Cubs Have Been How Bad During Recent Skid?!
Just like all good things, all bad things must come to an end. And even though facing Chris Sale on Thursday means the Cubs’ chances of having bad things continue for at least one more day, their recent run of futility is too rich with bad numbers to avoid mining it immediately. They haven’t just lost four games in a row, they’ve been completely stifled offensively.
As was pointed out to me following Wednesday’s loss, the Cubs have scored just three runs in those four games. Adding in the end of Friday’s win, they’ve scored in only two of their last 38 innings. Over the course of their skid, they are slashing .108/.213/.158 with a 15 wRC+ as a team. AS A TEAM. The next-worst team in terms of average is the Padres, and they’re 72 points higher. The Rockies are closest to the Cubs in wRC+, but their 50 says they’ve been 35% better.
Alex Bregman is the only player on the team who’s producing at an above-average level, which is something that has been in the works for a while now. Even though we’re dealing with an incredibly small sample here, Bregman’s season to this point has been characterized by getting bad breaks on hard-hit balls. Some of that is of his own doing, as his 14.8-degree average launch angle is nearly three degrees below his career mark and would be his lowest in any season by almost one degree.
What’s a little ironic is that the highest expected batting average and wOBA numbers come between 10 and 15 degrees. The problem for Bregman is that he’s hitting more balls on the ground than ever before, and not by a small margin. His 44.9% grounder rate is more than four ticks higher than in any previous season, while his 35.3% fly ball rate is lower than ever by nearly as much. The best results come from hitting the ball hard in the air, which Bregman has not been doing often enough.
The bigger issue for the time being is that the whole team is mired in a deep slump, something this roster was built to avoid. Again, we’re just talking four games. But when it comes to shaking out of it, facing Sale probably isn’t the best cure. The 37-year-old lefty won the NL Cy Young in 2024 and looks like a possible runner-up to Paul Skenes this year. Sale throws a lot of strikes and also gets a ton of chase, plus he’s among the best in the league at avoiding hard contact.
He has given up a few homers, though, and giving up six runs to the Angels earlier in the season proved that he’s human. The best possible outcome would be for the Cubs to rough him up before heading back to Chicago for a weekend set on the South Side, but even another loss might not be the worst thing. There’s a point at which you realize things can only get better, and I have a sense that that point will come on Thursday if it didn’t already happen on Wednesday.
The Cubs are too good to be this bad, so now it’s just a matter of them proving that again.
