Cubs pay price for last year’s success
If you’re perplexed by the question of what’s wrong with the Chicago Cubs this season, as many still are, nearly halfway through the defending World Series champion’s middling 2017 season, a good place to start is at the most fundamental level — the individual level, the human level, the molecular level.
Go back to the winter. You’re a pitcher. You lose a month out of your normal off-season, by virtue of playing into November. So instead of ramping up your winter throwing program around Christmas time, you start around the third week of January. And instead of arriving at spring training with your customary level of sharpness and freshness, your arm is sluggish and erratic. You’re behind, and you never quite get caught up by the time the season starts.
“You’re losing rest time, and when you come back, you’re rushed. I knew right away, my arm in spring training wasn’t where it was the previous year,” Cubs lefthander Mike Montgomery said Monday. “The previous year, I came in throwing 95, 96, ready to go. This year I knew it wasn’t going to be like that. And it wasn’t. So (October success) does take a toll.”
Multiply Montgomery’s experience by a dozen other Cubs pitchers, and you have a good starting point for how a team that looked, at least from a distance, like an alltime juggernaut throughout 2016 — and that, by virtue of its sheer youth and talent, engendered predictions of a dynasty — can look so mediocre half a season later, with a 3938 record heading into Wednesday and an entire group of pitchers with formidable track records all seemingly regressing at the same time.
It’s also a good starting point for understanding why it is so difficult to repeat as champions — why no team since the 1998- 2000 New York Yankees has managed to do it, and why no National League team has done it since the Big Red Machine of Cincinnati more than 40 years ago. For that matter, it’s been five years since a defending World Series champion, the 2011-12 St. Louis Cardinals, even made the playoffs the following season.
A year ago, the Cubs led all of baseball with a 3.15 ERA. Their starters’ ERA of 2.96 was more than half a run better than any other team’s. This year, those same numbers are 3.92 and 4.28, respectively. Almost across the board, their fastball velocities are down from 2016: Kyle Hendricks’ by 3.7 mph, Jon Lester’s by 0.6, Jake Arrieta’s by 1.8, John Lackey’s by 0.9.
Montgomery’s fastball velocity is down half a tick from 2016, which he split between the Mariners and Cubs, from 93.1 last year to 92.6 this one. But even that doesn’t tell the entire story. Nor does his gleaming 2.03 ERA. There’s also the matter of what he is feeling on each pitch.
“I’m still getting it up there, but just not as easily,” he said. “Last year, I felt like I wasn’t even trying and it was coming out 95. This year, that same feeling is coming out 92-93. I can get it up to 95 but it takes more effort, and you can’t do it on every pitch. I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily why we’re not pitching as well as last year. We just have to make adjustments and pitch differently, knowing that, ‘OK, I’m not going to have my best stuff eight out of 10 times; I might have it only five out of 10 this year.”
The Cubs’ 2017 malaise can’t be entirely pinned on the starting rotation. Many of the Cubs’ hitters have regressed from 2016, with Ben Zobrist, Anthony Rizzo, Addi- son Russell, Wilson Contreras and Kris Bryant all down at least 25 points of year- overyear OPS.
Kyle Schwarber, who was so highly regarded in 2016 that the Cubs activated him for the World Series even though he had missed almost the entire season to that point, was struggling so acutely this season that the Cubs last week sent him to Class AAA.
“It’s just different, man,” Cubs manager Joe Maddon said Monday. “Last year was just a different vibe, a different start. Guys were having, simultaneously, career years. This year we’re not. Part of it is — we’re just not. And part of it is we’ve been impacted by injury.”
Baseball’s preeminent slogan-maker, Maddon lately has taken to describing his team as “just trying to keep the floaties on” — the way a child treading water might. The Cubs’ disabled list currently includes two- fifths of their projected rotation, Hendricks and Brett Anderson, and two everyday players, Zobrist and Jason Heyward, with Russell day-to-day with a shoulder injury. In 2016, all five Cubs starters made at least 29 regular-season starts.
While t he Cubs’ 2016 season looks like one long, magical march to 103 regularseason wins and the cathartic World Series title, it was not always so. There was a 10-week stretch in the middle of the season, from early May to late July, where they played .500 baseball, at 34- 34. But that spell came after a 25- 6 start, so the Cubs were never fewer than 17 games above .500 after June 1.
“We’ve done well in the last part of the season the last two years in a row,” said Maddon. “Get to that point, and hopefully get the band back together and make the push you want to make.”