You know how sometimes teams “win ugly?”
Today, the Cubs lost ugly.
The thoughts:
1. It’s only one game.
As is tradition when reacting to an Opening Day loss, we must caution ourselves against overreacting. It’s 1/162nd of a season. It was a weird day in terms of just how cold it was. But at the same time…
2. It looked sadly familiar.
And that’s what hurts. The offense was impotent again, incapable of getting hits. It wasn’t like hard-hit balls were turning into outs. By Statcast’s XBA (expected batting average), the Cubs only “deserved” three or four hits, given the contact they produced. The fact they got just two wasn’t a product of bad luck.
The Cubs front office is in a tough spot in that if they move on from the core, they’ll get blasted by the fans, but the core is, by definition, the core of this impotent offense.
Hopefully today was an aberration and this passes out of memory soon. But in this sense, while it’s just another 1/162nd of a season, it’s raising the sample over which this trend has been displayed to two or more years.
3. The walks were weird.
I’m hoping this was just related to the cold and Major League Baseball scaring away any pine tar users. But man. So many walks.
4. Don’t worry about Kyle Hendricks.
There are things where the ugliness was a continuation of a prior trend (the lack of hitting). There are things where the ugliness was an anomaly (the walks). Hendricks’s outing falls into the latter camp. He made a few nice pitches. He wasn’t sharp—it was one of the worst starts of his career—but it is not yet a trend.
5. Anthony Rizzo swung the bat well.
The Cubs’ two hardest-hit balls were both hit by Rizzo. Rizzo turned a single into a double with some hustle in the first. Rizzo blew a big kiss to the crowd after that double, which reminded me, at least, of the Cubs’ failure so far to extend him.
6. Willson Contreras also had a hustle play.
Contreras made things happen on the basepaths too. Always fun to see that. Always fun to watch Contreras’s energy.
7. Ke’Bryan Hayes looked as advertised.
That home run was smoked. And his other balls in play were hit rather well, too. By XBA, he deserved a two-for-five day.
It seems like it’ll be fun to have him in the division. Except for, you know, the part where the Cubs have to play him.
8. So much slop.
David Bote had a terrible lack-of-urgency play. The Pirates gave away two or three runs via errors/baserunning mistakes/maybe something else I’m forgetting I feel like there was something else. There were, of course, the walks.
The game started exciting, especially on the heels of a strange season and a trepidatious offseason. But around the bottom of the fifth, it turned into an exercise in self-torture.
9. The Cubs will probably lose this series.
I wrote yesterday that we should hope for the Cubs to manage a 14-12 or 15-11 mark in April, hopefully having won five of nine against the Brewers. That isn’t at all out the window, but it’s going to be hard to win this series, with the likeliest outcome of the next two games a split. The path to 14 or 15 wins is still there: Win five or six against the Brewers, three total against the Pirates, and somewhere between five and seven out of the eleven played against the Braves, Mets, and Reds. But it is, as said, harder than we hoped it would be after today.
***
Around the Division:
The Brewers came back from three down in the ninth to beat the Twins in ten. The Cardinals are up 11-7 on the Reds after six.
Up Next:
Day off tomorrow followed by another day game against the Pirates on Saturday. Jake Arrieta vs. Tyler Anderson. Should be a beautiful day, so hopefully the pitchers can get some grip. And hopefully the rest of us won’t need to.
