and see where we end up.”